Harvest Moon Newsletter

Late Summer 2024

Are you coming to Clearwater next weekend? We’re super excited to host you all.

It’s been a very active and productive summer at the Harvest Moon Learning Centre. We dealt with some compromised trees (thank to some generous help from long time Mooner Paul Goldstone at G’s Tree Service in Onanole), but planted many more to replace them with the help of the 2 Billion Trees Program and Pembina Valley Watershed District. We installed solar panels on one of the cabins and replaced the back deck with a concrete patio with a lot of community help.

We grew our artist residency program hosting a songwriters retreat, welcomed the entire Willow Creek Colony School for a field trip, and had a variety of groups rent our space throughout the summer.

There was near constant activity at Harvest Moon over the last few months. The Municipality of Louise’s Recreation Play Group utilized our space most Wednesdays and there was a community-organized Comic Book Club on Thursdays as well as our New Moon Youth Nights, the New Moon Kids Camp, a couple Outdoor Adventure days, a visit from Petits Choux daycare in Somerset, and a couple cooking events, too.

Our awesome summer staff of Lauren, Emily, and Cole put in a LOT of work with Jo-Lene planning and running these activities while also tending to the greenhouse and garden, and mowing mowing mowing. They also put a lot of work into maintaining the Lessons From the Land trail on the north side of town. We truly appreciate all of their hard work and you really should see how great our grounds look because of it.

Lauren and the summer program participants made a backdrop for the new Hootenanny Stage. Here’s a picture of the work-in-progress, you’ll have to visit the schoolyard during the Festival to see the finished product.

Harvest Moon Scholarship

For the second year, HMS offered three scholarships of $500 each to youth aged 17-21 who reside within the boundaries of Manitoba for furthering their knowledge or education related to regenerative agriculture, sustainable food systems, and environmental stewardship. We asked them one question that they could answer in whichever format they liked: How would you use $500 to further your knowledge or education in the areas of regenerative agriculture, sustainable food systems, and/or environmental stewardship and why is this important to you?

This year’s winner of the HMS Scholarship were:

• Chelsea Kingerski from Headingly who is starting at Carleton University in Ottawa study Food Science.

• Jace Guilford of Crystal City is heading to the University of Manitoba to study Agriculture.

• Zenith Vanstone of Miami who is off to Olds College in Alberta where she is going to take the Agricultural Management Program

Harvest Moon Festival

The Harvest Moon Festival is fast approaching and we are ready to rock and roll. The action starts on Thursday, September 12 as over 50 volunteers help us hold the ECO Challenge at the Clearwater Sports Park for a day of experiential place-based learning. Each year we invite half of the schools in Prairie Spirit School Division to bring their grade 7 and 8s and this year we expect about 140 students coming from Treherne, Bruxelles, Manitou, Cartwright, Holland, Baldur, and Swan Lake First Nation for a morning of workshops and an afternoon trail test.

Then the party starts on Friday with the mainstage kicking off around 6pm and going late into the night. We bring more education into the mix with the Festival Workshops running in timeslots at 10am, 12pm, 2pm, and 4pm around town. You can read the presenter bios and workshop descriptions here on our website. Both the mainstage and the Restaurant Stage will have plenty of entertainment and we’ve got a full slate of family acts at the Hootenanny Stage in the schoolyard. There will also be a vendor market on both Saturday and Sunday.

After the succesful inaurgural event last year, the Second Annual Clearwater Cribbage Cup! If you think you’ve got what it takes, contact Jim Sanders to register.

No ticket is required to attend the workshops or market but you’ll need a ticket to get into the Festival grounds and campground. If you haven’t got one yet (or have tickets and your plans have changed), you can check out the Harvest Moon Festival Ticket Buy and Sell group on Facebook . If you do have a ticket and are looking for a way to Clearwater (or have space in your vehicle), you should visit the Harvest Moon Fest Ride Share page.

If you’re not going to make it out to Clearwater but you still want to experience the Harvest Moon Festival, you can access the livestream over at harvestmoonfestival.ca. We’ll have all of the Friday night mainstage action, and then we’ll start up again in the early afternoon on Saturday and go well into the night (possibly even early morning)!