The quick pollinator shade garden I made last week is doing great. I think I may have cooked some of the really early spring bloomers by waiting so late to plant them, but they are rebounding and will come back next year. Today I checked on them and found a couple of patches of Virginia … Continue reading A groomed garden bed approach to killing my lawn to build pollinator habitat
So I did a thing today. It was a pretty big thing as it was the first time I've planted anything in our new place. As you may recall, or maybe you have no idea and that's okay too, we moved late last fall, and I brought divisions of a lot of my plants with … Continue reading Native shade garden in a day
Our little Aylmer village grew quite interested in our micro-nursery project, as Aylmer does in any new business endeavour that isn't shawarma or pizza (except for Rose Pizza, because their pizza is in a world of its own 🥰). Some winter experiments heading to the greenhouse We got a lot of messages of interest, and … Continue reading What happened to the nursery?
Every plant we sell is grown locally, from seed, by us, on our own property, here in Aylmer. Most of our seeds are ethically harvested from our own extensive gardens, in Aylmer, or from our cottage in Blue Sea. These are the plants we can claim are truly 100% Localeaf. A patch of what was … Continue reading How Local is Localeaf?
Getting away from my personal life and back to the purpose of this blog, here's an update on our activities and where we are at coming to the end of this short month, and preparing for spring. I don't want to sugar coat anything or pretend we have things figured out because we are soooo far from that, but bit by bit it feels like we are starting to figure out some things. The kids have been amazing through it all.
We grow plants from seeds. That is at the core of what we love to do. Year after year, our collection of seeds grows. This is in part due to our plants growing, us collecting seeds from our maturing baby plants, saving seeds from our existing harvests, foraging the vast unspoiled wild land near our … Continue reading Our seeds, free seeds, shared seeds, and the small seed companies and nurseries we have loved supporting this year
Native flower mixes packaged by the kids and given out at various markets in Aylmer. It has made my heart happy reaching so many people with our free native seed packs this year. Here is the list of all the native flower seeds included in each of our free packs. We get a lot of … Continue reading Free Native Seed Packs: Planting Instructions
OMG OMG we are moving! More on where we are going later, today I'm focused on the why. As I re-read what I wrote below I have noticed that this post is very long, and gushy, and riddled with run-on sentences. Maybe you stumbled on my blog and you don't want to read my stream … Continue reading Embracing Change: Our Family’s Journey to a New Home
So you're thinking about ditching your lawn. Do it! We've done it, and we promise you won't regret it! In fact, this whole crazy venture we have embarked on by starting Local Leaf first started with an idea to replace a small part of the lawn in our front yard. We started small (not really, … Continue reading Lawn Alternatives: Create a Sustainable Outdoor Space
Imagine a garden that you (almost) never have to water. In a nutshell, that is xeric garden design. Reminiscent of a desert landscape, but adapted to our northern climate, xeric gardens thrive without additional water needs beyond natural elements once established. Plants selected for use in xeric landscape design are drought tolerant, thrive in dry … Continue reading Creating a Drought-Tolerant Xeric Garden
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