What gives a plant heritage? With support from the Edmonton Heritage Council, I am embarking on a year-long project to catalogue and share the stories behind Edmonton’s heritage trees and plants. While resources like Heritage Trees of Alberta (2008) and Alberta Trees of Renown (1986) have collected many examples, I believe that many of our heritage plants remain hidden and unrecognized – which is exactly why I want to hear from you!
Nominate an Edmonton Heritage tree or plant by completing the form below. Include as much detail as possible.
Pineapple Pits – How 18th Century Gardeners Turned a Shitty Situation into a Tropical Treat
Crowdsourcing A Hardy Food Forest Plant List
Food Producing Forest Gardens
As the climate continues to warm it will be increasly important to explore regernative forms of agricutlure. A food forest is a food-producing model that seeks to mimic the patterns of a natural forest ecosystem. Ecosystems are incredibly diverse and primarily made up of perennial plants.
The following project is an attempt to crowdsource a list of plants (according to layer) ideal for food forests in cold hardy, zone 4 or colder, climates.
A Quick Acknowledgment
Before we move on, I want to acknowledge that this is a crowdsourced project and that its development and success is made possible by the individuals who are continuously editing it – not the least, The Urban Farmer, Ron Berezan, whose “Edible Plants For The Prairies” list has been the jumping off point of this project.
Layers of a Forest
One way to think about the structure of a forest is by describing it in layers. Each layer of a forest occupies a different space in the system – each plant carving out a niche and contributing to the whole.
1. Overstory/Canopy Layer
The tallest plants in the forest make up the canopy layer. Canopy plants reach for the light and thus shade much of the forest below.
2. Understory and Shrub Layer
While the understory and shrubs are thought of as separate layers, I have brought them together as a single group. This layer is typically made up of small trees, and multi-stemmed woody-shrubs. Shrubs and understory plants that have evolved the ability to live beneath the canopy or at the margins of forests.
3. Herbaceous Plant Layer
Herbaceous plants have non-woody stems and usually die back to the ground each fall. As a result, they tend to be shorter than most woody shrubs.
4. Ground Cover Layer
Ground covers are short, crawling, or clumping plants that may be woody or none-woody. They protect the forest floor from the elements.
5. Root Zone Layer
As is the case above ground, the roots of each plant occupy various depts of the soil. However, when talking about food forests, the root zone is usually taken to mean plants whose roots are edible.
6. Vine Layer
Vines are long, spindly, climbing plants that are capable of occupying the vertical spaces within a forest. They can be herbaceous and die back to the ground each year (hops) or woody (clematis and grapes).
Using the Hardy Food Forest Plant List
The following plant list is an open Google document. As a result, anyone can access and edit its contents. The list is edited by myself and backed up periodically to ensure quality.
Editing The Plant List
Follow this link if you wish to view the plant list in a separate page or edit its contents. Here are a few guidelines when editing the document.
- Do not delete or move existing plants
- Incomplete information is fine. Don’t know the Latin name? Not a problem.
- Perennials. This list is meant to have an emphasis on perennials plants.
- Cold Hardy. Please add plants that will survive in Zone 4 or colder.
- Link when possible. If you know the botanical name of the plant, feel free to link it to a reputable source such as Plants For A Future Database.
Using The Hardy Food Forest Plant List
At the bottom of the window, you will see tabs corresponding to the various food forest layers mentioned above. Within each layer, you will see a curated list of plants, their common name(s), botanical family, botanical name (Genus species), as well as plant notes.
If you’re looking for a food-producing ground cover, select the ground cover tab at the bottom and browse through the list of suitable plants. If the botanical name is blue than it has been linked to an external page with more information. See the list by clicking here or on the image below.
