Yesterday Pollinate Aylmer completed stop #11 on the Aylmer Butterflyway, at the Aylmer Food Bank (Centre Allimentaire Aylmer). You can read the details of how we built it, and the plants we planted, but more importantly, we are hoping our community can help. We are looking for dozens, even hundreds, of crochet squares and flowers, to cover up the flimsy fence of the foodbank.
We bought our new home for the possibilities, projects and experiments it afforded us, in the quiet of the countryside just outside the city limits, but where school buses still stop to pickup our 3 kids en route to 3 different schools. Here, our neighbour walks her horse up and down our street to graze … Continue reading Making a Tiny Forest, the Miyawaki way
I've been quiet. It's a great feeling, because we've been so busy outside this first spring in our new place, with so many ideas and discoveries and projects, and dirty hands with mud-crusted nails, and if you know me you know that means I am happy. We finally got around to starting one project both … Continue reading A purpose-built (future) rain garden
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
I met a maybe-new-friend last week, and of course we chatted plants, chickens, and weird ailments. She said something to me along the lines of wishing she could bring herself to just do, and not overthink her garden planning. If she reads this post I hope this will inspire her to trust she can. Or … Continue reading Embrace Impulsive Gardening: How killing plants makes me a better gardener
This thing... sigh. It's been a lot, of everything. Hard work, obsession, learning opportunities, constraints, symbolism, acceptance, and so many other feelings and emotions I'm just now starting to digest and process. Two days after we moved in, I had some crushed stone delivered and built a flat base for the greenhouse The base is … Continue reading The Greenhouse Build
We LOVE tomatoes around here. My personal favorites are large beefsteak and slicing varieties, but the kids prefer cherry, grape and any other small type of small tomatoes so we have always grown a few different kinds. Last year I experimented with growing more tomato plants than we needed, and placing some in random parts … Continue reading Tomatoes, tomAHtoes and 34 varieties of everything in between
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.
I've been winter sowing seeds successfully for sever years, and racking up mistakes, learnings and tips from my experiences, as well as those of many others who started winter sowing before me, so by now I'm pretty comfortable with the practice. I found it overwhelming when I started, so I began small, with just a … Continue reading Winter Sowing for Beginners: Easy Steps to Get Started
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