Designing With Nature. These are my projects.
Shrubscriber Feature Member Yong Fei Guan
Yong Fei Guan is an Edmonton artist researching heritage goji berry plants. Yong Fei grew up in Foshan City, Guangdong Province, China, where her family consumed dry goji as a culinary herb and medicine. Ironically, due to the hot and wet climate of Guangdong Province, Fei had never actually seen a fresh goji berry until she moved to Canada 14 years ago. [Read more…]
Julie Kusiek is the past president of the Queen Alexandra community league, a mom to four, and a fierce community advocate. She has a master’s in political science focusing on youth engagement and believes that gardens are a great way to bring youth and other generations together. Gardens are a great way to encourage active citizens as they grow up. [Read more…]
Shrubscriber is an online community that advocates for nature-based solutions to problems impacting Edmonton. We bring together climate-conscious citizens, nature lovers and gardeners to fund trees for community projects. Become a shrubscriber today and help build a biodiverse, food secure and climate-resilient city.
Sherry Heschuk is an educator and community activator, splitting her time between teaching in Athabasca and volunteering in her home neighbourhood of Virginia Park.
In 2019, Sherry began working for Commonwealth Games Association as the Edmonton ambassador promoting sports for newcomers (S4N) to the city. While in her role, she noticed that many participants showed up hungry and increased interest in sports nutrition. In working to provide participants, Sherry realized that many of the girls and women in the community were interested in sharing their garden stories. One of the Newcomers was a youth beekeeper, which led to her becoming a certified beekeeper through Dustin’s beekeeping courses. [Read more…]
Shrubscriber is an online community that advocates for nature-based solutions to problems impacting Edmonton. We bring together climate-conscious citizens, nature lovers and gardeners to fund trees for community projects. Become a shrubscriber today and help build a biodiverse, food secure and climate-resilient city.
Jonathan Crane has been the pastor at the St. Augustine’s Anglican Church in Fulton Place since 2013. Shortly after arriving, Jonathan connected with community members looking for a site to place a community garden. After engaging the Church in the project, a community garden was raised on the East side of the church and continues to thrive with a multigenerational community of gardeners tending 30 individual household beds 8 communal beds and other communal fruit-producing spaces. It is a community organization with a number of Sunday morning members engaged as well. [Read more…]
These trees and shrubs produce low-maintenance edible fruits, berries, nuts, or leaves and contribute to community food security year after year. Examples: Plums, Walnuts, and Saskatoons
Where to Plant: Plant Food Growers in parks, community gardens, and school grounds to provide access to food and local community building. Use park and food desert maps to target communities with less green space, community gardens, or access to grocery stores.
Shade trees combat the urban heat island effect reducing the temperature beneath them by up to 10 degrees celsius. These plants save energy by reducing the need to run expensive air conditioning units and block the wind. Examples: Walnuts, Honeylocust, Oak
Where to Plant: Target communities that are missing boulevard trees or that have less forest canopy. Plant shade casting trees south of buildings and paves surfaces to lower the ambient temperature. Use urban heat island data to target communities most impacted during heatwaves.
All plants remove carbon from the atmosphere to make sugars and build their bodies, but carbon busters are especially large or fast-growing. Their long lives lock carbon within their bodies for decades or centuries. Examples: Willow, Oak, Aspen
Where to Plant: Carbon Eaters tend to be large or fast-growing—plant carbon eaters in parks or as part of naturalization projects.
Air Cleaners are exceptionally tolerant of urban pollution and good at removing particulates from the landscape – letting us all breathe a little easier. Examples: Silver Maple, Honeylocust, Pine, Yew
Where to Plant: Use Air Cleaners as buffers between streets and commercial and residential properties.
Often slow-growing, these trees can live for many hundreds or even thousands of years. If you want to plant a tree for the year 3021, then these trees are for you. Examples: Bristlecone Pine, Black Walnuts, Oak, Ginkgo
Where to Plant: Contemplate the future of your city by planting a Time Traveller where it will have time to grow and be appreciated. Potential locations include parks and boulevards. Privately planted Time Travellers are more prone to development but could be used as a Slow Landscaping Tool.
Plants propagated from seeds or cuttings from existing heritage trees. Seed propagated plants are the parent’s offspring, while cuttings are exact genetic copies (clones). Local Examples: Holowash Horse-Chestnut, Stark Oak
How to Plant: Storytellers only retain their powers if we continue sharing their stories and making new ones.
Well adapted to our historical climate, native trees and shrubs have been here for thousands of years. These plants often have symbiotic relationships with native birds, animals, and pollinators, making them essential food and habitat. Examples: Black Poplar, Tamarack
Where to Plant: Throughout the city or as part of naturalization projects.
These trees and shrubs increase our urban forest’s biodiversity and resilience by decreasing the urban ecosystem’s susceptibility to pests, diseases, and climate change. Examples: Walnuts, Honeylocust, Oak, Catalpa
Where to Plant: Use to replace ageing, damages, diseases, or missing boulevard trees to increase diversity and protect existing trees from the spread of diseases.
