Well, here we are, late February/early March! Are you ready to design the layout of your garden and get your seeds started?
For those who have space and haven’t planted a garden before, or for those who planning it anew this year, you always start with a rough plan: what to place where, and how much space and sun it will get. This will give you an idea how many seedlings you should have of each kind of plant.
I don’t always start seeds every year, and when I do, I’m almost always late at it (much later than this). It’s easy to get a little overzealous and end up tending tonnes of seedlings we have give away. Of course, you start by planting many seeds, because some never germinate, or else germinate and start, but then fail. If you have the space to add a few more good planters, extra seedlings can come in quite handy.
The spring gardening season is upon us with even more speed than it usually arrives, because regardless of what winter does, that’s the way time works: every year accelerates. So it is time that the Ville’s annual “embellissement” campaign (“embellishment,” or rather “beautification”) is coming again to many boroughs in just a few weekends.
A pepper plant I received from the garden giveaway as a seedling, once it matured and produced two peppers!
This annual event gives residents of Montreal a number of floral, vegetable, and herb seedlings for their gardens and balconies. Past entrants have been impatiens and begonias, echinacea (cone flowers), sage, rosemary, basil, and mint, and peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers. Always included: as much compost and wood chips as you want to take. Bring your own bags, baskets, buckets, and a wagon to cart it all away! Oh, and don’t forget your ID. You have to prove residency in the borough in which the plants are being given.
When? Well, you’ll have to check the Montreal.ca website and consult the calendar or the page for your borough, or other community listings, to find out when the “distribution” of plants is (that’s the search word to look for), but it typically happens on the long weekend in May, and for some, the weekend after that, and lastly, the first weekend in June.
I know it seems late for gettting them in the ground (last-frost date seems to be happening in April, if you’re in the city), but frankly, it takes time for the seedlings to grow up and “harden off” (acclimate to the outdoors) before they can be distributed for public planting. Though outdoor plants that are well-established are now as lush as can be, the seedlings I’ve planted are hardly ready for planting; the ones the Ville distributes have been started in greenhouses.
but I didn’t have much more than a social media slug to say about it — it was actually the shortest blog post I’d ever done. So if you still have tomatoes in the garden, they’re going to go to waste, unless you do this:
Pull up the plant in its entirety and hang it upside down in your garage or cold cellar.
All the cherry tomatoes on this plant – and there were many more; I’ve harvested them regularly – were green when I pulled it up at the end of September. I’m getting a lot more than I thought possible – at least 40 off of 3 plants!
Other than the standard and cherry tomatoes, I didn’t have a harvest this year – except for a few good beets. It’s been the least homesteading year I’ve had since I got the garden fully underway in 2010. Since June, I dedicated myself to other pursuits (including a trip to England and France). The garden I left to do its own thing.
Autumn is concluding, so get ready for winter
So here we are, with the gales of November (my grandfather was a First Mate on a Great Lakes cargo ship) about to come early. (This year. I’m feeling extra chilly.) I’ve decided to update this blog post into the things one should do to get the garden and the house (duplex, triplex) ready for winter.
But first, an opportunistic hack: make fresh cheese
Let’s just give a hearty welcome to Resume Cooking Season! In this pic, I have a bowl of minestrone (my version, anyway), along with pumpernickel bread and some home-made ricotta. If ever you have milk that’s going bad, before you throw it out, “break it” by gently warming it on the stove. What should happen is it separates the solids from the whey, a pale yellow liquid. If it does this, lucky you! (If it does not do this, then too late/too bad.)
Take a sieve and pour the contents over a bowl.
Toss the whey out, and leave the curd (it’s fine-grained, like ricotta) in the sieve over the bowl.
Mix in some table salt (start with half a teaspoon, you can add more later) and let it dry for a few hours in the fridge.
Then mix it in a regular bowl or tupperware, and taste it. It should taste like “nothing” cheese, just with a bit of salt.
Adjust the salt to your taste, and you can also add a little lemon juice if you wish.
This is fresh cheese, and you can eat it on toast with jam for breakfast, in sandwiches, in pasta, in baking (lasagne or desserts!). It doesn’t keep very long, though.
Tidy up the garden, but not too much
Here’s what that entails:
Empty the rain barrel and store it for winter (you can store it outdoors on its side). Put a downspout extension on, to direct rain and meltwater to the garden or to the drain.
