Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive
and even spiritual satisfaction.
- Edward O. Wilson

Habitat - the environment where a plant or animal naturally lives - is all around us. The problem is, as we go about our business, we destroy natural habitat. If your subdivision has all the streets named things like Deer Run Way or Great Heron Crescent, there almost certainly are no deer or herons there… any more. What’s left are raccoons and mice and nobody wants to live on Rodent Blvd or That ^*%$^ Thing Got Into The Garbage Again Road.

Unless your house backs onto a huge green space or there are large quiet ponds in your neighbourhood, you won’t bring back the deer or the herons. But there are many other plants and animals that will make a comeback if you make it possible.

But why? Well, for one, biological diversity is a sign of health in any ecosystem. The more diverse, the better. By creating space that is more naturalised, we increase our proximity to nature and reap the benefits (see the post on Nature Deficit Disorder). It’s beautiful to look at. Trees help clean the air and the water and reduce background noise. Birds mask background noise and add colour and motion to your yard. Avoiding the use of lawn and garden chemicals to make your yard wildlife-friendly reduces pollutants in the greater environment and reduces health risks for us all.

The Canadian Wildlife Federation and the National Wildlife Federation have programmes to certify backyards as “Wildlife Habitat”. The key areas are:

• Food
• Water
• Shelter from predators and to raise young
• Earth-friendly gardening
• Naturalised habitat (native plants)

Once your backyard meets these targets, you can submit for Certification, and then you and your yard are official and certified and you can buy a sign to put in your yard proclaiming to one and all that YOU have a Certified Backyard Habitat. And when the less enlightened ask you when you are going to ‘fix up’ your yard (i.e. plant more grass), you can point to your certification (which is framed and hanging on the wall of course) and nonchalantly reply, “We’re part of a North American network certified by the CWF/NWF in the creation of suburban habitats suitable for, and encouraging the recreation of, indigenous biodiversity in our specific ecosystem. “. And anyone who hears that must be impressed. You’ll be invited to all the best dinner parties. Maybe. But even better, you’ll have a colourful and vibrant little naturalised space all your own.
We’ve been keeping these goals in mind as we slowly landscape our yard. When we moved in, we had only grass in the backyard (oh, and a small mud pit) and the front yard had a row of shrubs and more grass. Progress is coming and we hope to get our certification this year or next.

And I am so getting one of those signs to put in my front yard :D

Canadian Wildlife Federation’s Certified Backyard Habitat Programme
National Wildlife Federation’s Certified Wildlife Habitat Programme
Evergreen.ca’s Searchable Native Plant Database (Canada)
USDA Plants Database
Plants For A Future - Database Search - At this site you can search for (among many other options) plants native to specific geographical areas anywhere in the world.
Native Plant Suppliers (Canada)
Native Plant Societies of The United States and Canada

Water Bottles

In my post about bottled water, I talked about the aluminum Sigg bottles we use and how much we love them. They are expensive though. The other day I saw an Oggi Aluminum Sport Water Bottle (Amazon link) at Winners. They are made of recycled aluminum* and the 0.8L (26oz) size was $8.99 ($10.65 at Amazon) - about a third to half of the price of the Sigg bottles at Whole Foods. The Oggi bottles have a screw top as well, and also come with a caribiner clip to attach the bottle onto a back pack or something.

* Isn’t most aluminum actually recycled aluminum any more? I mean, yay for using recycled, but I’m not sure this is unusual.

Lawn Chemicals

The proposed ban on cosmetic pesticides in Ontario has had it’s second reading in the House. The Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment is asking everyone possible to call or email the Premier with the following message if you have not already done so.

That message could be easily edited and sent to your Provincial Premier, Environment Minister/State Representative/whomever. I sent mine off this morning :)

Litterless Lunch

We still love the Laptop Lunch Box that we’ve been using for litterless lunches. I bought it at Whole Foods and it seems they’ve put the price up. I can’t find my receipt to confirm, but I am sure I paid about $15 for ours. $20, max. When I went back a few weeks later, the price had gone up to $40!! umm.. No? I know that Whole Foods tends to be more expensive, I get that, and I even accept it because they often carry items I can’t find anywhere else. But, the set we bought is $21 if you buy it directly from Laptop Lunches - cheaper if you buy multiples. I suggest you get it there.

