Living rural in the city is great – you can do it, too.
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 Charles Dickens novel!
There are many chimney swifts in Côte-des-Neiges and Notre-Dame-de-Grâce — you can see their aerial acrobatics and hear
“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 need to have sun, and then you need to have space. If you don’t have sun, you can’t do it (unless you go to step #2, community group part, and then it’s a garden, not a homestead, but that’s OK).
If you have sun and space, then the only thing you need (other than water), is to be ready and willing to put up with the learning curve and the occasional need for help on any of the following things:
1. Start your seedlings indoors in March (some as early as February). That means now! Many require eight weeks before planting.
2. Try not to spend more than $250 on the initial effort. Every new venture — and this is a work of pleasure and a cost-saving measure— should be started with a minimum of capital until it looks promising. If you invest too much and your plans fail, you won’t be happy at the end of the growing season, or if you spent more for your harvest than buying it from a CSA. Sure, you’ll benefit from the experience of gardening, which is therapeutic, but you need to derive value or success from it to make it an ongoing thing.
3. The growing season in Montreal starts with a huge leap of growth – but you need city soil to be well-amended to take advantage of it. Here’s how:
4. When the plants go in, install a grow fence (plants go up) or exclusion fence (keep animals and humans out). The fence should still allow wildlife to get around or through at safe points, because otherwise you’ll trap them (neither good nor nice), or they will destroy it. Needless frustration has a negative impact on wildlife— you should focus on defending your vegetables, not your property. Also keep in mind: if the fence is too rickety or fugly, neighbours might complain. Cute counts.
5. Buy a rain barrel (cheap if you get one from an EcoQuartier) and a seeping hose from any garden centre. Obtain permission from landlords and neighbours to get water from their downspout, if necessary. Montreal is prone to having an early heat wave beginning with the Victoria Day / Fête du patriotes weekend. Just when the growth is getting going, it can cause lettuce to bolt and other plants to stop growing. Keep the ground just moist enough for highly transpiring plants during the growth phase. Rain barrels with seeping hoses are one way. And mulch!! — but just enough to cover the soil. Don’t smother it like a blanket!
6. The late June-to-July and then the August heat waves happen in this climate zone. If you come from a different zone, or you are just learning, read up on strategies in the garden and the varieties of fruits and vegetables to plant. We are in Plant Hardiness Zone 5a. The city is more like 5b and even 5c, depending on the direction your building faces and the amount of sun it gets. This is due to the urban heat island effect from too much paving, not enough green space, and people using air conditioning (especially in their cars). You probably won’t need to shade anything, but water early and often — and also be aware of our Mon-soon-treal moments, where we get a deluge. (Hence, rainbarrel, and put out pots to catch even more!)
7. Put a net over top of the delicate leafy things as they get started, because house sparrows love them. They and, yes, the occasional rat (don’t panic!) predate on seedlings. Very young plants do not often get the opportunity to unfurl their 4th and 6th leaves – they are often gone by the first two.
Which brings me to say: Squirrels don’t care about your plants, they’re going for the disturbed soil. Wherever they see fresh dug soil, they have to investigate: “There’s a nut in there, I just know it!” So try to plant your seedlings after they’ve gotten “big enough to defend themselves,” and cover up the soil with mulch. Replant them if they get plucked out in search for food. Once the delicate things are hardy, you’ll need the net to stave off the squirrels going for your fruits. Though the next point is critical about that:
8. Put out a water dish for wildlife. Fruits growing on a plant are just a convenient Capri-Sun pack of hydration for a passing critter. They go for your cucumbers, tomatoes, and other fruits just to have a drink of water. Provide them a water bowl, and change it consistently, and they’ll come to know your place as the place to get a drink. Be their oasis, not their Vegi-Capri-Sun convenience store.
9. Hang a house for solitary bees, just in case. Leave a messy corner in your yard for others, especially for ground-dwelling bees. Offer them every form of hospitality, because we’re dependent on them. Assume an insect is beneficial first, and then learn to identify and only be deadly towards those that actually cause harm. Sugar ants, stinkbugs, wasps, hoverflies, and all kinds of bees, ladybugs, spiders, centipedes, or sowbugs—all have a part in our great chain of biodiversity.
10. The season here goes to the end of October. Get a good gardening book that tells you the stages for successive plantings, and keep going with planting new seedlings until mid-to-late August for an autumn harvest. Peas, spinach, and Swiss chard are cool-weather crops you can enjoy until the snow flies. Or even after, if you put them into a cold frame.
Give it a go, and good luck!
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 camping! So when I bought my home in late 2005, I had a wish list, and fireplace was right up there in the “needs” section.
Indeed, most homes have one, because along with having a full-sized kitchen or a second bathroom, a fireplace or woodstove is one of the most common requirements. I wonder if this is true everywhere, and not just in an area where, if your main source of heat fails, you need a backup.
So this photo, taken directly from the MLS listing I first saw, was what my fireplace first looked like:
As soon as I got the keys, my first order of business was to paint that room something other than the colour of crud (that yellow-y beige, reminiscent of grease trapped in the grill of your stove vent). I chose blue with white wainscotting and trim:
It took a while to realize I didn’t like the terracotta tile surround of the fireplace, and that I could paint it – so I painted it white. What a difference it made! It brightened up that corner of the room (you’ll see a pic later down this post).
But alas, I rarely used the fireplace, because as every homeowner learns, they are an exit to the outdoors through which all your heat escapes. The glass doors on a fireplace limit that loss in a very minimal way; in fact I hung a blanket across the fireplace when it was really cold and didn’t light any fires at all. Fires were basically for the fall and spring. I still have some of the firewood left to me by the previous owner, which I’m saving up for campfires with friends.
