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How Your Garden Helps the Planet: Trees, Plants, and Garden Design
We’re continuing our series on how your garden helps the planet this week by looking at the elements of trees, plants, and garden design. If you missed our first post in this series, check it out here to find out about lawns and their environmental impact: How Your Garden Helps the Planet: Lawns. Ways Your Garden Helps the Planet What comes to mind when you think about a garden: carefully cultivated, visually appealing flowers? Shade trees and benches along paths? Perhaps a pond? Do you think about how you, your family and friends will use the space? In reality, there are many impacts that your space has on the natural…
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How Your Garden Helps the Planet: Lawns
It surrounds our homes and buildings, lines our roads and sidewalks, and covers our parks. But have you ever wondered why or how we ended up with a flat green mat covering the dirt in our outdoor spaces? I hadn’t really thought much about it until watching the movie Biggest Little Farm. In the film, the plot that is eventually transformed into lush, productive land teeming with life begins as a former monoculture farm operation that has sapped the life and energy from the soil. It was inspiring to see what could be done, made me wonder what could be achieved on my little bit of land, and also made…
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Winter Garden 2020: Last Update
As always, things didn’t go entirely as planned with our winter garden plants. However, we were able to harvest a few things through the winter. Read along below to find out what worked, what didn’t, and what we’ll grow again! Biggest Success The best result was probably our brussels sprouts. In fact, we gave some away as we had too many! I used five or six stalks for soup through the winter and could tell that their flavour improved after the weather turned cold. I actually thought they made a beautiful feature in my garden through the cold months and hadn’t wanted to cut them all, so there are still…
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Eat Local In Every Season: Brussels Sprouts
Why Local? As we move into fall in southwestern BC, farmer’s markets with their beautiful abundance of local fruit and vegetables are beginning to wind down. This year my family participated in a CSA (community-supported agriculture) food box from a local farm for the first time. What is a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) box? The idea behind these boxes is that the community buys food directly from local producers and supports these producers in their work to grow food in a sustainable manner. We paid a cost in advance and then went to the farm on scheduled days to pick up a box of fresh, local produce. We loved the…
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Reflections on Backyard Garden: Good, Bad, and What Happened?
Success this year Our usual peas were out of stock so we tried planting snap peas and they were so good that we’re going to plant them again next year! We’ve actually harvested a good number of apples that didn’t have worms which is a huge improvement over last year; We had a good harvest of garlic and have been putting it in almost everything!; The winter garden bed is planted and growing. Failures this year I was so excited to try growing luffa however both seed starting attempts this year failed. I’m guessing the soil wasn’t warm enough so we’re going to try them again next year with a…
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What We’re Planting
Our start to vegetable gardening was not a success: we had tried to grow a few things on a borrowed plot with friends some years before trying our own and spent about $100 on seeds and supplies… and ended up with enough vegetables for one pot of soup! Undaunted, we attempted our first garden at our own home in 2015 with the help of my husband’s parents and grandparents. We’re excited to share what we’ve learned with you since then! Key considerations when starting a garden Environment Soil: Potting soil is a great option for containers. If a plant has a specific requirement, such as sandy soil, then the seed…
