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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, 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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! ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

"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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...