Elk Valley's “Keeping Food Real” Project Is Ready To Sprout

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In exciting news from the East—or the West, North or South, depending on where you’re reading this—the Wildsight Elk Valley branch will be moving their Keeping Food Real project from brilliant idea to brilliant reality this year. And that’s pretty exciting (and brilliant)!

The two-year Keeping Food Real initiative aims to support the citizens and communities of the Elk Valley in growing their own food by providing online cold climate educational resources and hands-on workshops. Sparked by inspirations like the Down To Earth – Cold Climate Gardening book and years spent pursuing regionally driven answers to the questions that arise when producing your own food in a challenging environment—from permaculture, growing, canning, preserving, and everything in between—the Keeping Food Real team has no shortage of vital topics that they’re looking forward to addressing.

The first stage of the two-year project will put a strong focus on cold-climate gardening, offering courses and workshops on a wide range of topics, such as season extension, maximizing yields, seed saving, growing better crops, composts and soils.

“We live in a climate that is often seen as challenging for growing food,” said Dawn Deydey, one of the prime instigators of our Beyond Recycling classroom program, of Fernie’s Community EcoGarden, and far too many others projects to list. “The Keeping Food Real program is set to provide practical content with a host of solutions to increase the novice to intermediate gardener’s ability to successfully grow food here,” Dawn added.

There are a lot more details still to be confirmed (and we will keep you updated), but we just couldn’t wait to share this first wave of excitement with you now. So, to everyone involved in our Keeping Food Real project, and to the other 9 projects selected for B.C.’s Grow Local Program, thank you for continuing to bring the importance of community grown food to the table!

As Sharon Switzer, Wildsight Elk Valley Branch president said:

“We are working to cultivate a thriving, knowledgeable and resilient local food culture in the Elk Valley. Our board members Mary Cosman and Tanya Malcolm along with EcoGarden committee members Gaetane Carignan and Dawn Deydey have developed an engaging project for our community that will help us move closer towards this vision.”

We couldn’t agree more and can’t wait to see this program blossom.