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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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Gardening While Renting: The Start of Year Two
I’ve always loved the thought of having my own vegetable garden, but since I’m a renter without my own plot of land, I wasn’t sure it was possible. Last year, I decided to take advantage of my current front stoop and have my first attempt at gardening while renting. You can read all about how that year went in my recap post for the gardening while renting series. While I didn’t yield a huge harvest (as you can imagine in less than one square foot of space!) I still found gardening incredibly rewarding. That’s why I am diving in and giving it another go this year! Deciding to Plant Again…
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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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Lessons Learned from Gardening on the Front Stoop
This year, with much help from Krista, I started my first ever garden on the front stoop of my rental unit. Read the journey from beginning to now in my previous posts:Gardening While RentingTaking Over the Front Stoop I was excited to see what I would be able to produce in my very limited, small space, though my expectations were not very high. I was approaching the entire gardening adventure as an experiment to see what was possible. Where things went right Lettuce My lettuce plant grew amazingly well! I had a steady supply of little bunches of lettuce shortly after it was planted. The plant grew tall instead of…
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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…
