Happy Tonics September News

Ryall, M. E. (2010, October 6). Happy Tonics September News. Washburn County Register, p. 10

Alex paying attention to learning to identify leaves

 There was a Fall Youth Plant Science event at the Spooner Ag Research Station on Saturday October 2, 2010. Area 4-H youth and other youth were invited to attend the event. Happy Tonics is proud to announce that the Pines and Lake Girl Scout Troop of Shell Lake attended. The Girl Scout Troop had a container garden at Friendship Commons this past summer. Offering youth gardening opportunities is one way to jumpstart their interest in gardening. 

Emily experiences pure joy as she catches a falling leaf

Kevin Schoessow, UW-Extension Spooner Area Agriculture Agent and UW-Extension Master Gardener Volunteers lead discussions and demonstrations on making compost, planting garlic, pruning grapes and raspberries and putting the garden to bed. There was a tour of the Spooner Ag Research Station Display gardens were youth learned about the “off the grid” drip irrigation system, powered by an airlift tech pump and windmill and the newly constructed hoop house for season extension. The girls learned something about seed saving and enjoyed tasting fresh fruit, vegetables and berries right from the garden.

Kevin showing a button bottom and a peanut shaped squash

Happy Tonics exhibited at the Lac Courte Oreilles Convention Center as part of the Wellness Fair and Farmers Market on September 30, 2010. The nonprofit organization is a member of the Green Team at the LCO Tribal College which sponsored the event.  A pumpkin and squash display was on Exhibit. The plants are native to the Americas. A Three Sisters Garden (Corn, beans and squash) was grown in the habitat to teach visitors how heirloom organic crops may have been grown by Native Americans in the prairie of long ago. WOJB did a live interview of the Three Sisters Garden with Mary Ellen Ryall.   Happy Tonics volunteer staff shucked Hidatsa beans and packaged organic herb tea and organic culinary herbs for their online Store at http://stores.ebay.com/HAPPY-TONICS

Happy Tonics received a Matching Gift from Hachette Book Group from Park Avenue, New York, as a match to the donation made by Erica Hohos of Worcester, Massachusetts. The donation will allow us to implement memory pavers around the large wild black cherry tree in the Memory Tree Grove. We will honor Happy Tonics members who have passed on with pavers. The nonprofit organization will invite the public to participate in this upcoming fundraiser. Citizens will be able to purchase an engraved paver in memory of their loved ones including family, friends and pets.

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Day Eight – You did it! You got us over the hump with 100 VOTES

And on the Seventh Day They Rested.

What a great weekend. Thank you one and all for voting on our grant proposal at Brighter Planet. Happy Tonics now qualifies for another chance at the brass ring in the future because we got 100 VOTES. The nonprofit realizes that we are up against some pretty stiff competition.  New Orleans is in the lead with their grant proposal.  Winning the Super Bowl Sunday was a wonderful success. Well done Saints. 

Be sure to Sign up and VOTE at Brighter Planet for Climate Change for Native Habitat and Community Garden Shell Lake at http://brighterplanet.com/project_fund_projects/100

Good news!  February 8, the Washburn County Public Property and Land Sales Committee granted Happy Tonics permission to plant a raised bed garden at Friendship Commons, the senior center, in the summer of 2010. 

Libby loves being a butterfly

 Girl Scout Troop Number 4392 (MN, WI Lakes and Pines) will plant, grow and maintain the garden.  Seniors will be partners in this intergenerational activity.  A grant from Leopold Education Project and Pheasants Forever are funding the project.  Happy Tonics believes that all sustainability projects are accomplished from the ground up.  A community that can feed itself is sustainable. 

The garden will be a teaching garden.  We teach through the monarch butterfly who is the canary in the coal mine.  What happens to the butterfly can happen to us.

 Even a little grant is a big thing to a small nonprofit.  We volunteer for Happy Tonics. Won’t you help us spread our wings to teach others to adapt to climate change?

We offer the Morph Your Mind Environmental Education Program.  Our classes, events and two native wildflower and butterfly gardens are nature’s outdoor classrooms where we teach others about the importance of native crops and plants as native host and nectar sources for the monarch butterfly and other pollinators.  The natural landscape supports life.  Monoculture and invasive species are replacing native habitat.  Native habitat is the only habitat can withstands drought conditions and climate change.   

Taking Environmental Education to the Classroom

Thank you for your kindness.

Day Two – Brighter Planet Votes that Keep Us Going

Thank you Crossroads Resource Center, MN; La Cruz Habitat Protection Project, Inc., TX; Destination Marketing Organization, WI; Yellow River Advertising and Design, WI; Wisconsin Great Northern Railroad, WI; Dyer Design, VA and countless individuals who are VOTING for our grant proposal at Brighter Planet.  

Brighter Planet copyright by Brighter Planet

 PLEASE REGISTER AND VOTE for Climate Change Native Habitat and Community Garden Shell Lake at http://brighterplanet.com/project_fund_projects/100

 Happy Tonics members Patti Gardner, PA; Cindy Dyer, VA and Janice Organ, WI voted.  Friends on Facebook are voting AND writing on their wall to ask their friends to VOTE.  Friends on MySpace are voting.   It takes all of us to implement change in adapting to Climate Change. 