Zone Pushers come from places with slightly warmer climates and have struggled growing here in the past. However, planted in the right location amidst a changing environment, these plants have the potential to grow and diversify our urban forest. Growing zone pushers is always a gamble but one with a high potential to pay off. Examples: American Beach, Sycamore, Pawpaw, Persimmon, Chestnut
Where to Plant: In private yards and adventurous community gardens. Plant in protected locations where trees can get established.
Climate Refugees are plants struggling to survive in their native ranges due to climate change, pests, or diseases. By moving them further North or beyond the reach of their host pests and diseases, these plants often find sanctuary and thrive. Establishing refugia for these plants creates a genetic bank from which seeds can be gathered and repopulate their native ranges. Examples: White Walnut, Bristlecone Pine, American Chestnut
Where to Plant: Schools, community leagues, parks, public gardens and arboretums.
Sometimes, you want to feel pretty! Beautifiers are trees and shrubs species and varieties selected for their colour, flowers, or pleasing growth habit. Often flowering, these plants have been shown to have a positive effect on mental wellbeing. These plants often provide forage for pollinators. Examples: Flowering Quince, Catalpa, Locust
In July of 2021, I launched Shrubscriber!
Shrubscriber is an online community that’s advocating for nature-based solutions to problems impacting Edmonton. We bring together climate-conscious citizens, nature lovers and gardeners to fund trees for community projects. Become a shrubscriber today and help build a biodiverse, food secure and climate-resilient city.
Shrubscribers receive community perks while finding trees for school and community projects.
I play squirrel each fall by collecting nuts from local walnut trees – sometimes using a telescoping painter’s pole with an attached 2-litre pop bottle to gently knock ripe nuts free from their branches. I make for an odd-looking squirrel. However, unlike the squirrels, I’m collecting nuts to plant into my urban tree nursery.
Located West and North of the native range of walnuts, Edmonton doesn’t have many walnut trees – but you’ll spot them if you’re searching. The most common Walnut found locally is the White or Butternut Walnut (Juglans cinerea, E North America). However, I’ve seen a few Black Walnuts (Juglans nigra, E North America) and Manchurian Walnuts (Juglans mandschurica, E Asia) in smaller quantities.
When you collect a fresh walnut, it’s surrounded by a sticky green husk. To get at the seeds, I’d go through the time-consuming task of removing the husk – a process that would stain my fingers for weeks. Until recently, I discarded the flesh. Then I learnt that walnut husks could be used to make a dark brown/black ink or dye.
I jumped online a found four posts describing how to make walnut ink. While each set of directions varied, they all followed the same basic steps; soak, boil, filter, preserve. The following steps are my take on the process and an average of the four sources I found. While this process worked for me, I should emphasize that this was my first time making walnut ink. I am not an ink making expert, chemists, or ethnobotanist – so let me know if you have any advice. In no particular order, here are the instructions I came across in my research:
Remember, the seed is what I’m really after – the ink is a bonus for me, so, unlike some of the instructions above, my process emphasizes saving the seeds so that they can be planted.
Collect as many husked walnuts as possible. The exact species (White, Black, Mancuriaun, etc.) doesn’t seem to matter – what you’re looking for is any plant in the genus Juglans. The flesh of Juglans seeds starts off green and will oxidize to a dark greasy-looking black. This is what’s going to give us our pigment.
The green husks will oxidize as soon as they’re exposed to air – like the browning of a cut apple – but a few of the instructions above suggested letting your walnuts turn brown/black before starting. It probably doesn’t matter, but the darker the husk, the easier it will be to remove them from the seed. So if you’re nuts are green, lay them out on a try until they start turning brown and getting soft to the touch.
How many nuts? As many or as few as you’d like. The more use, the more ink you’ll make. There’s no limit, but I probably wouldn’t do any less than a dozen as I’m not sure that the return would be worth the effort.
Find a pot large enough to hold the walnuts you’ve gathered and toss them in. Add enough water to cover the nuts and let them soak at room temperature. The water should start taking on colour right away. Soak them for a day or two – more if they’re green, less if they’re already black and falling apart. Stir ’em now and again.
This is an optional step if you’re not planning on saving the seeds. Recall that I’m primarily in this to grow walnut trees. The thought of boiling a pot of walnuts that could turn into three-hundred-year-old trees is too much for me to handle.
A bonus to the ink making process is that removing the seeds (from the now solf husks) breaks everything up and exposed more oxidizing juglans to the water.
Directions for boiling ranged from 1 to 24 hours, but almost everybody said to reduce the volume of liquid by half – so that’s what I did. I suspect that this step has more to do with concentrating the pigment than any chemical or extractive process brought on by boiling – but then again – not a chemist. In either case, the amount of time it takes to reduce the volume of liquid by half will depend on how much liquid you’re starting with. This step took me around 2-hours.
I would recommend doing this step outside. It turns out that I enjoy the smell of boiling walnut husks, but the added humidity and potentially sticky residue is enough to convince me to go outside.
