As we near the end of the year, I thought I’d make a comprehensive post briefly outlining what my partner Davin and I did this year as well as our short and longterm plans for our yard/garden. Perhaps it will give you some ideas for your space, or at the very least it will provide context for some of the things I show and tell online.
For background, I am located in Ontario, Canada, on the north side of Lake Erie, in the Carolinian Zone. This is the northern part of a life zone that extends much further south into the Carolinas in the US (usually under a different name). Here in Canada it is only a small strip that follows Lake Erie in the province of Ontario. The ecosystem, and the plants and animals that inhabit this area are severely threatened because this is also the most populated part of the country, supporting 25% of Canada’s total population in a relatively small area. There is also great pressure on the ecosystem due to agriculture and highways.
I read that 98% of the land here is privately owned, which is why it feels especially critical that I use this 1/2 acre property in service of the ecosystem. Every yard, balcony, and garden counts toward providing food and shelter for wildlife. As soon as we were able to purchase last spring, I immediately started making plans for beginning the restoration of what has been a large lawn for several decades into a meadow with plants appropriate for the conditions and the region. I’ll get more into those details later.
What Defines the Carolinian Life Zone?
The term Carolinian Zone aka Carolinian Canada is mostly used to describe the Canadian portion of a much larger life zone that is primarily comprised of deciduous forest, but also includes tall-grass prairies and oak savannahs, as well as wetland and shoreline ecosystems. It is one of the most biologically diverse areas in the country. Carolinian Canada has a distinct climate due to the moderating effect of the surrounding Great Lakes. We experienced the mildest winters in the province (Ontario) as well as some of the warmest annual temperatures in Canada. We have humid summers, frequent thunderstorms, and snowy winters. Of course, this varies quite a bit within the zone. For example, my location is just at the edge of the snow belt, so we get heavy storms, but not as heavy as the town only 20 minutes east. And since we’re on the southern side of the Niagara Escarpment at Lake Erie, it’s surprisingly colder and snowier than cities just 20 minutes north of us.
It’s also important to acknowledge that Carolinian Canada is the traditional lands of many Indigenous nations including the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Lunaapeew, the Wendat and the Mississauga.
Longterm Plans
Our long term goal is to reclaim all of the land from lawn, with a large, wilder area at the back half where the yard meets the woodlot (privately owned by someone else). The land closer to the house will be mixed use with edible and non-edible native and some non-native trees, bushes, and plants. I also grow plants here for medicine, art making materials, and dyes. We also intend to dig a small, natural pond behind the garage with a sitting area.
The back half will primarily be dedicated to a wilder space with a large meadow of native perennials and annuals. There are currently 4 fruit trees there, so we are working around and with them. We are also working on an outdoor “room” that will have seating and a fire pit. It will be backed by fruiting native bushes, many of which I grew from seed and have already planted. The meadow will also include some native bushes and we have planted a tulip tree at the back that will eventually grow and connect with the woodlot to create a larger canopy. We will be planting several native paw paw trees there and elsewhere in the spring.
The front yard has the driest conditions and is south-facing, sloping toward the street. Half of it sits in dry shade underneath a massive big-leaved Tilia aka linden tree that also needs maintenance. We have already begun reclaiming the lawn as a garden bed and by next summer there should be little mowable grass remaining there. I will write a separate post about this area in the future, but the goal is a mix of native and useful non-native plants that will thrive in these conditions.
Our Approach
I am limited by a severe chronic illness and can’t dedicate hours to hard labour as I once could. Economically, we can not afford to hire help or rent expensive equipment. For those reasons, our approach is about tackling bite-sized pieces and making slow, incremental change rather than sweeping, grand projects. We are focussing on trialing approaches that are as low-impact as possible, such as smothering lawn with cardboard and other existing materials, rather than hiring a crew to come in and clear beds. There are some negatives to this approach and I will address them in further write-ups, but they are the most feasible for us.
We can not remediate the entire back half of the property into meadow overnight. It will likely take several years. So instead, we are working on small patches at a time and allowing the remaining areas to grow as grassy meadow. While those areas will contain existing non-native species, they still provide habitats for wildlife as well as medicinal and edible “weeds” that we utilize and eat. I believe in focussing on native species, but I am not dogmatic about it because non-native plants can have their purpose and place too. My hope is that as we create beds of native species, they will slowly be seeded elsewhere too. We’ve already begun that test by tossing seeds saved from the native species we planted this spring into other parts of the yard. It will be interesting to see which ones are able to compete with and without intervention.
What We Have Done So Far
Trees: Our property only extend to just inside the woodlot, so one of the first things we did in the early spring was work on managing the trees that are there. We have worked on eradicating the invasive Buckthorn trees (there are 3) and we cut out some of the spindly trees that were pushing out the trees we want to thrive. We also cut back some of the native Red Osier dogwood that had become overgrown and spindly, and we cut and pulled an enormous amount of grape and Virginia creeper vines that had taken over and were entirely smothering smaller trees.
Fruit Trees: There are 3 old ‘Bosc’ pear trees and 2 apples on the property, all of which require pruning and maintenance. One of the apples is on its last legs, and one of the pears is diseased and unable to produce. We will never be able to properly treat the disease because the neighbour’s have a massive specimen of the same variety that is also diseased. We are considering cutting it down and replacing with a fruit tree that is better suited to the heavy clay soil here, but that’s a plan for further down the road. The tree still provides food and shelter for wildlife as-is, as does the gangly old apple we’ve named Elder Apple that is half dead yet still producing good fruit on the living half.