To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul. .. Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.
- Alfred Austin, 1835-1913

I have always been in love with the idea of a huge vegetable garden and all the tomatoes and beans and peppers and greens. In fact, I was in love with the idea when I didn’t even like vegetables (which would be all the years before the age of about 26). Even when I did start eating and enjoying vegetables, I would never have considered growing my own because I had, not one, but two very distinct and very large black thumbs. Everything I tried to grow died. Almost always sooner rather than later. House plants, annuals and perennials in the yard. Even the grass usually. All dead. All the time.

Shortly after we moved here eight years ago, I saw a notice about garden plots for rent in the provincial park nearby. Hmmm.. could I do it? Maybe I could, maybe I couldn’t, but most importantly, if I failed, my failure would be two kilometres away on someone else’s property and not mocking and throwing stones at me from my own backyard. The thought was appealing. So I went for it. Of course, I had no idea what I was doing, but that’s ok, because the process was the point: I had no expectation of getting anything edible out of my efforts. Anything that made it to the dinner the table would be an unexpected bonus.

A lot made it to the dinner table. A LOT. And every time I pulled up a carrot or an onion, or picked a tomato, I was in shock - I planted this, I didn’t kill it, and look what it made! I did kill lots of stuff, but the vast majority made it to the fruitful end. It was delicious, and more importantly, deeply satisfying.

Each year after, I had a garden there. I got better at planning, finding organic solutions to bug problems and preserving the harvest. But it became more and more difficult. After the first year and due to a clerical error, I was assigned gardens at the back and top of the field. Hoses are not allowed at these gardens - all water has to be carried. In my case, this was quite a distance, up an incline and with two years in a row of severe drought, it became impossible to keep my plots watered. It was heartbreaking, but I had to pretty much walk away. Of course, some things survived. Heirloom tomatoes seemed almost unaffected by the heat and lack of water. Root vegetables did fine, though yields were much smaller. The last two years, I have rented my plots, and then not planted them. I wanted my gardens, but couldn’t face hauling the water and the disappointment of other years.

But this year? We’re back :D
That time off left me lots of time to think and read and regroup and I knew what I wanted my next vegetable garden incarnation to be. I wanted to use raised beds, the square foot method, and I wanted my gardens at home. I had learned that gardening is like knitting: total strangers love to tell you that you are doing it wrong, or using the wrong tools or the wrong timing. And, just like knitting, there is actually no wrong way to do it. Gardening is a journey and while you can get advice from all the experts you can find, in the end, each gardener must make the journey herself. Failures are to be expected and embraced as learning experiences. Just as important, I had learned that I loved to be *with* my garden. Just there, beside it, smelling it, enjoying it.

I had experimented with Square Foot Gardening in my rented plots, and it just made way more sense to me. It worked better too. But I also liked the idea of raised beds for a bunch of reasons including keeping the dog and The Baby out of them. There are a lot of cottontail rabbits in my neighbourhood, so I needed some kind of fencing system and ta-dah… We’ve got a plan.

I had actually gotten all the wood and had my dad measure and cut it for me last Spring. So this year over one weekend, my husband and son assembled four 4′x4′ frames, filled them with garden soil, put up 2″x2 stakes and ran the netting around. We used a staple gun to stick it to the frames on the bottom, and nails in the tops of the stakes at the top. To work in the garden, I just unhook the netting from the nails and it drops down. It all feels so efficient and tidy. All that was left was to plant the gardens, which took no time at all, compared to the long rows at the rented plots. And it’s done :)

Another week and the weeds will be here, but the radishes are already up, the plants I put in are doing well and no critters have gotten in. In two weeks, and we’ll be eating :)

All New Square Foot Gardening

Cubed Foot Gardening: Growing Vegetables in Raised, Intensive Beds

“A weed is but an unloved flower.”
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox

I have always loved dandelions. A lawn that is yellow and fuzzy with their blooms is almost magical. When I was little, I believed that if you ever were to find a unicorn, it would almost certainly be in a field of dandelions.
I’m not sure which I like better: the sunshine yellow flower stage or the silver silky seed head stage. There are a handful of days each year when the air is full of dandelion fluffs that float up to the sky and then down to collect in drifts along the sidewalk and it is like a summer scene in a snow globe.

I remember my aunt’s funeral. It was this time of May, several years ago. The day was warm and bright and as we stood in the cemetery, the air was thick with dandelion seeds that floated on the wind and caught in our hair and enveloped us in an airy and ethereal dance. It was beautiful and peaceful. And fitting.

