Backyard Harmony

The Queen Victoria Day weekend has come and gone. The weather was typical, cool and wet. Unfortunately, it's staying that way. I've planted a few seeds but am waiting for a warm and dry day to finish. It was during this undesired, but not unusual, gardening break that I started to read Sara Stein's Noah's Garden . We must endeavour to strike a balance between food security and ecology. In other words, we need to develop a harmony between the food that we grow for ourselves and creating a place for the wilderness to be within our gardens.

We need to learn about the ecosystem we inhabit.Techniques such as wildscaping provide us with skills and strategies which can help us create harmony within our backyards. It is important that you find out what bylaws are governing property use, before you begin, otherwise the results could be disastrous. Food security does begin in your own backyard but so does our opportunity to create a habitat that regenerates a small piece of the wilderness that humanity is so readily destroying.

You will need to become intimately familiar with your property. Of course this is the first step in good planning and design anyway, so it doesn't add any work. You need to know what to plant. Decisions will need to be made, how much space to you actually need for food purposes? How much can you give back to Nature? Can you combine the two? It is not just a matter of sticking a few seeds in the ground and letting the plants grow and it requires more effort that doing nothing to a particular piece of land, it will require your input.

The rewards are worth the effort. You will not only create a property that is self-sustaining to meet your family's food needs but you will have provided space for the wilderness to be, or at least a small part of it and that space is in your own backyard where you can see, hear and feel it everyday. In this way you provide shelter for the beings who were displaced by the sprawl that surrounds most of us and you have become a part of something that is much bigger than yourself.

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