“Embers of Hope: Embracing Life in an Age of Ecological Destruction and Climate Chaos.”

An excerpt from my forthcoming book is available in the latest issue of the Permaculture Design Magazine! Check out your favourite eco-friendly bookstore, your library, or order it online.

I've been working on this, mostly on my own, for over six years. So now, to be warmly received by the community fills me with gratitude, humility, excitement, and anticipation. I am so grateful.

Scaling back can nourish what is meaningful to us, rather than deprive us.

In the last few years, our garden has been growing fewer veggies. This summer, I charted the sun and shade at two-hour intervals during the day, roughly one month before the solstice and two months afterwards. In late August, our garden looked like a woodland with dappled sun. Most of the beds had four or two hours of sun. No wonder the tomatoes have not been looking happy.

Since putting together my “55+ Favourite Plants,” I've continued to add new plants and comments based on observations from our site and other edible forest garden projects.

You can download the plant list as a pdf file.

Our garden and relationships keep teaching me how generous and fruitful life can be. I've written about self-seeding plants filling the greenhouse bed, friends giving us squash when we had a poor veggie harvest during a drought year, and our neighbours helping me during a crazy snowstorm. I see again and again how life keeps on giving, if we allow it and nurture it.

It was -21C last night and I forgot about the greens in the greenhouse again. In the early afternoon, I went to see the extent of the damage, and was very pleasantly surprised to find most of the plants looking green and perky :)

I was appalled to see how little food we grew this summer. Our gardens showed us that we were not ready for extreme and changing climate conditions. It is an unpleasant lesson, and hopefully one that will help us be better prepared going forward.

We look to Mother Nature as our teacher. We “listen” to the plants and try to understand their messages.

Read "Lessons from Water" in the Permaculture Design Magazine's spring 2016 issue. The magazine celebrates it's 100th issue! Look for it in stores (or you can order it as a back issue a little later).

Our relationships with Anishnabek people and teachings beckon us ever more deeply.

This journey weaves strong threads that connect and reconnect so much of my life leading up to this point. It's like dots being connected to dots, a vision coming into focus of what had already been there. It's like having half of a puzzle – the pieces I have reveal half of a picture – and then discovering that a friend has the other half of the puzzle. All the pieces fit together and this puzzle picture becomes more whole. Of course, one picture is only one picture, and is not the WHOLE of Life. It simply offers one perspective or one lens. And as far as lenses go, I do find this lens to be a very helpful one.

A few years ago, I was invited to give a presentation about permaculture for an indigenous studies class in Ottawa. After the class, I had lunch with the professor, an indigenous man from Bolivia. He told me that much of what I had shared was inherent in his culture. I realised that permaculture is most powerful for people like me: people who grew up in a society and culture where we were NOT taught how to meet our basic needs in harmony with all of life around us.

A colleague asked me about my top plants for perennial polycultures in our region (hardiness zones 4b/5a in Ontario and Québec). This is also a popular question on our garden tours and in our classes! From our observations, here's what I came up with...

Interested in wild edibles, animal tracks, microclimates, shelter, active and passive observation, and relationship with place?

Check out "Tracks to a Full Stomach", an article by Bonita, published in the Permaculture Activist, (#88, Earth Sckills & Nature Connection, May 2013).

Why do I love these gardens? Why do people love these gardens? There is something empowering about many hands transforming a lawn into a productive food garden. There is something magical about cardboard, compost and woodchips as the main ingredients for soil fertility. And there is something promising about planting trees, shrubs and perennial food plants, which will potentially provide abundance for years to come.

This year, I've had the joy of being involved in four different edible forest gardens.

Read “Integral Permaculture,” published in The Permaculture Activist (#92, Stacking Functions, May 2014).

We had a very full year in 2013, connecting with other permaculture leaders from across Canada, the USA and internationally. We hosted our 3rd Eastern Ontario Permaculture Convergence, which sold-out with over 300 tickets and drew attendees from over seven hours away. The Northeast Permaculture Convergence was hosted for the first time in Québec and on this side of the Canada-USA border; the theme was “the edge effect”, highlighted by bilingual (English-French) offerings and cross-border connections.

Permaculture is a holistic approach to design based on living systems. It offers a way of thinking, relating, making decisions and solving problems, which are more in balance with the living world around us. Its ethics, principles and design process enable us to use our resources intentionally and more effectively, thus creating more abundance for ourselves and our communities. Permaculture design can be broadly applied to land-based, urban, social or economic systems.

Imagine planning your garden or making decisions for your organisation in a way that puts your time and energy to best use, while creating the outcomes that are most valuable to you. At its simplest, permaculture design can be described as a way of thinking, making decisions and designing things, based on the way nature works.

En mai 2010, nous avons été invités en Haiti par une ONG pendant une semaine et demi. Le but était de préparer un cours de design à la permaculture et de donner des petits ateliers dans les camps à Port-au-Prince sur la façon de commencer un jardin potager et un système de composte.

I have deep gratitude in my heart to all of you for supporting me with my initiative in Haiti and for helping to make this possible through your donations, helping to spread the word, and sending positive energy. As I prepare for this trip, I have a sense of being in touch with the oneness of our humanity.

A little less grass in our yard and a little more space for planting! We decided to use all the biomass from the trees we recently trimmed to make a hugelkultur bed in our garden. We also created a winding path along the outside of where our annual garden will be to help keep out the grass.  All of the materials were free!  I love creating abundance and beauty from surplus, scrap materials.  Yes indeed, waste=food xoxo

After a few years of dreaming and several months of intentional observation, we've finally started a bit of garden here at our new home! This weekend, we sheet mulched a new garden bed, planted a small guild of edible plants and put up a mini hoop house!