McCauley is Edmonton’s Gardening Community
Cultivate McCauley
In the Fall of 2014, I was looking at a house just off Church Street – I decided on a whim to knock on the door of each potential neighbour and introduce myself. At one door, Naomi Pahl answered. Within minutes Naomi was giving me a tour of her yard. By the time I drove home, she had emailed me a list of fruit trees growing in her yard – in the event that I wanted to cross-reference it for cross-pollination purposes. I put an offer on the home, and I moved in at the end of October. [Read more…]
Don’t Wait. Plant Your Garden Early.
Is May Long Weekend The Best Time To Plant A Garden in Edmonton?
Originally written for and publised by Boyle McCauley News
When I was growing up, my parents kept a large vegetable garden in the backyard. Each spring, my Mom would bring out an ice-cream pail of seeds, a bundle of wooden stakes, a garden hoe, and a roll of twine she got from my Uncle – a nearby cattle farmer.
I watched as she paced the distance between rows – carefully placing one foot in front of the other – before pressing a stake into the ground. She repeated the ritual on the other side of the garden and pulled some twine tight between the stakes to mark the row. Tilting the hoe at an angle, she added a shallow trench along either side of the string. We were ready to plant. [Read more…]
Humans Are Not A Disease
We Are Not A Cancer
In response to a comment that humans are cancer on the planet, futurist and polymath Stewart Brand once said: “Nah, cancer can’t stop asteroids.”
One of the most pernicious cultural narratives is that we are inherently separate from and destroying the Earth; a blight, a disease, cancer, or parasite on the planet. This story is uninspiring and defeating. Humans are note a disease on this planet.
Nature isn’t a thing but a process of continuous becoming. Nature predates biology. Nature goes back to the Big Bang (and probably before); it is the cooling of subatomic particles into simple elements, the formation and collapse of stars that fused simple elements into complex ones. It’s the clumping of complex elements into planets and (on at least one of those worlds) the formation of the chemical soup needed to create primordial RNA. Once life appears, nature used it to further diversify. Anything natural is the product of this process.
Nature Predates Biology
Not only are we natural, technologist Kevin Kelly might argue that our minds and anything they produce – language, tools, genetically modified organisms (GMOs)*, artificial intelligence, etc. – are also natural.
Interestingly enough, nature has a built-in ethic of sorts. Generally speaking, the long arc of nature works to expand the adjacent possible; that is to say that nature uses the tools of the present to create even more tools for the future. Nature is playing what author and religious scholar James P. Carse calls “an infinite game”; any game in which the goal is to keep playing.
Being A Good Ancestor. Will This Decision Create More Options For The Future?
If nature favours creating possibility, we can argue that to work with nature is to create possibility. To work against nature is to reduce it. So while humans are natural we don’t always act in ways that align with it. One way to work with nature is to practice long-term thinking:
- Am I interacting in ways that increase the potential of others?
- *Will this decision create more options for the future?
- Am I being a good ancestor?
- Will this act increase diversity and complexity?
While, the answers aren’t always clear-cut there are people (like Brand and Kelly) and organizations like the Long Now Foundation that seeks create a new and more helpful cultural narrative around long-term thinking and a future rich in possibilities
Humans are not a disease. Now, let’s go stop some asteroids.
Until now, no species has ever had the ability to stop this catastrophic cycle. Stopping one extinction level asteroid would make up for (but not justify) all of the harmful things we have ever done to our planet.
School Container Gardening
Create A School Garden With Containers
One of the most significant challenges of urban agriculture in the classroom is finding a large permanent space. But what if there was a solution that means that your area need not be large or permanent? One of the easiest ways to introduce urban agriculture and gardening in the classroom is with containers. Small, attractive, and portable, container gardening might be the perfect way to gets your hands dirty without breaking the bank or going all-in with a fixed garden site.
What to Grow?
What you grow is entirely up to you and your class. With the right container, soil, water, and lighting, you can grow a staggering variety of plants.
Herbs and Leafy Green
When it comes to growing food in containers, herbs and leafy greens like basil, mint, rosemary, lettuce, and spinach are good choices. If possible, choose long-lived perennial varieties that you can harvest on an ongoing basis. Before deciding which plants you want to grow, consider how you might use them as a class or school.