My carbon footprint is probably as close to neutral as it can get without being surrounded by forest and going solar. I’ve planted a lot of trees, so I don’t feel bad at all about burning wood for its ambiance. Still, there’s a better way to do it than how we have…
I wanted to replace my cold and drafty fireplace with an EPA-certified wood burning stove insert (“insert” means putting a stove…into a fireplace!) But then Montreal enacted the 2013 anti-fireplace law (controversial, for good reason) that disallowed solid fuel stoves and masonry heaters. The law is now revised so that fuel type is not important, if the emissions certification protects air quality.
I prefer solid wood as fuel because to have local private forests, we need to value them. The best way to value them on private land, after the joy of owning a forest of course, is to have woodlots. Firewood comes from dropped deadwood and selective logging. Cutting a small percentage of a forest every year (around 3%) is sustainable and generally not considered harmful for an ecosystem (considering every tree on a case by case basis). What happens if we don’t value firewood? We will lose woodlots – small forests – as landowners transform them into something more “profitable.”
With the new law, I decided on a pellet stove (pellets are compressed sawdust from the milling process). I did my research, acquired the permit, and bought the Harmon pellet stove P35i fireplace insert. It heats up to 900 square feet, which is enough to make my TV den / home office nice and toasty. Foyers Lambert did the job in late fall 2014.
This is how I enjoyed my new fireplace in Winter 2015:
I installed the floor tiles in the spring of 2015. Insurance policies require 18 inches of tile or fireproof flooring in front of the hearth, so this is how it looked with the new floor. Unfortunately, the tile installer didn’t notice the ashes drawer under the stove, so it’s rather a tight fit.
The cover photo (at the top of this post!) is how I enjoy the pellet stove now. I buy my pellets at Reno Depot and at Rona on St. Patrick, and a bag lasts me about three to four days of lounging in the TV den/office space for about 3 hours per night (a bag is about 12 hours of burn). At around $5.75 a bag, this is an inexpensive way to be warm, comfortable, and happy (the Danes have one word for all three: hyggelige) on a cold night.
If you have no intention to (or aren’t in the financial position yet) to upgrade your fireplace, there’s something really awesome you can do for nature. Come spring, inspect and clean your chimney and prepare it for welcoming chimney swifts. They need urban habitat! And they will only occupy the chimney during the late spring and summer, leaving with autumn migration.
Unfortunately, woodstoves use metal pipes to line the chimneys — unless you choose a different egress for the smoke, little that there is (up to 90% less smoke than traditional fires). Swifts can’t cling to and build their nests in metal pipes; they need masonry towers.
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. It’s a device that raises and lowers the pulley by about a meter, so that the laundry hangs high overhead.
When I shortened the deck in September 2012, the 2×4 supporting the clothesline’s pulley came crashing down. The screws that held it in place left scrappy holes in the fencepost (same fence post, reused here) from all that tension. The only other place I found to install the pulley made for a shorter clothesline. Loathe to cut the line without having considered all my options, I took the clothesline down for the winter.
My laundry room already has two shower rails to hang clothes from. I also have a clothes drying rack. And this past summer, we had a humid spell that was making my posters and photos curl in my basement, so I acquired an old dehumidifier. It turns out it is the perfect solution for drying clothes indoors on a cool autumn or cold Canadian winter day (it even produces a bit of heat).
The annual average cost of running a dryer is $160 (calculated across a few websites, lately). So, after the necessary but variable cost of running baseboard heaters and your refrigerator, your clothes dryer is literally the biggest energy draw in your home. It’s obviously not necessary when you can use a clothesline. But when you run it in winter, you’re virtually throwing money out the window!
When you run a bathroom fan, kitchen fan, or the clothes dryer, you’re venting out air that’s been heated. This depressurizes your home, which will suck cold air in through the cracks, seams, and other places where air infiltrates. Rather than create a pressure differential (and heat the air twice), it makes a lot more sense to use a dehumidifier in the laundry room. The dehumidifer pulls the water out of the clothes in a matter of hours.
My dryer is about 20 years old and brags that it uses 111 kWh per month. Hardly an EnergyStar! I don’t know the rating on my dehumidifier, but it’s surely lower than that, and it’s not dragging cold air for ambient heating. The residual heat of the unit is a bonus, and the water from the reservoir can be used for watering the plants.
Another obvious advantage is that there’s less wear-and-tear on your clothes, and for certain fabrics, less shrinkage! This is a priority in Europe, where they care slightly more about the care of one’s clothes and so typically use better drying options (check out this blog post on the Green Home Building Advisor website).
So I’ve started using the dehumidifier in my laundry room. I’m impressed with the drying time (about 2 hours) and the state of my towels—they don’t dry stiff. The only part I miss is the de-linting that a good tumble dry can do. Should that be a problem for a few sheets and garments, I can take them to the laundromat for a 10-minute tumble to solve that problem.
This is a long-running “lifestyle” blog about the pleasures of living like a farm kid in an urban context. There’s a big focus on ecology and wildlife because this has brought me joy – and this is also the greatest potential we have of restoring some balance to nature where we live.
I write practical content for people to do little projects that basically make things beautiful, but also support climate readiness (energy efficiency, heat reduction, drought tolerance, flood prevention, and more). I’m a relentlless promoter of having a live-and-let-live attitude towards biodiversity.
Comments and questions are welcome! And if you’re anywhere near the Montreal region, you can also use my “Rewilding” service to landscape your property using native plants, convert to a green driveway, and prevent your windows from killing birds.
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