“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).