Living rural in the city is great – you can do it, too.

Category: Rewilding (page 1 of 2)

All articles that pertain to the BCLH service, “Rewilding” – green driveways, native plant landscaping, and bird protection.

Revising the front yard and green driveway

Whelp, it’s now been 10 years since I converted my driveway to a green one, and laid an infiltration gallery into the front yard. I’ve written about it in Harrowsmith Mag, and I’ve been interviewed about my yard and its expansion in Modern Farmer.  And of course I’ve written about it here, sometimes just in passing while observing the progress of my endeavours, my pets and the creatures that use it, and the changing seasons.

Objectively, when I look at the house from the street, the yard, the landscaping right up to the front door, seems to have both vertical and horizontal depth. It holds so much more, it just feels bigger than neighbouring properties. But as…it holds more… the gardening is as necessary as housework. I find both rewarding, but gardening is like therapy or meditation or something productive and relaxing at the same time. It never ends (except for winter’s recess), and it never gets boring, because something’s always changing.

Plant community changes

The first few years after the entrenching and conversion work, I did as much food-gardening as the garden would let me. The plan was to maintain the box hedge at the sidewalk perimeter, have a long box garden down the property line with the welded wire fence, and regular yard in between. Other plants could grow where they wanted to, or where I had room to fit them. I got quite a bounty in my first year.

As the shade from the growing tree dwindled the harvests, I tapered off growing vegetables and just cultivated as many flowers as appeared. And they did, in fact, take over. I had, and still have, big pots and balcony planters for a small potager of vegetables and bunny food. I literally grow more for my rabbits than for humans. (And yes, I absolutely did get lazy about cultivating a potager garden.)

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Replace your grass lawn with a meadow, or just let one happen

Do you hate mowing the lawn? Holy cow, I used to. We had a lawn that was half the size of a football field, and I spent many hours doing it. It’s not a hobby. And loads of gasoline spilled, actually. It kills the grass, but the grass comes back after a week or two.

When I first published this post (in June, 2017), a friend just turned me on to the Freakonomics podcast episode about America’s “stupid” obsession with lawns. It has a lot of different points of view and recommendations on what to do differently. Native species, alternative lawn care, and urban agriculture are some of the topics. Listen at the link.

If you prefer to read an article instead, there’s 2013’s Outgrowing the Traditional Grass Lawn on the Scientific American Blog Network. (Comment with any others you’ve found useful!)

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How cracks in my asphalt driveway revolutionized my life

If you’ve been to this blog at least once before, you’ve probably seen photos of my green driveway. In 2015, I converted a standard residential parking spot into a green driveway. It’s a portfolio pictorial. It took a month to “settle in,” but from mid-May, I’d gotten used to the results and I was quite happy!

Having seen the results over eight seasons (spring through winter, three years), I’m still pleased. It’s like an extra yard with cobblestone wheel paths, and after I got rid of my car, a space for my Adirondack chair.

And yet each year (just like before I put it in), some contractor dude drops by with a card to “fix” it. (I can’t blame him for pounding the pavement looking for clients, but still…). Sometimes he jots a quote on the back as to how much it would cost me to rip out my green driveway and put down some blacktop asphalt driveway.

You know, my green driveway cost a little more than what he’s quoting, because it was kinda fancy underneath, but I never will have to “repair” crack every five years ever again. No, thank you.

Crack repair

Because I used to have an asphalt driveway. About the only thing you can do on an asphalt or concrete driveway that you can’t do on mine is play basketball. And maybe make chalk drawings, but you know, the sidewalk’s right there, so that’s no biggie.

When I had asphalt, I had cracks in the driveway where plants would grow. (That’s why they’d wanna repair it.) But why would I let that crack bother me? Water percolating into the soil and being taken up by plants actually cools the air through transpiration.

“But frost heaves!” – it’s a driveway, not a highway; a little bump from a crack is not a problem.

“But bigger cracks!” More plants! There’s an aesthetic appeal to broken pavement, you know!

Why would I want black top + hot sun make my driveway and home hotter, rather than something cooling it down?

Besides, when the plants were growing in the cracks in my driveway, guess what the bunnies’ favourite outdoor snacks were? That’s right – CRACK SALAD!

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A Rewilding the Garden session

Six weeks before the frost sets in (traditionally, Canadian Thanksgiving is the first-frost date, but it actually comes later), gardeners can often get an early start on the next year’s garden and crops. The six-week mark is perfect for doing transplants because roots are not likely to experience drought or heat stress. It gives them a chance to establish themselves before the coming winter.

I decided it was time for an event that I then publicized on EventBrite and Facebook: a fall-oriented gardening session to prepare a garden for next year and plant native species. This hands-on event for the avid or casual gardener was to be a collaborative learning opportunity about native and cultivated plants for biodiverse wildlife gardens. Attendees were also welcome to bring plants from their garden, for swapping with other gardeners.

So, Saturday morning, I got up early to make it up to Pepinière Jasmin – where you can always find some native/indigenous plants even at the end of the planting season. One of the native plant suppliers was Aiglon Indigo.

I got the following plants: 

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