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(This post has no photos because I didn't think it was as brilliant an idea to blog about before I did it - but my technique worked so well, I ...

Ever since I moved here (six years ago at time of writing), I've had a skunk living under my deck. I'm quite fond of the beast, despite that it eats ...

My ambitious SPIN farm plan (above) hasn't panned out this season. After expecting to blog every week about how my garden grows, I've met with, well, failure. How embarrassing. Some things ...

Two weeks ago, I went to Ontario for a little family/business/pleasure roadtrip. About 3 kilometers east of Fenelon Falls, I went to a farm where they had a table selling ...

I brought three pumpkins back from Ontario, and two evenings ago, I baked one of them. As the fastest way to process a pumpkin is by baking it, I just ...

On Monday morning the weather was beautiful, so I planned out an awesome Homestead day. I was only lacking one person and one tool (a post-pounder, an auger, or a ...

Come New Year's, I always ask people what their resolutions are. (It's more than just being polite because I want to tell them one of mine.) Most people say "None, ...

I'm not that much of a birder, but I do like to take on a birding challenge once in a while. I used to recognize fewer than 20 species of ...

Across from the Montreal General Hospital on Cedar Avenue, Mont-Royal park begins. And it starts with stairs to a meadow. Right away you see Queen Anne's Lace and chicory blooming ...

I went to the Eastern Townships for Labour Day weekend to get a good hike in at Mont Mégantic (I also visited Lac Mégantic for one of their evening benefit ...

This March, I avoided planting my garden seeds until this past weekend. Though I knew I was blowing the schedule for many seeds, I hadn't done any additional homework about ...

If you have bird feeders and trees at your home –and even if you don’t – you're likely to have a couple of window crashes per year - and you ...

Non-gardeners have funny ideas about what a pest is: usually something that gets into your unsecured garbage, something that has a "bad reputation," something that they haven't seen before and ...

In 2011, I took a course at McGill in Organic Soil Fertilization where I learned that my yard's soil type is loamy clay (with a lot of rocks in it ...

As the fall harvest winds down with freezing the vegetables (no pickling this year) and prepping the seeds for next, my efforts turn to the green renovation project consultancy I ...

There's a difficulty with most so-called economic behaviour in the world: it pays attention only to the first price tag, and rarely to the second. The first price tag is ...

(The photos in this post are terrible, but that's the camera I have right now.) In making my home more energy-efficient, one of the first projects that I could get ...

If this spring, with all this rain and insufficient heat, has been frustrating or lacking in inspiration, don't despair! You can still have a lovely garden this summer. Here are ...

Although the month of July isn't quite over, today's post is because when August really sets in, the wasps come out. It's true you've seen them all year, but in ...

When I installed the green driveway in April, I did two more things to benefit my garden: I installed an irrigation field (also known as an infiltration gallery) from the ...

I've long used a clothesline to dry my laundry out in the sun and fresh air. When I first moved in, I installed a "clothesline elevator" at the back door ...

Don't you just love lounging (or curling up) by the fire on a cold winter's eve? Lord knows, I do - just as much as in summer, because I love ...

"Can an urban homestead work in Montreal?" This was the query of someone who found my blog once upon a time. "Yes, of course." But. (There's always a qualifier!) You ...

A chimney swift is a bird, an aerial insectivore that consumes more than 1000 insects per day. It roosts in brick-laid chimneys. It is not a dusty child from a ...

Window crashes, also known as bird strikes, kill millions of birds with *every* migration. You might not think it happens to your windows, but it does, and you're not there ...

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 ...

I enjoy looking after the birds out back, where I feed the house sparrows and any other bird that comes by in winter. It's good to have a garden that ...

In 2015, I posted about converting a standard residential parking spot into a green driveway. It's a pictorial, part of our Project portfolio. Three months later (from mid-May to August), ...

Beginning with the raptors (birds of prey) in March and culminating in Warbler Season in May, and then again from August through October, birds face an incredibly dangerous journey, flying ...

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 ...

A quick note to readers from outside Quebec: now that the dams are over 40 years old, our hydroelectricity is probably the cleanest in the world (dams do produce GHGs ...

This little guy or girl comes by my backyard every day and raids my two bird feeders, sometimes with the help of another squirrel. Because it has sarcoptic mange, I've ...

