ecovillage
myvalleysun.com
October 17, 2013
Bullish on the real news in the Monashee
My Valley Sun
blog
index
Online Community News for Lumby, Cherryville, Rural Coldstream and Highway 6
We update this website on a regular basis. We are eager to receive your news, events, advertising and letters by email at: mediaservices@uniserve.com
Returning to Basics:
A practising Ecovillage close to home
The Yarrow Ecovillage near Chilliwack
The Yarrow Ecovillage is a combination of cohousing, sustainable living, farmland preservation, a live/work community and a mixed-use town center. Yarrow used to be its own town before being incorporated into Chilliwack and since then the lure of big mall shopping in the city has resulted in Yarrow losing its town center. The ecovillage has been a response to the erosion of the old community.
The site is located on Yarrow Central Road and remains a work in progress. Houses have been built and the community continues to grow. The ecovillage will eventually build-out at 28 cohousing units, and it will include a village center, seniors cohousing a learning center, and presently operates a certified organic farm.
The combination of three elements – living, working and farming – along with many other activities and amenities such as learning, socializing, sharing, teaching, playing, visiting, comes together to provide a model for environmentally, economically and socially sustainable lifestyles. Establishing the residential, cohousing community has been the first building block.
The ecovillage includes a 20 acre, certified organic, community farm. Farmer's lease land, run their individual operations, and work together to share advice/experience and resources. They also collaborate on a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Harvest Box program to supply fresh organic produce to the ecovillage and the surrounding communities of Chilliwack, Abbotsford, and Yarrow.
On the front street side of the ecovillage is an old dairy farm which will contain 30,000 sq ft of commercial space intended to offer services to the greater neighborhood. The space will provide places for work and creative opportunities including 17 apartments and a refitted dairy barn all within a pedestrian friendly environment.
Returning to Basics:
The Eco-Groovy Factor
Eco-Friendly Technologies Balanced with Real Life
Something about being an Ecovillage must, by definition, be “eco-groovy” and cutting edge. One of the things the members of the Yarrow Ecovillage seem to have had in common is a genuine interest in new technologies.
The first handful of homes at Yarrow Ecovillage, from 2008 to 2010, had a small-scale conventional septic system, consisting of a few of the usual tanks and pumps. With their vision of creating a more earth-friendly development, in 2010, Ecovillagers went ahead with replacing these initial tanks, with the first stages of a more comprehensive system, called Solar Aquatics, when it was needed for the new village project of 50 household plus commercial buildings.
Solar Aquatics treats effluent flow by passing it through a series of aerated tanks that hold the right aquatic plants and bacteria, to complete the purification of the water and remove harmful substances like heavy metals, and pharmaceuticals.
The ecovillage is always on the lookout for new and more effective technologies and systems that achieve a balance of the ideal and the doable.
After the installation of the first big tank, and before the Solar Aquatics greenhouse containing the planted tanks was installed, the Ecovillage discovered and switched over to a more economical, attractive, and practical system, combining the virtues of the enhanced initial aerobic (carbon dioxide creating, rather than methane) treatment of the effluent in a multi-chambered Canwest-installed treatment tank, with tertiary treatment in a future (summer 2012) Wetlands Pacific Corp’s constructed wetland marsh.
A constructed marsh appears natural, and is, in a great many respects, but it is carefully engineered to slow the water flow with a diversity of plant materials and soil base so that it can hold onto heavy metals and carbon. Wetlands have multiple pathways for contaminant removal. Chemotropic microbial decomposition removes lingering pharmaceuticals, endocrine disrupting compounds and personal care products that can prove hazardous downstream for local rivers and waterways. Robust and reliable, wetlands capacities improve as time goes by and can have a useful lifespan of a hundred years.
Part of Phase 1 of the Yarrow Ecovillage Cohousing
Octaform Housing under construction at the Yarrow Ecovillage
Returning to Basics
Ecovillage & Cohousing
FEATURE INDEX