Fruiting Plants
If you have larger containers and lots of light, consider fruiting plants like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, peas, and beans. With even larger containers consider small trees or shrubs like citrus or figs.
Growing Figs in containers – StarkBros.com
Choosing Soil For Your Container Garden
Choosing suitable soil for your container is probably the most critical step. Though, you might be tempted to grab a few shovel scoops of soil from the garden resist the urge. While garden soil works well in the backyard it’s a terrible choice for containers; more often than not it will pack into a tight brick and be utterly unusable.
Technically speaking soil is composed of organic matter, water, air, and inorganic minerals such as sand, clay, or silt. It’s these inorganic minerals that tend to compact and make garden soil a poor potting mix. Instead, choose a soilless potting mix. While soilless potting mixes are chalked full of organic matter, water, and air, they lack the inorganic minerals found in actual soil; hence the term “soilless”. However, with more room for water and air, soilless mixes are lighter, stay fluffy (filled with air), and don’t easily compact.
Watering Your Container Garden
While each variety of plant has its preference for moisture, the key to a healthy container garden is to find a happy medium between soggy soil and bone dry. Generally speaking, your growing medium should be slightly damp to the touch but not wet. If you could grab a handful of soil, squeeze it, and get a single drop of water, you’ve got it right.
How frequently you water will depend on the size of your pot, its location, and the plant you’re growing (some plants, like tomatoes, are thirsty and won’t tolerate drying out).
To prevent overwatering, use containers with drainage holes at their base. While you can get around a lack of drainage holes by adding stones (or some other porous medium) to the bottom of your containers your plants will be better off if excess moisture can freely drain through the bottom. Remember that air is a critical component of healthy soil and that over-watering removed air to the point that the plant’s roots will be unable to breathe.
Lighting Your Container Garden
Like water, each plant has its preference for how much light it wants. While tomatoes and peppers love the sun other crops like lettuce, spinach, and broccoli are more shade tolerant. Depending on the location of your container and what you’re growing, you may get away with a sunny South-facing window or need to supplement your crop with full-spectrum artificial lighting (such as these sunblaster compact fluorescents or T5s.
Choosing The Right Container For The Job
Typical, Off the Shelf, Pots
There’s nothing standard about an off the shelf pot as each pot is sure to vary in height, depth, shape, size, and material. Plastic containers are inexpensive and light but not as durable. In contrast, ceramic pots can be expensive and bulky. The best pot for a school is probably a free pot so talk to colleagues, big-box stores, and nurseries to see if you can take any old containers they might have laying around. Plastic nursery pots inexpensive, pleasant to work with, and a good choice for school; they’re not pretty, but they’re durable and in abundance.
Self-Watering Pots
A self-watering pot is exactly what it sounds like – a pot that waters itself. Though not foolproof, self-watering containers generally have a water reservoir below the soil and a wick to draw water into the container as the soil requires it. Any form or self-watering pot or automatic watering technique is valuable for schools because it answers the existential questions of “who will take care of the plants over the weekend or break?” You can sometimes find self-watering pots at garden supply stores, though, they’re not as common.
Earthboxes Containers
Strawberries growing in an Earthbox container garden.
An Earthbox is a complete gardening kit and commonly used by the Sustinable Food Edmonton’s Little Green Thumbs Program to grow vegetables and herbs in hundreds of school classrooms. The basic Earthbox kit consists of a self-watering grow box, casters (for easy transport), and an organic soil amendment (fertilisers and minerals). You can purchase lights as an accessory.
Earthboxes provide roughly two square feet of growing space on top of a self-watering reservoir; keep the water reservoir topped up, and the innovative Earthbox design wicks up water when needed. I can say from personal experience that growing in Earthboxes is an easy and efficient way to start growing food in the classroom. The only downside of Earthboxes is that they are one of the more expensive options.
Global Buckets
Melons growing in a rooftop global bucket garden.
