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

CBRM Council last week approved a budget that nixed the 2017/18 heavy garbage pickup while re-upping the CBRM Blossoming Program. The reason given for canceling heavy garbage — i.e. Cape Breton Christmas — was that the CBRM already provided such a service following the Thanksgiving floods, never mind that the post-flood collection onlyRead More

Caring for seedlings: I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that it is very important for recently planted seeds to be warm until they germinate. Once germinated, they are a little more forgiving, and can be moved to a cooler windowsill so you can use your warmest spot for theRead More