Urban Agriculture
WE’VE MADE NO SECRET of our desire to gradually transition Green Apple into a landscaping company that designs and builds permaculture gardens. It’s perfectly possible for your yard to be beautiful and healthy and productive, all at the same time. But it’s going to take some time and effort to educate our client base until there is a demand for these services! So as part of these efforts to make permaculture principles more widely known, we interviewed Jane Hayes of www.GardenJane.com, one of the city’s foremost experts on urban agriculture, and a dear friend, at her home in downtown Toronto. If you’ve heard the term permaculture being batted around and wondered what it might mean, but been unclear as to what it actually is, then have a listen as Jane eloquently explains.
Continue reading about Garden Jane on Growing Food in Toronto
OKAY, FOR OUR FIRST FORAY into urban agriculture, we wrote Backyard Farming, a blog about vegetable gardens and fruit trees. For those interested in kicking it up a notch, we brought you Backyard Chickens, a blog about raising birds right outside your house. I imagine that we’re already treading on weird and wacky territory here when we start talking about food-producing animals. You may know a couple people in the neighbourhood that take care of a vegetable patch, but you probably aren’t aware of anyone that’s providing a happy home for chickens and turkeys, ducks and geese. So I don’t actually expect anyone out there to take me up on what I’m going to talk about next. But in the event that you’ve already aced Homesteading 101 and you’re past the intermediate class, then we’ve got to give you something to shoot for: an entire menagerie of livestock, fauna of the land, sea, and air!
IN THE 2009 SEASON, we successfully started a new ecological business venture, designing and building Living Roofs and Living Walls. In the 2010 season, we plan to introduce another new line of ecological services, growing gardens of edible and medicinal plants… even picking up the concept of small-scale animal husbandry. It’s simply not possible to completely revamp the entire product line in a single season. But we can give you a little preview of what we’re planning down the pipeline.