For the DIY class and teacher, making Global Buckets might be the perfect option. The invention of two high school students looking for an inexpensive way to make Earthboxes, a Global Buckets is simply a bucket inside of another bucket. By adding a wick (cloth or soil filled pot) and a watering tube, you can build an inexpensive self-watering container for a fraction of the price of an Earthbox. Though, not at pretty, a Global Buckets are deep enough to root vegetables like potatoes or grow larger plants like small trees and shrubs.
Scaling Up Your School Container Garden
The great thing about a container garden is that it scales so effortlessly; you can start with one container and scale up (or down) as you see fit and as the school year progresses. However, should that day come that you’d like something more substantial and permanent, raised beds are a logical next step.
Simple raised beds made with 8 inch cedar.
Raised Beds
What is a raised bed if not a large pot? While a raised bed is large to be virtually immobile, they’re a logical next step for a classroom looking to scale up from or consolidate smaller container gardens. The trick to a successful raised bed on school property is finding a suitable site; ideally with plenty of sunlight, access to water, accessible to the students and staff, and relatively permanent (they’re difficult to move).
There are many off-the-shelf raised bed options or kits, though, if your school is fortunate enough to have an industrial arts class it might be possible to turn your raised bed into a fabrication project. A few things to consider; avoid using anything wider than two-arms-lengths or you’ll have to crawl into the garden to access vegetables growing in its centre (note: use your student’s arms as they’ll be the ones planting and harvesting), choose a light and fluffy soil or soilless mix. You don’t have to build it too deep, though, I’d recommend at least a foot. Organic matter helps retain moisture to the more you have in your soil, the better.
Self-Watering (Wicking) Beds
Wicking bed; raised garden bed with water reservoir (hidden) under it.
If you built a raised bed on top of a source of water you’d have a wicking-bed. Wicking beds are large self-watering pots. While there are a lot of ways to achieve this, most wicking beds rely on creating a watertight reservoir, filling it with gravel, covering the gravel with landscape fabric, and building a typical raised bed on top. Like self-watering pots, wicking beds use the soil’s natural water-wicking action to soak up water as needed.
Installation of a wicking bed in a residential yard. In this example, perforated weeping tile pipe brings water from the roof to the raised beds where it can be absorbed by organic matter in the soil.
As a less technical alternative, I have used 4″ perforated pipe to bring water from the downspout of a building directly under your garden. I prefer this technique as it doesn’t require building a water-tight reservoir or moving heavy gravel.
There are some excellent online resources for both of these wicking bed techniques.
To Sum Up
However you decide to do it, containers gardening is an excellent way to start growing food in the classroom. Use a light, soilless growing medium in inexpensive (or free) container, and you’ll be on your way! Start with a single pot and scale up as you find success.
Northlands Youth Beekeeping Club
Now Taking Registrations for 2018
The Prince’s Charities’ Northlands Youth Bee Club
From Spring until Fall, students from across the City gather at the Southernmost edge of Northlands to learn about and keep honeybees. Sponsored by the Prince’s Charities, the club has eight beehives on site and enough protective gear to keep stings to a minimum. Each week – weather permitted – we cover important beekeeping topics and perform our routine hive inspections.
The following is an account written by Jacob Tombs – one of our Youth Beekeepers.
Hi, my name is Jacob Tombs, I’m 14 years old and this year was my first year beekeeping. When I started bee club in May, I had no idea how to keep bees and now I feel confident that I could maintain some hives all by myself. What I must thank for this is the Northlands Bee Club. The Northlands Bee Club is a group of young beekeepers that meets every Thursday from early May to early November (roughly one beekeeping season). Some people are completely new to the club (like me) and for others it was their second year, as Bee Club was only founded in 2016. Under the guidance of Dustin Bajer, we learned the basics of how to keep bees and some other interesting information on bees.
Northlands beekeeping club members removing the frames and inspection two hives.