The Dandelions

Upon a showery night and still,
Without a sound of warning,
A trooper band surprised the hill,
And held it in the morning.

We were not waked by bugle-notes,
No cheer our dreams invaded,
And yet, at dawn, their yellow coats
On the green slopes paraded.

We careless folk the deed forgot;
Till one day, idly walking,
We marked upon the self-same spot
A crowd of veterans talking.

They shook their trembling heads and gray
With pride and noiseless laughter;
When, well-a-day! they blew away,
And ne’er were heard of after!

Helen Gray Cone [1859-1934]

Additional Resources:
Fun with Dandelions! This is a great page from Universal Preschool full of dandelion facts, lore and activities. Forget preschool, *I* want to do a bunch of those things.
All entries in the Nature Journal series from Suburban Green is People.
Nature Deficit Disorder: How this series began.

A child who takes a lunch to school will produce about 70 pounds of garbage every year.

Seventy. Pounds. When I read that, I didn’t believe it and went right away to look it up somewhere else. Yup. The numbers come in at 45-90 pounds per student per year. That’s the weight of a 10 year old.

Going litterless means avoiding what Gillian Deacon calls the The Sinister P’s of food:

• prepared
• processed
• packaged

As a general rule, these foods tend to be less healthy, more expensive and wasteful: three good reasons to avoid them. Buy in bulk and pack food in reusable containers to save money on over-priced individual portions and food wraps and to avoid producing all those pounds of garbage.

But how to go about it? It isn’t as hard as it seems, once you make the choice to do it. You may need to invest in a few things, but the cost will be offset by the money saved by packing lunches in a new way and by the good feeling from just Doing the Right Thing.

Avoid juice boxes, bottled water and cans of pop. Pack juice or filtered tap water in a good reusable container. Avoid plastic bottles and don’t reuse the bottles from bottled water. Use stainless or lined aluminum containers. Stainless steel thermoses are easy to find.

Fresh fruit comes pre-wrapped in it’s own skin. Easy-peasy. Use cloth napkins and avoid plastic cutlery. If you don’t want to send you regular forks and spoons to school for fear of being lost, a quick trip to your local Value Village or a yard sale or two should be enough to stock up on cheap stainless cutlery to use in packed lunches.

Pack sandwiches and other food in reusable containers with lids. Apparently, Tupperware, Gladware and Ziplock tubs are now made without phthalates or PVC. Baggies are handy, but make sure they come home and get washed and reused. Alternatively, sandwiches can be wrapped in a reuseable wrap. I’ve seen some online made from the plastic-coated fabric used to make ‘rubber pants’ to go over cloth diapers. Some people love them, others say the fabric has an odour they don’t like. Highly recommended is the Wrap-N-Mat. Machine washable, it is used to wrap food and then opens up into a place mat for your dining pleasure. Cool :)

We’ve opted for a Laptop Lunch lunchbox. I saw them at Whole Foods about a month ago and recognised them right away from the (no longer updated, but still awesome and worth checking out) blog Vegan Lunch Box.
It works well. According to Jordan, it is awesome and he loves it and all those little boxes are cool. Besides the fact that the Laptop Lunch is the gateway to the golden land of the litterless lunch, I like it because when it’s early morning and I haven’t had any coffee and the baby is hanging on my leg and whining, all those little boxes make it easy to make sure I’ve put everything in there. Environmentally friendly AND brain helpful! Lead and phthalate free! Plus, no baggies to wash. A lunchbox can’t get much better than that. It comes with a fork and spoon and a great book full of tips, recipes and other information. Of course, Jordan teams his with his dragon Sigg water bottle.

Now for the math. I am all about the measurable results, so here we go…
Let’s say that a child produces 70 pounds of garbage every year from his or her lunches. And lets say there are 200 school days in a year. That means about 0.35 pounds of garbage per meal. Jordan doesn’t take a lunch to school every day since he homeschools, but he does pack a lunch about forty times a year. 40 x 0.35 = 14.

Fourteen pounds of garbage NOT produced by my family every year. Excellent :D

Green For Life by Gillian Deacon.
Laptop Lunch . This website is packed with great information.
Vegan Lunch Box. Use the archives and start at the beginning to see some great examples of amazing packed lunches. Those meals are pure nutrition.

There is an update to this post here.