Take the garden hoses off the spigots and bring them in. There may be a chance you’ll need to use the spigot over the winter but unless the hose is clear and unfrozen, you wouldn’t be able to.
Sweep up the leaves, but rather than dispose of them, load them on to the garden beds and into the fence rows. You can also pile them against the house foundation. They are insulating.
Use some lightweight landscape cloth and wrap up the plants you want to protect, such as rose bushes. Use a stapler to secure the wrapping around them, but then stuff it with the dead leaves from the garden.
Also, you don’t need to prune roses or clematis or, really, any other plants before winter; winter will prune them for you! If you leave them alone and then spruce them up in spring, you’ll have a lot more growth.
Put down rubber step mats on your outdoor steps. They help cut down the need for salt, and prevent slips. Put down a winter mat at your front door.
Get your heated water bowl ready for the first days where the temperature falls below 0º
Clean out any nest boxes you have on your property so they’re nice and ready for next year’s occupants. You can also convert them to roost boxes, too, by changing the orientation of the portal (at the bottom of the front, rather than the top), putting in a perch, and “winterizing” it to make it a little warmer.
Of course, it’s also time to put out the bird feeders and stock up on bird seed!
And like me, you can also install a squirrel cabin. I bet these four share one together:
Pond owners with fish
If you have a pond and it’s not deep enough for fish during the winter, bring the fish in! If it is deep enough, then make sure the pump is in good working order and obtain a backup (such as a stock tank de-icer, but those things are energy hogs) should it catastrophically fail. So long as the pump or an aerator is running, so long as there’s an air gap between the frozen over part and the water in the pond, the fish will survive.
Winterizing the house:
Inspect any outdoor caulking, and the weatherstripping on doors and windows. Replace any that needs replacing. This is sometimes easier said than done, but at least door weather stripping and door thresholds (sweeps) are easy.
After this, you can also mimic blower-door test by turning on the kitchen and bathroom ventilator fans to create air-exchange pressure in your home.
Walk around with a stick of incense, checking places where air might be infiltrating – draughty corners, window frames, electric outlets. If a room is really drafty, check all joint points in the drywall, such as at closet doors and corners, and the baseboards – chances are excellent that someone screwed up the job and left a crack unsealed.
When you find areas that need sealing, your friends are 1) foam tape, 2) foam backing rods, which you can poke all the way into wider cracks, 3) drywall repair tape and spackling, because cracks and holes in walls should be dealt with, 4) latex caulking, and 4) switch and outlet gaskets from the weatherstripping aisle. Serious sealing may require Tuck Tape and expanding foam. Now seal those gaps and cracks!
Keep the heat in!
Next, go around and check that ALL your windows are closed, both outside panes and inside panes. It does little good to have a window closed if the second window – the storm window, on the outside – isn’t closed. The air between the two panes is an insulation gap. This is why double- and triple-glazed windows have insulation ratings. If your windows in winter have moisture condensing on them, one of these windows is open or broken. Fix it (call your landlord if you have one)! It’s like throwing your money out the window to not have it closed properly. If you can’t, then get the plastic cling window sealing kit from a hardware store. It provides some extra draft prevention and insulation, and you will be a lot more comfortable.
Next, you have the daft people (you might be one of them, for now) who think “It’s ok to have a window open in winter, it lets fresh air in—” Buzz⛔️ – Wrong! See the above about sealing gaps? Even with all the gaps sealed to a professional standard, there ain’t no building (even all the “spacious” new ones!) that has perfect integrity in its vapour barrier and weather wrapping. All buildings have an Air Exchange Rate (ACH). This is the number of times the volume of air inside your dwelling is exchanged with air from the outside. To see the standards for different kinds of buildings, including homes (10-18 ACH, though the lowest, “residences,” is 2!), follow this link.
Since you’re the one paying to heat that air, you best be energy-efficient and keep the heat in. Seal the gaps, keep the windows closed, and close the vestibule door! Those who don’t have a vestibule have to live with their draughty design choices.
