A noun. A verb. A blog.
How much compost is in this bag? Today’s Idea File is really an “I-Have-No-Idea File” – for when someone asks you how much mulch or manure or compost or topsoil you need to cover an area, and you answer, “I have no idea!” This is especially tricky in Canada, where we straddle metric and imperial […]
Coal wagon stalled on muddy Ashdale Avenue, a photo by Toronto History on Flickr. When you consider this photo, taken just over a century ago, you realize that Toronto isn’t much beyond its infancy. This is on Ashdale Avenue, just a few blocks from where my home would be built — a couple of decades […]
I’d been gardening on it for almost 10 years before I knew these garden spaces actually had a name: The Hell Strip. And suddenly all my challenges made sense. Yep, I’ve been trying to garden on a little strip o’ hell. For those of you unacquainted with the “hell strip” it’s a long garden space […]
Today’s headline is the punchline to the joke: Why will Toronto gardeners never go hungry? The gas-main excavations in many Toronto neighbourhoods have been revealing. What they’ve revealed on our east-end, upper-upper-upper-upper-upper Beach street is sand, lots of deep, inert, yellow sand. This was the beach of prehistoric Lake Iroquois, making our street, which runs […]