Tag: Urban Agriculture
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…
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…
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…
Edmonton Youth Beekeeping Club
The Northlands/Prince’s Charities Edmonton Youth Bee Club From Spring until Fall, students from across the Edmonton gathed at Northlands to learn about honeybees. Sponsored by the Prince’s Charities (Now Kings Trust), twenty students, acged 13 to 18, managed ten beehives on site. Each week, weather permitting, we covered important beekeeping topics and performed routine hive inspections.…
BeeComm Community For Small-Scale Beekeepers
BeeComm, contains more tools, resources, videos, and opportunities for community collaboration.
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,…
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,…
The Watershed Diet
You Are Where You Eat If you are what you eat and you’re mostly water, shouldn’t we spend more time thinking about the source of that water? Move over 100-mile diet, let’s explore the watershed diet. A watershed is the area of land that captures, soaks up, and channels water toward increasingly large bodies of water. We think…
School Urban Agriculture Supports Local Food
Growing Food in Schools To Kickstart Urban Agriculture One of the best ways to kickstart a local movement is to provide early access to training. I saw this firsthand when culinary teacher and Pastry Chef Kelly Hobbs’ culinary students won more than 28 awards between 2009 and 2017. After graduation, a sizable number of them enrolled in…
Beekeeping in Edmonton, 13 Steps to Get Started
A Step-By-Step Guide To Beekeeping In Edmonton Since 2014, beekeeping has been permitted within the City of Edmonton, and in that short amount of time, the City’s beekeeping community has steadily grown to hundreds of urban hives. If you’re here, there’s a chance that you’re interested in joining that community. Let me be the first…