London, Ont., adopted Canada’s first stand-alone Urban Agriculture Strategy in 2017. Yet, almost eight years later, many of the strategy’s goals remain unrealized.
Tag Archives gardening
Growing pains: An Ontario city’s urban agriculture efforts show good policy requires real capacity
Selling GMO tomato seeds to Canadian gardeners ‘reckless’ say advocates
Selling genetically-modified purple tomato seeds to home gardeners could raise the risk of contamination of organic vegetable varieties and hamper farmers’ ability to save their own seed, say a group of advocates.
Canada’s ‘Harvest for Victory’ in the Second World War
Propaganda posters celebrating farming show the legacy of Canadian agriculture during the Second World War.
Great recipes rely on timely fall resource management
First We Eat: Your garden’s yield may need storage all at once if autumn arrives on short notice
dee Hobsbawn-Smith recounts an early-September rush to get frost-sensitive Prairie produce out of the garden, into the kitchen and processed for storage.
Harvest, part 1: Garnishing summer greens
First We Eat: In the dog days of summer, salads with protein can help dial down the heat needed for food prep
We’ve been in deep summer heat for weeks now after a rainy spring, and every plant in my yard — including the quack grass and chickweed — is consumed with the green fuse of growth. The result is a cornucopia of everything. The scarlet runner beans and snow peas twining around their bamboo stakes tower […] Read more
Seedy Saturdays
First We Eat: A freshly pulled carrot from the garden will remind you why this vegetable is such a mainstay
Back in March, I joined a crowd of people purposefully moving from booth to table to booth at St. Mary’s Wellness and Education Centre in Saskatoon. The occasion was the annual Seedy Saturday, an opportunity amidst the snow and ice for gardeners to buy seeds and think about spring. Seedy Saturdays occur across Canada under […] Read more
Garden seeds lead to problem weeds
The names in the garden catalogues may sound pretty, but the plants are far from that in pastures or fields
Glacier FarmMedia — Manitoba rancher Herman Bouw was casually perusing a gardening seed catalogue when a particular ornamental grass item caught his eye. The plant was listed as “squirrel tail grass,” but Bouw thought it looked awfully similar to a species with a more cursed name on the Prairies. A comparison of scientific names confirmed […] Read more
Prairie farm gardens
Growing vegetable and fruit crops in Canada: Part 1 of a series
Garden crops from beans to apples have been a passion of mine from my childhood in Wales. On our small 17-acre Welsh farm in southwest Wales, we grew or raised most of the vegetable food that we ate from potatoes to apples as well as milk, eggs, pork and chickens. The mild climate allowed us […] Read more
How to grow beautiful bird of paradise flowers
Singing Gardener: Plus some thoughts on grape juice and its plentiful health benefits
How are you doing, everybody? We owe it to ourselves to feel good and have as many of these good days as possible, even though we know some days can be anything but good. When someone says to me, “Have a good day,” I often respond with, “Those are the only kind of days I […] Read more
The best times to go fishing
Singing Gardener: Plus a few things you may not know about potatoes and melons
My grandma on my mother’s side loved to go berry picking. She was a berry picker through and through, seeking out wild saskatoon and chokecherry bushes. Together, we often picked raspberries from canes at her home garden patch too. If there was anything she taught me I was qualified to do, it was picking raspberries. […] Read more
Cyber-Savvy Farmer