Once the volume has reduced by half, take your inky mush of the heat. Once the pot cooled, I brought it inside and let it sit for the night.
Now that your inky mush is at room temperature, use a ladle to run it through some strainers. A colander, sieve, or cheesecloth is a good first pass. I used a nylon straining bag inside a pail. Then, with my gloves on, I squeezed the ink from the walnut pulp.
The ink seemed fairly clean and probably usable, but I decided to run it through a large coffee filter for a final polish. It was obviously filtering something because I kept having to change the filter – I probably went through 6 or 7 of them.
At this point, we’re basically done, but walnut ink has a shelf-life and will mould (or so I’m told). To prevent spoilage, keep your ink in the fridge or add a few drops of antimicrobial essential oil like wintergreen. A second suggestion is to add rubbing alcohol – up to 20% of the volume – to your ink. This will dilute the ink, but alcohol’s lower evaporation point may aid it drying.
I opted to store mine in the fridge.
Walnut ink is less viscous than modern commercial inks. If it’s too runny for your liking, add gum arabic to preference. Gum arabic is the hardened sap from the acacia tree.
I opted to leave mine unthickened. Partially because I’m giving my ink away to some local artists and members of the Forest City Plants propagation class – I’ll let them decide how thick they want their ink – but mostly because I don’t have gum arabic or acacia trees on hand.
Almost any airtight container will work for holding your finished walnut ink. I used a few mason jars I had lying around and some honey jars for smaller samples. I like the honey jars because they’re reminiscent of old-timey inkwells.
And that it! You’ve made ink from walnuts! It’s worth noting that your ink can also be used to dye textiles. If you end up following this recipe, let me know how it turns out! Please send me a picture of your project!
If you’d like a closer look at the ink and dye-making process, I’ve put together this short video or each of the steps outlined above.
The most rewarding and challenging part about beekeeping is that the learning never ends. I’ve been tending bees for a decade now, and I’m always discovering something new and surprising about these lovely little creatures – and always learning from other beekeepers!
That’s why I’m excited to be setting up a Beekeeping Community of Practice alongside my regular online beekeeping courses so that participants can share their experiences, ask questions, troubleshoot challenges, and learn from each other.
It’s not that online beekeeping communities and forums don’t exist – they absolutely do – a few of my favourites include the Edmonton Urban Beekeepers and Royal Alberta Urban Beekeeping Collective Facebook Groups and the forums over at Beesource Beekeeping. And I encourage you to join them!
And still, I’ve taught hundreds of new beekeepers and hardly a week goes by that I don’t field multiple beekeeping questions from my inbox. And while I’m always happy to respond, a few things occurred to me:
After teaching beekeeping courses online, I realized that it would be helpful to take the course content and break it into a bite-sized, searchable resource for existing and past students. So, instead of experiencing the content once, students will be able to go back, ask questions, and review videos and resources to improve their beekeeping knowledge. This is why I’m excited to announce that all of my new beekeeping students will have access to the course community for the entire beekeeping season.
From now on, I will add videos and resources to the Beekeeping Community board for ongoing student access. The Community of Practice will grow stronger and become a more useful tool as resources, questions, and answers are added after each beekeeping class.
Since trees can live longer than the buildings, they cohabit the landscape with, development has an enormous impact on the life expectancy of a tree. Developers prefer blank-slates, so levelling the site is common and preferred. Bigger buildings fetch bigger profits, and while mature trees also increase property value, they’re susceptible to damage from nearby excavation, soil compaction, and regrading.
The life expectancy of a privately owned tree is tied to (1) how often development happens and (2) the care taken to protect on-site trees during construction. Robust building codes, routine maintenance, flexible zoning, and the housing market influence the former. Setback requirements, market demand, and a cultural appreciation for the value of trees impact the latter. Both can be influenced by strong planning and bylaws that provoke pause or shed light on the benefit of mature trees.
The 2008 book, Heritage Tree of Alberta, lists 28 trees within the City of Edmonton. While I believe that this list represents a cross-section of the City’s total number of heritage trees, I think that we can draw a few lessons from its pages. Generally, three things come together to make a heritage tree; time, novelty, and narrative. In the first of three posts, I will explore the relationship between heritage trees and time.
You can’t plant old trees, but you can plant and nurture young ones. Mature urban trees are the result of continuous care at best and benign neglect at worst. Development, overzealous home-owners, changes to drainage patterns, pests, extreme weather, climate change, diseases, or disruption to the root zone can all result in the premature death of an urban tree, so it’s no wonder that mature trees are uncommon. This fact alone makes mature trees rare enough to give heritage status.
The zombie apocalypse has happened, and all of the gardeners have been saved – something to do with exposure to healthy soil microbes. Using ecological principles, permaculture gardeners have been using needs and yields analysis to use the zombies to their advantage and create a sustainable future.
This presentation is an audio recording from a talk given at an Edmonton Horticulture Society event (October 24, 2019) titled “Gardening in the Zombie Apocalypse.”
