Big City, Little Homestead

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

Category: Urban agriculture

Designing the garden in OmniGraffle
OmniGraffle (v. 5) has a garden template. I used it to plan my first garden

Resources to help you design your garden

February 25, 2023 / / 0 Comments

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.

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Garden certification from Espace pour la vie

August 12, 2016 /

Hello, fellow wildlife gardener!

Last year, I certified Big City Little Homestead’s garden as Wildlife-Friendly with the Canadian Wildlife Federation. The certificate I received is the feature image, above, and I have a sticker in my window to promote the program (if you come to my front door and see it). The Certification program link is here.

At the beginning of every September (if not a little earlier, like, now!), the Montreal Botanical Garden “Espace pour la vie” website offers a similar service, so I registered my garden there. Certification is annual, so you need to update your pictures every year, by October 15th. There are four themes for certification:

  • Biodiversity garden
  • Bird  garden
  • Monarch oasis
  • Food garden

You also get a signpost for your garden with stickers for each type of certification, so you can get all four. That way the public can see what kind of garden you have, and raise awareness of the program.

The program’s website has a “Gardenaut Gallery,” a map extension so that you can visit the photos that gardeners have submitted to the program and their location –there are over 300 entries in all of Quebec.

My entry is here: http://espacepourlavie.ca/en/my-garden/big-city-little-homestead. (There’s more than one entry, because the certification is annual.)

Mission

My mission is to spread appreciation for ecological resilience and encourage you to live a little closer to the land. I want people to take actions that increase the beauty, biodiversity, and climate-change readiness of our towns, cities, and regions. That begins with people who own property, but includes anyone who can just go forth and do something at hand, from planting a public space to persuading a company to create green space. 

Image credits

© myself, unless credited otherwise; all rights reserved. View my photography – available for free! – on Unsplash.

Contact

Reach me by using the Comment form under the About BCLH menu. During seasonal work, my details are available by pop-up.

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