There are several reasons why bee club was very fun, useful and interesting. First, it is completely unique. As far as I know, there is no other group in the city of Edmonton that teaches young people how to keep bees. One of the things I really enjoyed, was how over the summer the bees built up. The hives started out small, only one or two boxes, and then by the fall some hives were up to six boxes high. I found it very satisfying to see the bees grow in number and in strength. Another thing that was awesome was the taste of the honey. Most of the honey you buy in the grocery store has a bland plain taste but, our honey had a lighter more interesting taste that comes from all the different species of flower in people’s gardens and in the river valley.
Northlands Youth Beekeeping Club members learn about making nucs.
Another one of my favorite things about bee club was the field trips, we went on three throughout the time that bee club met. The first one was a trip to Beary Berry honey to see what a commercial beekeeping operation was like and to Alberta Nukes which makes nukes (mini hives that you get in the spring to create new hives) to learn about nuc hives.
Our second field trip was a walking tour of some of the hives in the downtown Edmonton area, we visited a hives at the Edmonton Event Centre and the Fairmont Hotel Macdonald and a protected tree because, Dustin happens to also be studying protected trees in Edmonton.
Beekeeper Patty Milligan leads a walking tour of some downtown Edmonton beehives at the Shaw Conference Centre and the Hotel Macdonald.
The last field trip, which was my favorite, was a trip to one of the NAIT labs where we studied bees under a microscope and dissected them.
Two Bee Club members dissect a honeybees under a microscope at the NAIT Biological Science Technology Lab.
Finally, I met a lot of new people that had the same interests as me and I learned a lot of things that had absolutely nothing to do with beekeeping but, that were interesting all the same. For example, did you know that carrots flower on the second year after they are planted?
In conclusion, bee club is interesting, fun and useful if you ever want to keep bees and the club is (amazingly!) completely free!
For more information about the Northlands Youth, Beekeeping Club, visit Northlands.com.
Click Here To Register For The 2018 Beekeeping Season
Urban Agriculture as a Response to Climate Change
Urban Agricultural Systems Inspired By Nature Can Mitigate Climate Change
As climate changes and extremes become more common (floods, drought, storms, etc.) growing food – especially in monoculture – will become more challenging. Monocultures rely heavily on external inputs.
Forests aren’t immune to climate change, but they’re less susceptible because of the connections they contain – forests are diverse, and the end of every process is the beginning of another. Forests cycle water, nutrients, and create microclimates conducive to life.
Cities are like forests. Cities are places for maximizing connections, and they’re filled with opportunity. Whereas a forest might cycle water, nutrients, and energy, cities cycle ideas, information, culture, and resources.
Ecologists describe the border between two ecosystems as an ecotone – a special place where the diversity of both systems some meet. If we could bring nature into the city, we could create a system with all the variety and potential of each separate systems – while creating unique opportunities for these systems to interact in beneficial ways that solve problems.
Here’s a secret – nature loves cities. Nature will colonize even the most inhospitable urban environments. And as it does, it will hold onto water, cycle nutrients, and create microclimates. We often fight the parts of nature best adapted at doing this.
The key to blending nature and cities is to link them in creative ways – in ways that turn problems into solutions. (Drink your problems away. Root-beer from invasive plants).
In cities, we tend to collect and move water away from our landscapes. Forests, in contract, capture excess water when it’s wet and put it to use when it’s dry. Forests cycle their resources – using water twice is the same as having twice as much water.
In the face of climate change, we can take inspiration from nature and integrate passive water harvesting and storage into cities – especially when combined with the potential to grow food. Small changes in topography can direct water to the soil where it can be accessed.
Here’s a water harvesting feature (swale) going into the Parkallen Community Garden. It’s built on contour and is designed to spread and soak water along the length of the garden.
Once planted, fruits and vegetables can access free water stored in the soil. This simple technique stores excess water during wet periods and makes it available when it’s dry – mitigating floods and drought.
Ecosystems don’t create waste – they cycle it. Though, we tend to bag ours and send it to the landfill. When we throw out our organics, we’re robbing our landscapes of essential nutrients. They’re called leaves for a reason.
