Praise the Ward

Un-Book-of-the-Month Club (household composting and vermiculture)
11am-1pm @ Double Rainbow Cafe - 60 Ontario St.

A Membership drive for The UnBook-of-the-Month Club and other household indoor composting and vermiculture adventures. By The Compost Queens of the Royal City. 

Bring one book with which you have a conflicted relationship. Write the nature of that conflict on the inside cover of the book. This can be anonymous. Be prepared to surrender the book. It will become amazing, rich, healthy soil, thanks to composting and vermiculture. Such a good outcome to a crappy relationship with an object. 

Books and other surprising everyday objects are compostable. With the help of a small quiet unstinky worm farm, you can divert an impressive amount and array of objects through this system, producing soil rather than clutter. 

Come and learn how. 

(Small vermiculture kits available for purchase, 20-25$ sliding scale)

2-4pm - Huron St. Community Garden - Huron & Manitoba
At the giant Community Composting System 

Come see how a neighbourhood-sized composter works. Bring any and all of the following offerings to the cause: fruit peels and cores, vegetable scraps (nothing cooked), hay, sawdust, wood ashes, gerbil cage or hamster droppings, cow poo, leaves, old stale dried beans and spices you’ll never use, coffee grounds, used tea bags, dead houseplants with their sad soil. In return, you can take some home-grown local compost home with you.

The Ward's composting Queen, and resident poet, Karen Houle, will present two informative, interactive and fun workshops during the festival.  

Creator of The Art of Soil Collective (or T.A.S.C.) Dr. Houle is a recently retired Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, in Guelph, Canada. Her Poetry collection "The Grand River Watershed: a Folk Ecology, was a shortlisted finalist for the Governor-General's Awards.  She has always wanted to get to a place in life where, with the alchemy of energy, immense privilege, a nutty work ethic, the accumulation of some social capital, grandmotherhood, and not giving a shit what people thought anymore.... she could lead a practical local project that combined ALL her political and ethical principles + skills + passions -- food security, mentoring, ecology, environmental protection, organic farming, flat democracy, soil remediation, Black Lives Matter, gender parity, experiential learning, biodiversity, queer positive space-making, seed saving, mental health, cultural diversity, pollinator support, flowers! compost! poetry, many languages, global politics, post-humanism + collective activism.