What to do this week Most of the vegetables we grow from seed in our gardens are annuals. These seeds are programmed to grow quickly and set seed themselves in a single season. Generally speaking, this means they are easy to germinate, since their reproductive strategy is to hit theRead...

What to do this week This week is a good time to divide rhubarb, as well as a few other perennial plants, but rhubarb especially. If at all possible, you want to do it when you just see the tips of what look like buds starting to poke up fromRead More

What to do this week This is a great time of year to talk about soil structure. Whatever you have in your backyard, if it is in Cape Breton it is quite likely to be clay, sorry to say, unless you have been building it for a while. Clay predominatesRead...

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw, “Reinstatement of the Blossoming Program” on the agenda for the 27 March 2018 CBRM council meeting. Had Deputy Mayor Eldon MacDonald, who put the issue on the agenda, temporarily lost his mind? I think the short answer is, “Yes.” During the meeting,Read More

What to do this week This week is a good time to talk about a couple of things you might want to get to around the garden soon. One of those things is any plants you might have brought in from the garden last year. They will probably be showingRead More

Author’s Note: This week, we are re-running the third in a series of three columns from 2017. They are perfect for this time of year, and will help you get ready for spring while Michelle deals with a few things that have her tied up right now.  What to do thisRead More

Editor’s Note: Our gardener is away this week, so we are reprinting her advice from roughly this time last year, which, she assures, us remains applicable. What to do this week: So now that the seeds are ordered, let’s plan those windowsills. Onions get the first rotation on the bestRead More

What to do this week The main thing I am doing now, besides harvesting, is dealing with cover crops. I’m crimping or otherwise destroying the cover crops I had planted for the summer period, and planting new ones for fall/winter. A while back, we talked about cover crops as livingRead More

What to do this week If there is one thing that is true about gardeners, it is that we are always thinking ahead. You might think we would all be busy enjoying what we have grown, or perhaps be scattered in multiple directions picking and processing everything that is comingRead More

What to do this week This week I want to talk about stratifying and scarifying. These are two tricks for germinating hard to start seeds such as the seeds of many perennial flowers. I mostly concentrate on food gardening but perennial flowers can be so nice, and lots of themRead More