What to do this week Now that the leaves are being blown off by the fall winds that have finally arrived, it is a good time for hardwood propagation of some of your perennial bushes. Gooseberries and currants are what I am working on this week, but you can doRead More

Kudos to the Post? Oh yeah, you read that correctly: this week, the cranky ol’ Spectator is congratulating the Cape Breton Post on its new website, which is crisp and clean and mercifully free of the clickbait ads that used to cover its home page like measles on the faces ofRead More

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

I (finally) received an answer from the CBRM in response to my wastewater questions. You can read my original story here, but the gist is that when Canada’s new Wastewater System Effluent Regulations (WSER) came into effect on 1 January 2015, municipalities operating water treatment systems that didn’t meet themRead...

Summer is all but done and fall is just around the corner. Sadly, so too is the latest moose cull in the CB Highlands National Park. Generalities about the process and results of the previous two moose culls have been shared with the public by Parks Canada, but not manyRead More

It may be dark as a dungeon way down in most mines, but the sun always seems to be shining on Donkin — at least, that’s the impression you’d get from the coverage of the coal mine in the Cape Breton Post. Take the latest front-page ode to the mine’sRead More

Xinhua, the official Chinese state news agency, says a recently completed voyage through the Northwest Passage by a Chinese scientific icebreaker was actually a fact-gathering mission on behalf of its commercial shipping industry. As reported in the Globe and Mail, the news agency said the Xuelong (or Snow Dragon), whichRead 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

This was supposed to be a follow-up to last week’s article on wastewater in which I would present the response of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality (CBRM) to concerns about its readiness to meet federal Wastewater System Effluent Regulations (WSER). But what with vacations and long weekends and short workweeks,Read...