This year I dug and planted permaculture guilds with a mix of Carolinian native and edible plants underneath 2 of the 4 fruit trees. Eventually, these plantings will be expanded outward, but since digging in clay is excruciatingly difficult work, I was only able to do small areas.
Food Gardens: There were already 2 completely overgrown garden beds here that we reclaimed and restored in our first year as renters. The smaller is nearest to the house on top of a hill. It has the second driest soil of any space on this property, and my long term plan is to use it primarily for growing herbs that prefer drier, well-draining soil. There were several old roses growing here when we moved in, and so far I haven’t had the heart to remove them since the dark petals make an excellent dye. Perhaps down the road I will replace them with fragrant species.
This yard is entirely clay (to varying degrees) with shallow topsoil. The second existing garden is a much larger bed at the bottom of the hill. It’s been built up on a berm and is flanked by a line of blackberry vines on the east and west sides. Nobody needs two massive rows of blackberries. I absolutely stuffed our chest freezer with their bounty this summer. For that reason, we have removed nearly all of one row and replaced it with black raspberries. In the spring we will remove the remaining blackberry vines from the row. We still have the other side, which produces more prolifically anyways.
Clay soil is nutritionally good, but difficult to grow in and I have found that over two seasons many of the crops we grew in the ground were a bit stunted. For this reason, we plan to renovate most of this area to raised beds with the exception of one circular bed that I have allotted to growing sunflowers and leafy greens. My partner, Davin, got the raised beds started this spring when he built and installed 10 of them using old cedar planks our neighbour was getting rid of. We installed a compost bin here and added an extra large bin for collecting rainwater that we used to hand water the saplings and plants we put in the back half of the property.
This year we received a small greenhouse in trade with a friend, and next year we plan to install it in front of a small pin cherry (a native fruit tree) that was here when we moved in. I will write about these beds and our larger plans for this section in another post.
Other Garden Beds: This spring we built a new bed behind the garage. It used to be a junk pile, so as renters we just let it be. But once we purchased the property, we immediately cleaned up and planted a range of native plants and bushes, and a small tree in the space that are suitable to wet and shady conditions. We also installed a rain barrel here and a compost bin. I will write more thoroughly about this space in a separate post.
The area nearest to the house is mostly a hill with very clay soil. Our plan is to convert the entire hill to garden beds, with large and small pathways in between. This is slow work that will take years. To begin, we planted a bed up near the house with a range of native perennials and non-native species I brought from our former Toronto garden. We also dug several smaller islands so we could plant the myriad of native plants and small trees I purchased. We made a large, rectangular bed against our neighbour’s garage and planted it up with raspberry canes for future food as I eat both the berries and use the leaves for medicinal tea. I planted a handful of haskap berry bushes, goji berry, strawberries, black currant, roses, and elderberry bushes on this ridge. There are also several blueberry bushes that I’ve decided to keep in large pots for the time being.
Down in the middle range of the yard, we built a bed on the east and north sides of an old, ramshackle shed. There I have planted more native plants and bushes.
In the open space between the shed and the first pear tree, we planted a handful of native fruit trees, and on the line that divides this property with the neighbours to the east, we planted a Kentucky Coffee tree and a Paper Birch.
The Meadow: This year we let the grass go in the area that will eventually become a full Carolinian native plant meadow. It was interesting to see which plants came up and how the lawn grasses behaved once allowed to grow to their full potential. It certainly was not a monoculture and there are several grasses growing, some that I believe are native species.
Through the summer months we suppressed a large rectangle of lawn and this fall I planted a Clay-Busters Native seed mix there that I purchased from Wildflower Farm here in Ontario. I also planted a few native grasses and ninebark bushes there. This section will serve as testing ground for how to approach converting the entire area to meadow. As I mentioned, since we have a teeny budget, we can’t do it all in one swoop. This test patch will also help me determine if this is the right seed mix to use in the entire area or if we should experiment with others. I like the range of plants in the mix and they certainly seem appropriate for the soil conditions, but time will tell.
Conclusion
A lot of this year was about making plans and putting in slow growing trees and bushes. I especially wanted to get fruiting perennials in since they can take as long as 5 years to start producing. Experimentation was also a big factor this year since I am still learning what will thrive in heavy clay soil that is sopping wet for half of the year and bone dry for the rest. It’s quite an extreme swing! I am also learning how to garden alongside rabbits, skunks, voles, deer, and more birds than you can imagine. I did not share space with these animals in my urban gardens—the wildlife and challenges there were different. There’s a great learning curve here for me, but I am loving the experience.
Next year will be about expanding on what we started. We also need to double down on tree maintenance, particularly the fruit trees that have been mostly neglected for several years.
It’s still so surreal to look out at this land and realize that I get to stay here and steward it. I’m so grateful and looking forward to all the learning that will come from being here. I can’t wait to see what unfolds in the spring after all the work we did in 2023, and I especially look forward to the day when I look towards the back and see a field of beautiful flowers teeming with insects, birds, and small mammals. It’s going to be amazing!
Many of you helped us to get here, and every paid subscription helps us pay for the plants, seeds, and materials needed to grow this space. Thank you for being a part of this.
Lovely read.
I love all of this so much, and it feels very relatable while we sort out how to triage the needs of this building!