Watering non-food producing monoculture designed to shed water then bagging and throwing away the result is insanity. This landscape could capture and process the water that lands on it. It should cycle and accumulate its nutrients. It could be producing food.
This patch of lawn has been converted into a raspberry garden. Beneath the ground, water harvesting features collect water from the roofs and spread it across the length of the yard. Covered with mulch the beds soak up excess water like living sponges and make it available to the plants. These simple techniques reduce flooding, reduce drought, cycle waste, and grow food.
This vegetable garden is growing on top of a series of water harvesting features that take water from the roof of the house. A bed of organic much is added on top and planted with vegetables and perennial food plants.
When I first started working in this yard it was unbearably hot – south facing and void of vegetation – the soil baked. After adding ten cubic yards of mulch, dozens of bags of leaves, and 24 straw bales the earth is coming back to life and the microclimate of the yard has transformed – it’s humid now and doesn’t get as hot or cold. This yard now captures all the water that lands on it and converts it to food.
Urban environments are exceptional places for creating and taking advantage of microclimates – especially for food production. These fruit trees are planted against a south facing fence to increase the length of the growing season. Water harvesting features below the ground bring water from the roof to the base of the trees.
Vast microclimates create large potential. The south-west facing retaining wall by the Quinelle bridge would have made an amazing fruit orchard – absorbing the sun’s energy throughout the day and radiating it back at night.
Just outside of Edmonton’s growing conditions (zone 4a) – the ‘resilient’ peach (zone 5).
Just outside of Edmonton’s growing conditions (zone 4a) – the American persimmon (zone 5).
Just outside of Edmonton’s growing conditions (zone 4a) – the largest fruit native to North America – the Pawpaw (zone 5).
We can choose to come together and create innovative food-producing systems that benefit the city and the natural world. Since 2014, I have been partnering with the City’s Roots for Trees program to plant thousands of native edibles in the river valley.
A forest is a community, and a community is a forest. It’s a dense web of connections, ideas, and potential. Working together is probably the single biggest strategy that we can adopt from nature to grow food and mitigate climate change.
There’s no shortage of places to do this – backyards, front yards, boulevards, vacant lots. The City of Edmonton recently released a list of public utility lots available for gardening.
One of my favorite things to do is reimagine the cityscape as food-producing ecological systems. I used to call this “postapocalyptic Edmonton”, but I’d rather see them in a preapocalyptic reality.
I will admit that some of my drawings are a bit tongue in cheek – but we have so much unused space, and we should be putting it to productive use.
This is a favorite of mine. West Edmonton Mall Community Garden.
How much food could we produce in the city? Probably not all of it – but let’s not underestimate the food producing capacity of many small players. What we need are people who are willing to try and the regulatory and political conditions conducive to doing so.
What I can tell you is that in addition to capturing water, reducing waste, and temperating the local climate these systems will be uniquely Edmontinain – like these, naturalized Goji berries left behind by Chinese market garden community.
Or these – Capilano apricots guerrilla planted in a city scrub bed sometime in the 60s. This is a uniquely Edmonton variety – it exists nowhere else int he world.
So let’s take inspiration from nature and create a city that cycles nutrients, tempers climate, and captures water and our imaginations.
Let’s create a forest city.
Creating A Classroom Aquaponics System
Why Set Up A Classroom Aquaponics System?
Lots of classrooms have plants and fish, but not many consider combining the two in a symbiotic aquaponics system. Together, fish-waste provides water and nutrients to the plants while the plants clean the water for the fish. Though aquaponics systems contain a complete nitrogen cycle, symbiotic relationships, cellular respiration, and photosynthesis they are in no way limited to the science curriculum. Addressing issues of food security (social studies), design (design/construction/fabrication/art/math), and food preparation (foods/culinary), aquaponics is an exceptionally effective cross-curricular platform for exploring various programs of studies. Regarding curricular connections, aquaponics is curricular gold mine. [Read more…]
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