 We are counting on YOU!  

Seed in time regenerates the Earth.

 Happy Tonics is so appreciative to those who are helping us carry our sustainability work forward.  Our Mission:  Sanctuary for the Monarch Butterfly and Food Safety Issues.

Walk in Beauty.  Navajo Morning Prayer.

Day One – Brighter Planet Climate Change Report

Happy Tonics is running fourth at 8:10 p.m. in the Feb. 1 – 15 VOTING period for Climate Change Native Habitat and Community Garden Shell Lake grant proposal with Brighter Planet at http://brighterplanet.com/project_fund_projects/100

 

Butterfly week host plant for monarch copyright Anna Martineau Merritt

Let’s face it some folks have big guns with bigger networks in larger cities with a bigger VOTER base.  We’re in Northern Wisconsin with a population base in Shell Lake of little over 1,300 souls.  Is it any wonder we are falling behind?  Those of you who are watching the process can make a BIG DIFFERENCE.  Please REGISTER and VOTE for Climate Change Native Habitat and Community Garden Shell Lake. 

 I feel honored when I learn who is a member of the Project Selection Team.  To even think that our grant proposal is being considered makes me humble. 

Gus Speth Member Project Selection Team Copyright Brighter Planet

Meet Gus Speth, Dean, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. From 1993 to 1999, Gus Speth served as administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and chair of the UN Development Group. Prior to this, he was founder and president of the World Resources Institute; professor of law at Georgetown University; chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality; and senior attorney and co-founder, Natural Resources Defense Council.

Dean Speth’s publications include “Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment”; “Worlds Apart: Globalization and the Environment”; and other journals and books.

Adapting to Climate Change

Please take a minute to REGISTER AND VOTE at http://brighterplanet.com/project_fund_projects/100

Happy Tonics needs your VOTE to help us do our work.  Officers and Board Members give of their time to educate and implement programs to adapt to Climate Change by promoting Sustainability of Native Plants, Monarch Butterfly and other pollinator habitat.  Our mission is:  Sanctuary for the Monarch Butterfly and Food Safety Issues.

Native bumble bee on autumn sedum

small square foot garden

We are a small grassroots nonprofit that needs your help to WIN our Climate Change Native Habitat and Community Garden Shell Lake grant proposal.

This is not Happy Tonics first attempt to bring Adapting to Climate Change into national awareness.

We were honored to participate in the Green Effect grant process with National Geographic sponsored by Sun Chips in 2009.  Although other worthy causes won, we believe that each of us must do our part to bring the message of adapting to climate change home.  (National Geographic, Green Effect Winning Ideas for a Better World, November 2009, insert after pg. 6.)

Plant native wildflowers for drought conditions

Won’t you help us now?  Please SIGN UP AND VOTE at http://brighterplanet.com/project_fund_projects/100

Thank you.

HOPE – WE NEED TO SEE the movie FRESH

Lacinto kale. Italian heirloom from 18th century.

Just when we thought the global food battle was lost to genetic engineering (GE) in Washington, DC, along comes hope.  I am thrilled to speak about the Good Food Movement.

 The movie FRESH will be out this spring.  Watch the movie trailer at  http://www.freshthemovie.com/

Happy Tonics promotes the importance of local grown and organic crops and grass fed animals for dairy, poultry and meat.

FRESH the film is already marching forward in Wisconsin.  You can view the film in Hayward, on January 31, at 2 p.m. at the Park Theatre.  The film features Joel Salatin from Polyface farm, Shenandoah, Virginia, and Will Allen, of California’s Growing Power.  Both of these extraordinary people have been instrumental in the Good Food Movement.  Allen says,
“The Good Food Movement is now a Revolution.”

If each and every one of us can take this message home and practice it, we can change the global food marketplace one plate at a time.  Remember Margaret Meade said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” 

Visit Will Allen at www.growingpower.org/blog

Visit Joel Salatin at http://www.polyfacefarms.com/

Let us know how we can work together to promote food sustainability in our own neighborhoods right where we live.  Home is where the heart is.  Let’s hear from yours. 

Good day, Mary Ellen 

HAPPY TONICS IN THE NEWS

We are honored to announce that Mary Ellen Ryall, Executive Director, has been given a scholarship to attend the 13^th Annual Food Security Conference, 10-13 October 2009, in Des Moines, Iowa.  The focus is on Commodity to Community:  Food Politics and Projects in the Heartland.  Visit www.foodsecurity.org to learn more about growing healthy farms, people and communities.

Community Food Security Coalition copyright poster

Happy Tonics along with many other organizations around the USA are working to promote growing our own food closer to home using green methods and far less energy.  Happy Tonics a nonprofit organization is committed to sustainability of our food, the monarch butterfly and Mother Earth.  We are deeply committed to biodiversity of native crops and Say No to GMO!  Farm Aid has created the Farmer to Farmer Campaign on Genetic Engineering.  Visit www.farmaid.org to learn more.  According to Farm Aid, “Due to the extremely unpredictable nature of genetic experimentation, new food toxins, allergens or diseases can and have resulted from genetic engineering.”

We have a choice in how we feed ourselves and our families.  Pick up a hoe and tend the earth.  Mother nature will provide if we work with her.