Tag: Design
Ecotone Urbanism: Design at the Intersection of Nature and City
The Power of Overlap Edmonton, my home city, sits in Aspen Parkland—a transitional ecosystem between the great plains to the south and the boreal forest to the north. Not quite prairie, not quite forest, it is a classic ecotone: an area of overlap that is richer and more diverse than either ecosystem alone. Ecologists describe…
Snow Farming—The Winter Gardening Hack You’re Not Using
Using Snow to Water Gardens, Insulate Plants, and Change Your Growing Zone As a gardener, winter presents an ideal opportunity to harvest, move, pile, and store water for the upcoming gardening season. It’s time to talk about snow farming. Snow farming goes beyond storing water. Strategically placed snow can reduce winter damage, increase the survival…
Pallet Farming
Modular Urban Agriculture Using Pallet Farms One of urban agriculture‘s ongoing challenges is access to land. While urban ag has social, ecological, and economic benefits, municipalities and developers rarely sit on vacant land for extended periods. As a result, access is often tenuous unless an urban farmer owns the land. I’ve seen and experienced the…
The Succession of Cities: Organic Patterns Shaping Urban Growth
Do Cities Grow Like Ecosystems? Until millennia, city building was an organic, bottom-up, incremental process beginning with a handful of people looking for opportunities at the confluence of waterways, trade roots, and resources. Speculating newcomers establish temporary structures, replaced over time with permanent buildings. Enterprising citizens set up shops to supply growing demands, and streets…
How To Grow a 1000-Year-Old Tree
Edmonton Public Library How-To Festival What would it be like to live in a world where people tended 1000-year-old trees? How might planting long-lived trees change our thinking about the future and our role in its creation? The following is a recording and edited transcript of a talk I gave at the Edmonton Public Library’s…
The 5 School Garden Pace Layers
Designing Better School Gardens Using Pace Layer Thinking School boards live for centuries, school buildings last decades, teaching careers come and go in thirty to forty years, the curriculum changes every decade or so, students come and go every three years, semesters turn over twice a year, units last weeks, and lessons are over in…
Garden Design Course
Online ecological garden design course covers five techniques for creating a garden that reduces work, increases yields and works with nature
11 Woody Superpowers That Grow Better Cities
Trees have woody superpowers that, when used correctly, can grow better cities. We plant trees in our parks, boulevards, and yards, but for many of us, they’re little more than greenery in the landscape. But noticed or not, trees are silently making our yards, communities, and cities better places to live. Whether shading our homes,…
Making Walnut Ink and Dye
Making Ink and Dye From Walnut Seeds I discovered walnut ink while collecting and processing (dehusking) walnuts to plant with the Shrubscriber community. Locally, the most common Walnut is the White or Butternut Walnut (Juglans cinerea but I occasionally run across Black Walnuts (Juglans nigra) and Manchurian Walnuts (Juglans mandschurica). I gather seeds, a process…
Gardening in the Zombie Apocalypse
How Gardeners Will Survive the End of the World The zombie apocalypse is upon us, and it’s up to the gardeners to save us. Armed with shovels and a handful of ecological design principles, it’s time to turn this zombie threat into a horticultural opportunity. This isn’t your grandparent’s rose garden. This is gardening in…
Creating Garden Microclimates
What a Poop Pit Can Teach Us About Garden Microclimates I stumbled upon pineapple pits while researching old botanic gardens. The Heligan Garden in Cornwall, England, was created in the 18th century by the Tremayne family. The garden fell into disrepair after the First World War but was restored in the nineties. During reconstruction, a strange…
Cold Hardy Food Forest Plant List
A Growing Inventory of Cold Hardy Perennial Plants Since 2015, I’ve been propagating and growing tonnes of USDA hardiness zone 1 to 5 perennial plants in my Edmonton backyard and urban farm plot. The list has grown to over 285 species across 152 plant genera. Tagging each species by edible component (fruit, nut, leaf, bark,…