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Tag : Community gardens (100)

The Organic Backyard

Canadian Organic Growers

A guide to applying organic farming practices to your home or community garden.

Growing organic food enables you to eat and share the most authentic form of local food possible while actively contributing to the health of our ecosystems. In this guide, we have taken the key elements of organic farming principles and practices as contained in the Canadian Organic Standards, and have made them more user-friendly for you, the gardener.

Although coined The Organic Backyard, the content is intended to reach all growers of food on a small-scale – either at home, in community gardens, across urban backyards, at schools or in parks and reclaimed urban land.

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Choosing the right fruit trees for your home

Mother Earth News / Mary Lou Shaw / 16 January 2017

Whether you have just moved into a new home or have lived there for decades, it’s always the right time to plant fruit trees. A small investment of time and money will reap delicious, chemical-free fruit in only two to five years. Most fruit trees cost between $30 and $40, but can contribute to a life-time of health and enjoyment. Begin now by deciding what fruit trees you will plant.

Before heading to a local nursery or perusing a catalog, do a bit of daydreaming to figure out what fruit trees you will enjoy long-term. First of all, what fruits do you relish–apples, cherries, peaches, pears, nectarines? Living where there’s frost may mean we have to forego banana and citrus trees, but we still have lots of fruit trees to choose from.

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Grow cover crops for the best garden soil

Mother Earth News / Harvey Ussery / October/November 2011

Consider cover crops your most important crops, because the requirements for abundant food crops — building soil fertility, improving soil texture, suppressing weeds, and inhibiting disease and crop-damaging insects — can be best met by the abundant use of cover crops, season after season […]

The most important strategy of all is: Do it now! When I complete a food crop harvest in fall, that same day I plant an overwinter cover crop. If I harvest a spring crop such as lettuce from a bed that I won’t be planting again until fall, I sow a fast-growing interim cover crop that does well in summer heat, such as buckwheat or cowpeas. The best time to plant a cover crop is anytime a bed is not covered by a food crop or mulch.

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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?

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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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