Once upon a time when I was at the Westmount Public Library, I saw something to get excited about: they're reusing their old card catalog, situated near the main circulation ...

Two weekends ago, I participated in the Good Friday Migration to save the Technoparc Wetlands. Read more about it - and see the French-language Pimento Report on YouTube (embedded) here. With this ...

If you've been to this blog at least once before, you've probably seen photos of my green driveway. And yet every year, just like before I put it in, some ...

Migration is pretty much over now, and all birds are where they want to be if they're sitting on eggs in a nest, or raising a clutch of nestlings, or ...

My house is distinctive for the vines I have growing on it. The only other neighbours who have vines are a house on the end of a row, with a ...

Back in early summer, I went to Bird Fest (I blogged about it there). I put my name into the raffle, and what luck! I won! Nature-Expert (formerly known as ...

I was born on Groundhog Day. I therefore became inordinately fond of rodents. Also, the 2nd falls after the first of every month, and many people (e.g. my mother) say ...

If you've been looking up at the tops of the trees or watching neighbourhood feeders, you've noticed the flitting of birds newly arriving on their spring migration. If you've been ...

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 ...

In this post, lower down, we're gonna build a Mason bee house. Pollinating flowers is a serious job. In fact, in places where pollinators have been killed off by environmental ...

Acopian Bird Savers are a relatively inconspicuous (visible, but not unsightly) way to prevent bird crashes, guaranteed. They're a light curtain of strings that wave in the wind, in front ...

Formerly, this post was about ripening your green tomatoes, but I didn't have much more than a social media slug to say about it — it was actually the shortest ...

It's been on my to-do list for a few weeks to build a couple of bird houses with the scrap wood I have leftover from other projects, and so finally ...

Well before the pandemic, I realized I was becoming a neighbourhood fixture, the person who sits on their front porch every day*, watching the world go by. I first started ...

This post is a bit of a departure from usual topics! The pandemic has brought a lot of people home and made them appreciate a few things. Some of them ...

In late November, 2020, I took a video of a very busy squirrel perched on the ladder in the back yard. It was stripping a burlap bag of material to ...

Everyone loves a red door, so the first year I owned my house, I painted the front door red. (It was a beige matching the trim, very boring when you ...

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 ...

Black squirrels are always noticeable, and one had been living with the other grey squirrels in either one (or both) of my squirrel cabins since last autumn. Yes, I provide ...

In 2012 — around the same time as this blog got underway — I started being an AirBnB host. Here I was at the time, a full-grown adult, having to ...

This post is a bit of an addendum to Build a nest box for bluebirds and chickadees. If you want to use this one-board/scrap wood tutorial to actually build the ...

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 ...

This story was originally posted on May 9, 2013. There's an update down below… At long last, I finally have a new front fence. I could go digging through my ...

Sorry (not sorry) if you might be a tad arachnophobic, but here's the thing: I was terrified of spiders as a kid all the way through to some point of ...

This year I decided to take the Nature Conservancy of Canada's challenge and do a biological census of my front and back yards. It's an event where you use the ...

In November, 2013, I posted the following: Ringo's Lost poster I want to show you the new rabbit that entered my life. Like all my pets, he came to me ...

Vous avez peut-être remarqué qu'avec les travaux aux égouts la semaine dernière, les rats ont évacué les égouts et ont trouvé refuge dans nos cours.Veuillez retirer tout poison que vous ...

This very popular blog post has been refreshed and updated for Spring 2024 (and thereafter). Photo caption: A legion (not an army, but part thereof!) of sugar ants committed mass ...

Way back in 2011 when I was a beginning birder, I visited Point Pelee National Park for the first time. I wrote a trip report for the group I'd joined ...

In 2012 I wrote about the skunk that took up residence in my yard (good), and this post here has been up since around that time. Now, twelve years later, ...

I thought I'd already talked too much here about bird strike prevention, but I recently reviewed what I had, no, I haven't, really. It's show-and-tell time! It's especially time, because ...

I decided not to present this post as a project, because I highly doubt anyone other than me has a garden shed that they'd want to reconfigure. Though if you ...

Now that it's autumn, the squirrels are setting up their homes for the winter. You definitely want to make sure it isn't in your attic! No, no, not a good ...

Warning: this blog post has more exclamation points than I utter during the rest of the entire year. For those who were living under a rock when this word took ...