Welcome to my archives… the annals of history, starting from the oldest to the newest. Browse away and enjoy!

 

How to strain lumps out of paint

(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 ...

The neighbours under our decks

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 ...
Back yard plans

Garden failures, and the start of harvesting

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 ...

Adventures in picking, pickling, and homemade sauerkraut

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 ...

Don’t use the oven for Just One Thing (recipes)!

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 ...
chopped peppers, sugar, salt, vinegar

A day to make red pepper jelly – Gelée de piments rouges

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

New Year’s Resolutions and getting organized

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, ...
A woodland trail at Point Pelee

A Point Pelee Pictorial

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 ...

A mountain meadow in an urban setting

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 ...

Labour Day weekend: The Eastern Townships and Brome Fair

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 ...

Hervé the white rabbit

Ringo's Lost poster I want to show you the new rabbit that entered my life. Like all my pets, he came to me through the rescue route. It was a ...

Saving electricity in winter

First, do this test for your electricity efficiency! the reno-climat program There's a difficulty with most so-called economic behaviour in the world: it pays attention only to the first price ...
Marmot baby!

Fat, sassy groundhog babies want our money.

I was born on Groundhog Day. I therefore became inordinately fond of rodents. (Even so, my dog used to drag home dead groundhogs, probably killed by the neighbouring farmer or ...
Seed Starting plan by crop

How to plant rhubarb seeds

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 ...

Window-crash survivor! A Golden-crowned Kinglet

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 ...
naughty nuisance squirrel

“Nuisance” wildlife control strategies in gardening

We have a lot of strategies to attract the animals and insects we want, and repel the ones we don't. Here I discuss nuisance wildlife that we might want to ...

Urban land and a plan for how we handle the soil, in perpetuity

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 ...

Changing the lighting – a renovation to conserve energy

When I came up with the idea for Green4r | V3rt [now Rewilding], I wanted to learn the business by doing it for myself. I identified a bunch of green ...

Why we need to consume less electricity

Here in Quebec, our hydro-electricity is so readily available that we have the cheapest rates in North America. Electricity is abundant, the valleys are already flooded, ecosystems lost ages ago ...

A solar tunnel from the roof to sun-light your home

In November I blogged about changing the lighting in my home, removing recessed lighting from a place it shouldn't have been (pot lights should not recess into an attic; it is an ...

Eco-renovations at the Homestead

As the fall harvest was winding down with frozen vegetables (no pickling this year) and seed preparation, my efforts returned to Green4r, the renovation project consultancy I felt was needed (and I'm ...

June is not too late to start an urban potager or native plant garden!

If you've been frustrated this spring, with all this rain and insufficient heat, or it's been lacking in inspiration, don't despair! You can still have a lovely garden this summer ...
wasp observations

Biophilia month: Things to know and observe about wasps

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 ...

My beautiful, bounteous garden (finally!)

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 ...

Ripening your green tomatoes

This is going to be the shortest blog post ever. In fact, here in October, I feel some chagrin for not posting this earlier, but if you still have tomatoes in the ...

Conserving energy when doing the laundry

I've long used the clothesline to dry my laundry out in the sun and fresh air. Unlike some other people, I don't give a flip if somebody thinks I'm poor ...
pellet stove insert

Installing an environmentally friendly wood pellet stove

Don't you just love curling up by a crackling fire on a cold winter's eve? Lord knows, I do - just as much as in summer, because I love camping! ...
chimney swifts in flight

Why you should make your chimney available for Chimney Swifts

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 ...

How to stop killing birds with windows – bird crash prevention for all!

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 ...

Garden certification from Espace pour la vie

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 ...

How to give wildlife fresh, unfrozen water in winter

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 ...
quilt on rack

My quilting-from-scraps project

In 2011, when I lived at the cottage on Sand Lake, I started reading up on patchwork and cutting up blocks of cloth to make a queen-sized quilt for my ...

How the green driveway conversion is holding up

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), ...
dead bird Canada Warbler

Migration is getting underway – and it’s a dangerous time

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 ...

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 ...
Squirrel at window

Meet my squirrel! Mangey, but adorable.

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 ...

A seed library/catalog at the municipal library

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 ...

10 tips for an urban homestead garden in Montreal

"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 ...

Visiting one of the last remaining urban wetlands – the Technoparc

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 ...
Green driveway paver Montreal

How cracks in my asphalt driveway revolutionized my life

If you've been to this blog or my Facebook page at least once before, you've probably seen photos of my green driveway. And yet every year, just like before I ...
Red-winged blackbird

How can you protect birds during nesting season? Don’t cut trees. And: BirdFest.

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 ...

Vines for green walls  

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 ...

A Squirrel Buster Bird Feeder play-by-play 

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 ...

The payoff from my green eco renovation — results you can see

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 (this acknowledges that dams ...

Like “Rabbits rabbits rabbits,” but “Groundhogs, groundhogs, groundhogs.”

I love marmots sooooo much, and my Fat Sassy Groundhog Babies post is one of my more popular… so here it comes again. My Groundhog Day February 2 Birthday Fundraiser ...
This is a flowchart of what to do if you find a baby bird, from birdandmoon.com

I found a bird – or a baby bird – in distress. What do I do?

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 ...

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 ...
Mason bee

It’s Pollinator Week! Let’s do stuff to help them.

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 ...

DIY: easy Acopian Bird Savers for apartment dwellers and 2nd floor windows

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 ...

New project: build a nest box for bluebirds and chickadees!

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 ...

Little Neuro-Squirrel – a squirrel with a disability

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 ...

Painting the front door

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 ...

Montréal’s annual garden giveaways and resources

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 ...
Designing the garden in OmniGraffle

Resources to help you design your garden

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 ...
Jeremy-Bruce-Fence

A fence of welded wire and cedar posts

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 ...

Spiders definitely allowed

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 ...

The Big Backyard BioBlitz is On! August 3–7, 2023

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 ...

Just in time for World Rewilding Day, a message for the local neighbourhood

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 ...
Sugar ants trapped in a pool of honey

Sugar ants aren’t pests – they’re harmless and helpful!

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 ...

An updated Point Pelee trip (two, actually) report

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 ...
Cottontail rabbit

Raccoons, rabbits, and other animal visitors

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, ...
Feather Friendly tape applied to a bay window

Fritted, decorated windows preventing bird crashes: Weird no more

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 ...
A groundhog in front of a garden shed

Rebuilding a garden shed

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 ...