Next, program your thermostats
16º overnight (23h00 to 07h00); 19º (07h00–08h30 or whatever slot you need to get ready for work), 17º (departure time until return time, say 17h00), then 20.5º from 17h-23h00, at least in the common areas (living room, den, bathroom, kitchen). The bedrooms, quite honestly, only need to be 16º except during a slot you might spend reading or meditating. People sleep better in the cool, so get a cozy duvet and you’ll be quite happy over winter.
Change your lightbulbs, and other decorative things
It’s still OK to use incandescent lamps in the Canadian winter, provided the lightbulbs are at people-height. Incandescent lamps shed heat, so both the warmth of their light as well as actual warmth makes you feel cozy. So on Thanksgiving, I swap all such lightbulbs at home to 25W–60W incandescents, and come the first of May, I swap them all back to LED.
And now’s also the time to swap the doormat (seaonal), put up the autumn wreath on the door (the harvest one, before Christmas), and change the throw cushions and blankets. Because:
P.S. Don’t forget to load up on fuel for the pellet stove or wood stove. (Not like you forget, just, do it early!)
Pollinating flowers is a serious job. In fact, in places where pollinators have been killed off by environmental toxins, people are employed to do it. (That means a government might see it as an advantage to take a service nature does for free, and turn it into something people have to be paid to do.)
For this reason, the third week of June every year we have Pollinator Week. Its aim is promote and support pollinator abundance and diversity, in the interest of serving them better than we have (see environmental toxin above, but also, habitat loss!) – because Lord knows they serve us!
Never mind an existential necessity for us humans; that’s a lot of economic value.
How you can help
What can we balcony or yard-owners and gardeners do to help bees and other insect pollinators? Things being as they are now, even if the spring proceeds as expected (not too cool and damp, not too warm and dry), and the blooms have been on time, if there are fewer flowers to choose from, pollinators won’t be seen around all that much.
So get planting! Plant a garden, even a balcony garden, of plants that flower in succession throughout the season. Include native plants amongst your more showy flowers! It takes a matter of years (don’t let this dissuade you, it’s rather an encouragement) to get the successive blooming underway, but it’s so satisfying when you do. By mid-summer, my anise hyssop is blooming, and between that and the Joe-Pye weed and asclepia, the butterflies are well fed until mid-September.
You can also provide a shallow water source such as a dish filled with sand and pebbles and water. This lets them mud-puddle:
Nature herself also motivated this post: On a recent trip to the Adirondacks, I found a bunch of Eastern Swallowtail butterflies mud-puddling on the beach.
While I was watching these Eastern Swallowtails (27 of them!) mud-puddle at the beach, I saw a Red Admiral butterfly also doing the same, and, nearby, a Mourning Cloak butterfly:
Why do butterflies mud-puddle? Well, it’s an easy way to absorb minerals, sodium in particular, from the solution it makes in water-logged soil. For this reason, other insects also congregate around mud puddles. Just watch and see who shows up.
Male butterflies tend to mud-puddle more than females. Read more.
How can you tell the difference between a butterfly and a moth? The butterfly’s antennae look like little golf clubs. If they don’t have a terminal bulb, but are more like a whisker (or even have whiskers themselves!), it’s a moth.
Bees that pollinate: oh, all of them. But those we notice most are honeybees and bumblebees. There are also many solitary types such as leaf-cutter bees and Mason, or orchard, bees. (There are even bee mimics called hoverflies who do the same job.) Honeybees and bumblebees pollinate cultivated crops; native bees pollinate native plants. To learn more, check out the videos on the Pollinator Partnership website, put together by Burt’s Bees, Wild for Bees, and Isabella Rosselini.
Even more fascinating is CBC Ideas radio/podcast "Dancing in the Dark." If you want to learn a lot about bees' variety, language, complexity and sheer sophistication in a short time, listen to this!
It’s very important to give honeybees as much habitat (well, hives) and food (fields of crops!) as we possibly can, because of Colony Collapse Disorder. When I first heard about this mystery illness (mites and viruses are involved)—and I’m a biologist by training—I knew the basic tool we had of doing something was throw numbers at it. Sometimes, an illness or an epidemic can only be overcome by developing a natural population resistance. One requires large populations where many are lost but some survive. Natural resistance is where survivors (survivor queens and surviving males that serve them) go on to create new hives, so that the next generation’s immunity increases and fewer are lost. Natural resistance would improve the survival rates of beehives until scientists came up with good answers.
