Is the winter garden the most beautiful garden of all? — Philip Slayton to Lynn Farrell, A Nova Scotia Garden in Winter   The Spectator‘s own gardener — Michelle Smith — is currently enjoying a well-deserved break from the rigors of weekly column writing, giving her more time to dealRead More

Roughly half of Nova Scotians rely on groundwater for their domestic water supply. In the Annapolis Valley, that percentage climbs to 90% —  in Kings County alone it is as high as 99%. I’m starting with that fact not because I intend to focus on Kings County but because itRead More

Editor’s Note: I was hoping to begin this third and final part of my water series with a catchy intro, but I can’t think of one, so will simply dive right in. (Dive? Water? Does that count as catchy?)   In 2010, the Canadian Council of Ministers of the EnvironmentRead More

“Our approach has been very different than previous approaches,” says Bradley Johnston, PhD, an author on all six papers and a co-founder of NutriRECS. “We’ve taken the individual approach rather than societal. We believe that people should be fully informed when they make health care decisions based on best estimatesRead More

Two things inspired this week’s feature story: the first was an Agence France-Presse article about a Michigan township that is trying to fight a deal under which the Swiss-based food conglomerate Nestlé may be allowed to pump 400 gallons of water per minute from a local wellhead for an annualRead More

Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil is on yet another pilgrimage to China as I write, “engaging” with the Chinese rather than isolating them because, according to what he told reporters just prior to his departure, that’s how you show non-democracies “what democracies have to offer.” At first I thought heRead More

This month, I told Michael Milburn I wanted to dig deeper into the concept of “ultra-processed” food, which we’d touched on last month in our discussion of plant-based burgers. Milburn said that in one way, it was possible to sum up everything about ultra-processed food simply by looking at what’sRead More

Bad bidness Remember the business owner who accused me of breaking into their office and stealing their credit card? The one I chose not to name? Well, the story has taken an even stranger twist: I have now been accused of fabricating the whole thing to make business owners inRead More

What to do this week Michelle Smith is away this week. She’ll be back at her regularly scheduled time next issue, but in the meantime, feel free to peruse her now quite substantial archive of past columns for some season-appropriate gardening advice. This time last year, for instance, she wasRead More

First of all, thank you to the candidates who took the time to respond to our questions — Michelle Dockrill, Lois Foster, Jodi McDavid and Kenzie MacNeil. As promised, we extended the deadline to Thursday at 5:00 PM for those candidates who had not yet replied, and here are theRead More