As the urban hen debate in our city heats up, here’s another video featuring yet another urban hen keeper. Well, two hen keepers, in fact. The more I get buried in this issue, the more I realize how important it is. In our province at least, it has become about the right for people to produce their own food. That, … Read More
Permaculture, Meet High School
I’ve long looked at vast school grounds, wondering how much food could be produced if there was will. I’ve had friends try to climb that hill to no avail, primarily falling apart on concern for maintenance and who’s going to do the work. Like many things in the food world, perhaps it just took some scale – Jasper Place High … Read More
Laissez-Faire Gardening Dividend
I see this ridiculously lovely onion, about as thick as my thumb, as a dividend of laissez faire gardening. I did not plant it this year. This year being my first with a solid crop rotation in place, last year’s allium patch is this year’s bean patch. But it looks like I missed a dozen or so onions last fall. … Read More
This is a Cold Frame
I’ve been talking about cold frames a lot over the past months, and invariably get ‘what’s a cold frame‘. This is a cold frame. It’s a piece of Dutch geniusness. And I find it slightly embarrassing that we, living up here in Edmonton, are not friends with it, nevermind masters of its use. Its purpose is to prolong growing seasons … Read More
Lawn Converted Into Food
Over the past few years I’ve watched a few hundred episodes of Gary Vaynerchuk’s Wine Library TV, and am a regular commenter there. Recently, I’ve been enamored with Daniel Klein’s ‘Perennial Plate‘ project about eating locally in Minnesota. So recently I had a bit of a ‘duh…’ moment, realizing that I had the gear to do some video blogging myself, … Read More
The Year of the Insect
I spent a lot of time this past winter with my nose in books, one of the topics being permaculture. It’s a pretty dense topic, and I certainly am no poster-child for it, but I did make a lot of changes in my urban yard this year guided by its principles. One broad concept that intuitively makes sense is that … Read More