Community gardens « Transition Brockville

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Tag : Community gardens (97)

Sudbury’s food forests thriving

Sudbury Star / Mary Katherine Keown / 13 September 2019

Part of the food forest at Delki Dozzi. The food forest is designed to resemble a forest ecosystem and requires no watering after a couple of years. There are several kinds of flowers in the forest to attract pollinators. Mary Katherine Keown/The Sudbury Star

“I think it’s doing great,” Carrie Regenstreif, executive director of Sudbury Shared Harvest, said. “Way better than I expected – I was honestly a little skeptical. When you saw it the first year and there’s just a bunch of plants with woodchips around them, you don’t really believe it’s going to fill in like this.”

The 8,000-square-foot forest is open to the public and Regenstreif said nearly every time she visits, she sees someone harvesting.

The forest contains several types of apple, cherry and plum trees; Saskatoon berries; ever-bearing strawberries, which produce fruit until the frost hits; gooseberries; haskaps; sea buckthorn; asparagus, which will be ready in 2020; rhubarb; currants; and three varieties of raspberries, in addition to other species. Everything in the forest is drought-resistant. In fact, the food forest is designed not to require watering after the first two years.

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Leafy ambitions for fall’s bounty

Trowel Talk / Pat Stachon / September 2019

Autumn is such a beautiful time of year in Eastern Canada that people travel to this area just to enjoy the wonderful sight. As the leaves begin to turn, their colours vary every year depending on our previous summer weather. They can also vary widely from tree to tree and even branch to branch.

Leaves begin to fall any time from the end of August and by November we usually wonder what is to be done with them all?

[ FULL ARTICLE ]

9 Permaculture practices

Mother Earth News / Jessi Bloom / June/July 2017

We’re all stewards of the land, blessed to be living here, and it’s our critical responsibility to make sure we honor the natural resources that help us live. Permaculture design provides a great toolkit for doing this, and it can also help simplify your life and make your landscape more resilient. Practicing permaculture can be fun and rewarding on many levels.

Though it’s complex and can take years to learn, I’m going to help simplify permaculture for you. First and foremost, permaculture is rooted in ethics, which can act as a filter to help you make decisions:

Take care of the Earth.
Take care of people — starting with yourself!
Share resources and abundance.

You can learn from a number of different ecological design principles, creation techniques, and even technical jargon, but I’ll let you save all that for your own adventures in learning permaculture. Here, I’ll focus on some easy ways to get started on your journey.

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Guide to urban homesteading

Mother Earth News / Rachel Kaplan / April/May 2014

If you live in a city and dream of someday being able to work the land and become a modern homesteader, consider this: There’s no need to wait — you can easily do many homesteading activities in the city. You may not have enough garden space to grow your own wheat or corn, but you can harvest an amazing amount of many crops from a collection of containers. Owning your own milk cow is likely not an option, but keeping backyard chickens certainly is. Plus, in the city, it can be much easier to build a community of like-minded neighbors who can share tools, knowledge and friendship.

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Community garden takes root

Recorder & Times / Catherine Orth / 19 August 2019

The creation of the Dana Street Community Garden was celebrated on Saturday morning.

Brockville acting mayor Leigh Bursey handed out certificates of appreciation, as those involved in the new resource in the north end of the city drew attention to their achievement. If you were like neighbour Pat Cyr, the activities in early May on the city-owned property on Dana Street caught your interest and curiosity.

“I saw that something was happening in the empty space on Dana Street. It looked like the beginnings of a community garden. I got on line and saw that that is what it was,” said Cyr.

What Cyr was to discover was that a group of interested agencies and volunteers were setting up a community garden on land donated by the city.

[ FULL ARTICLE ]

Helping pollinators in Ottawa, one native plant at a time

CBC News / Robyn Miller / 10 August 2019

Her garden is alive with butterflies and buzzing with bees, and all Berit Erickson had to do was plant flowers native to eastern Ontario.

Now, Erickson is encouraging others to roll up their sleeves and install similar pollinator gardens in Ottawa.

“There’s really a critical need. Pollinator populations are declining and all insect populations are declining. Insects are the foundation of food webs,” she said.

Erickson has been gardening at her home in Carlingwood for 20 years, but only recently did she make the switch to cultivating native plant species.

“I realized that the plants that I used to grow, they might as well have been plastic plants because they had very little wildlife value,” she said.

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In passing

So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent… Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger…. The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences…. We cannot avoid this period, we are in it now….

— Winston Churchill