So it was with a good deal of gratitude that we saw a huge uptake in people’s interest beekeeping, because only if more of us do it, will there be more of them, for evolutionary forces to have the fastest rate of success. There is no human intervention or cure for it yet.
Urban beekeeping is also getting to be more common. In 2011, UQAM allowed hives on its roof (translation here), and a few years ago, another apiary installed some hives downtown. The Ville is not planning on regulating the practice, so count on seeing more of this, everywhere.
Those of us who can’t keep bees can still help by buying honey from local beekeepers. Look for this kind of honey at the grocery store, farmer’s markets, and word-of-mouth.
Nonetheless, there’s a reason I’m not keeping bees myself: honey bees are very competitive with native pollinator species. If we’re going to increase the number of kept hives, we also need to make sure that the native bees and other insect pollinators get as much food as possible — specifically native flowering plants, which honey bees are less adept at pollinating. And also: and sources of habitat (e.g. gardens with long grass, bare dirt, trees, and insect hotels). So while other people keep honeybees and grow fruits, flowers, and vegetables that need their pollination, I’m keeping a garden for everything else.
Let’s build a Mason bee house:
A few years ago, I created aMason bee house out of a log and bit of hardware. I got the idea because of an interesting rant on the Montana Wildlife Gardener blog against honey bees (it’s interesting — here’s a link to all of Montana Gardener’s posts on the topic of bees.) A friend’s comment also spurred me to do it.
Here’s the process, in pictures:
Start with a split log – this one has 3 sides Choose a drill bit the size of the bee—¼” or 5/16″ and 3″ long is goodDrill holes into the long-side of each face of the log. Don’t drill all the way through the wood!Space them accordingly – I chose 2″ but they may be closerA close-up – I hung it to the fence post with a wrap-around chainA rather non-descript result —but it was used within a week!
The house typically needs a “roof,” but I skipped over that part.
The Mason bee house was quickly occupied. I’ve also seen paper wasps using it as a source of fibre, gathering material for their hives. They chew up the wood and build paper for nesting cells. They’re again succeeding in occupying the upper corner of my garage door. Wasps have a place in our ecosystem, too – so I’ll leave them alone.
You can even buy bricks made to house bees, and install them in a brick wall!
Want to help bumblebees?
Bumblebees are important pollinators of native and fruiting crops. In fact, for some crops, the flowers need the particular buzz of the bumblebee to shake the pollen loose – they aren’t going to give it up for just any old insect! But there’s one bumblebee that’s landed on the Critically Endangered list, and it could use your help.
For example, leaving your yard an attended-to kind of messy will help. Let stands of grass grow tall, and leave nooks and crannies of bare soil. These are places where ground-dwelling bees can live.
The Xerces Society has a few programs for supporting bumblebee science and conservation. You can read about the threats they’re facing, but more importantly, you can help by reporting every bumblebee you see to:
Knowing the lifecycles, ranges, and habitats of the animals and insects you want to protect is critical if you’re going to be effective at preserving their populations. So another thing you can do, if you have suitable habitat or enjoy going for walks in nature, is participate in this study out of York University: https://xerces.org/2019/03/26/quest-for-bumble-bee-nests/
The study’s investigators say we currently don’t know exactly what constitutes high quality bumble bee habitat—especially when it comes to nesting. But they can give you tips on what to look for, and knowing what it looks like afield, you can report back at https://www.savethebumblebees.ca/citizen-science/.
There’s even information on The Missing Link about training your dog to help sniff out bumblebee nests, which will augment their discovery when you take your dog further afield. That’s a novel approach! If you or your dog are the type to take on this kind of challenge, do it do it do it!
This is a long-running “lifestyle” blog about the pleasures of living like a farm kid in an urban context. You’ll find a wide range of topics that pertain to food, crafts, energy efficiency, and DIY. There’s a big focus on ecology and wildlife because this has brought me a lot joy – but this is also the greatest potential we have of restoring some balance to nature where we live.
Given that, I’ve turned my attention to providing more content for people to switch traditional lawns over to native landscaping and green driveways and things that will support climate readiness, drought and flood-prevention, and increased habitat for biodiversity. Comments and questions are welcome!
If you’re in the Montreal region, you can also use my “Rewilding” service to landscape your property using native plants, convert to a green driveway, and prevent your windows from killing birds.
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