Sorry for the radio silence here. I have been ill — in the hospital actually. Nothing serious or life-threatening, my nice Doctor says stress and overwork. Working 16-hour days, seven days a week for four months straight was not a good idea. Turns out I am not superwoman. Crap. IRead...
What to do this week This week is a good time to care for your fruit trees and shrubs before winter. The first thing to do is to clip the grass short around them. If you leave the grass long, the snow cover will leave little tunnels for mice. TheyRead...
What to do this week Gardening is a year-round pleasure, or obsession, depending on how hard you have fallen. There is always something to do, whether it be preparing for winter, preparing for spring, preparing for summer…you get the picture. This time of year, most gardeners are busy between theRead More
What to do this week Eat! You’ve put 38 weeks’ worth of hard and noble labor into your fall harvest, now it’s time to enjoy it. Michelle Smith and Madeline Yakimchuk are taking a well-deserved week off, so the Spectator decided to ask some of the people involved with theRead More
What to do this week I think we had better talk about planting garlic. It’s getting to be that time. I know it doesn’t feel like it because it’s warm, but this weather is not seasonable. You need to start thinking about garlic now because it will be that time inRead...
Inspiration for this column can come from the strangest places. This time, I was deep in the heart of my favorite blackberry patch, high canes arching above my head, hands and mouth stained as purple as my bucket. A flock of sparrows and finches were chirping and scolding me forRead More
What to do this week This time of year there is a lot going on for gardeners. You may be very busy figuring out how to store your harvest. This week is a good time to review a few basic storage tips for the most common Cape Breton garden products.Read More
What to do this week It must be green tomato season, unless you have been as lucky as I have been and are enjoying ripe tomatoes too. Local tomatoes had a bit of a slow start this year. It was cool, and then it was dry, so the plants didn’tRead More
What to do this week It is getting to be dry-bean time, especially since we may be getting excess rain (or even frost) very soon, making it a tricky time of year for beans. You may have planted dry beans deliberately. Certain varieties of bean are specific to dry beansRead 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
