Tag: Gardening
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…
Cultivate McCauley – 6 Ways to Grow 1,000 Community Trees
A Neighbourhood Revitalization Project With the help of residents, businesses, and social agencies, Shrubscriber, with support from a City of Edmonton Revitalization Grant, is working on a project called Cultivate McCauley to grow, distribute, and plant 1,000 trees. This effort will increase the neighbourhood’s tree canopy by 2%, moving it closer to Edmonton’s goal of…
Community Supported Forestry (CSF)
Growing Climate-Resilient Neighbourhoods One Tree at a Time If you’ve ever signed up for a vegetable CSA, you already understand the idea behind Community Supported Forestry. You invest in something local, share in the harvest, and become part of something bigger than a transaction. Now imagine doing that with trees. From Vegetables to Forests Community…
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…
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,…
Is McCauley Edmonton’s Gardening Community?
Green In The Inner-City In the Fall of 2014, I found myself looking at a house off Church Street in the inner-city neighbourhood of Edmonton McCauley. I was familiar with the community due to frequent visits to the Italian Centre Shop and Coffee Shop Cafe, Zocalo. I was also familiar with the area’s reputation for…
When to Plant Your Edmonton Garden
Stop Waiting Until May Frost Day to Plant Your Garden Are you wondering when to plant your garden? Historically, you would plant your Edmonton Garden the third weekend in May, but is that the best time to plant? I’d argue that you can plant your garden much earlier. Waiting Until After the Last Frost Date…
Classroom Container Gardening
Start A School Garden With Pots and Containers One of the easiest ways to introduce gardening to students is through classroom container gardening. A significant obstacle to growing food in the classroom is finding a permanent space, but pots and containers allow any teacher to start small without a fixed garden space. Container gardening can…
Creating A Classroom Aquaponics System
Why Set Up A Classroom Aquaponics System? Lots of classrooms have plants and fish, but not many combine them into a symbiotic classroom aquaponics system. When connected, fish waste provides water and nutrients to the plants while the plants clean the water for the fish. Aquaponics systems contain a complete nitrogen cycle and symbiotic relationships but are…
The Long Tail of Agriculture
Agriculture is Missing its Long Tail Imagine we could arrange every food producer on the planet according to total productivity. On one end, we’d find highly productive industrial megafarms, and way down on the other end, we find marginal food-producing activities such as foraging or kitchen window herb gardens. Graphing our lineup of food producers,…