Fall/Winter Projects
Need we say more? Now’s the best time to build the features you want in your landscape. Why? Two reasons come to mind. With the soil horizon built and settled over the winter, plants will have the very best start in the spring. The other reason is a little more human-centred: most people call their… [Read More]
Rock Gardens
The Chester Garden Club blog features a story about Helping Nature Heal’s unique approach to using rocks in the garden. https://chestergardenclub.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/a-rocks-role-in-the-garden/
Black Out Speak Out
This week you may have noticed that some of your favourite websites were darkened, or that Facebook friends had changed their profile pictures to read Black Out Speak Out. This initiative is fueled by grave concern for the sweeping changes to environmental law proposed by the federal government’s omnibus bill, C-38. Included in this bill… [Read More]
Seed Freedom
Today, Helping Nature Heal joins the 2012 Global Citizens’ Alliance for Seed Freedom. The organization Navdanya is founded by Dr. Vandana Shiva, who came to Nova Scotia earlier this year. Vandana Shiva fights for Earth Democracy– a combination of nature and human rights. Seed freedom is at the heart of her work because seed patenting… [Read More]
Tiered Garden Design
This tiered garden provides extra height for privacy. It also provides lots of good soil for the magnolia trees that will be planted there. Plus it gives us six surfaces to plant into!
Home Composting
Composting is a familiar concept to most people these days. Unfortunately, it is often associated with those smelly green bins we all dislike. But it doesn’t have to be that way! Composting, in its various forms, is an easy, safe, and creative way to manage yard waste and helps keep soil and nutrient cycles healthy…. [Read More]
What would it take?
What would it take to revitalize your relationship with nature? Get you outside, in tune with and alive to your surroundings? Do you have a place to sit and feel the wind on your face when the human-focused world is stressing you out? Or do you have a backyard that makes you tired just looking… [Read More]
Ongoing Training Ensures Consistent Results
On May 1, the HNH team spent the afternoon completing an assessment of Rosmarie’s garden. During this training session, staff discussed what they look for when caring for your garden and the strategies that they use to ensure the HNH philosophy is consistently used from landscape to landscape. One of the techniques that we focused… [Read More]
Our Definitions: Strategic Composting
It’s hard to believe, but we’re finally turning the corner on winter, heading into March and looking forward to feeling the sun warm our faces, then our bare forearms, then our bare feet, and then one wonderful day, we’ll be wearing bathing suits and plunging into our first lake-swim of the summer. But we get… [Read More]
Talking to Plants – May 2013
Dear Friends, Spring is in full swing all around me, inciting my willing and eager involvement with the caretaking of the land and soil and plants. The growing plants channel amazing joy with their life force, beauty and proliferation. I take time to resonate with that joy. I take time to ask them how I… [Read More]
Do you access the ‘healing power of nature’?
What do I mean… by the healing power of nature? I mean to refer to the way in which Nature ministers to our minds, all more or less diseased by the rush and racket of civilization, and helps to steady and enrich our lives. My first point is that there are deeply-rooted, old established, far-reaching… [Read More]
Bruce the Moose
Photos by Gary Smith Meet Bruce the Moose. He’s made of scrap metal welded onto a framework of 370 feet of rebar and weighs in at approximately 500 pounds. He’s an assemblage of donations from friends and neighbours and pieces purchased at scrap yards: chain, steel traps, oxen and horseshoes, hinges, springs, railway spikes, tools and… [Read More]
What We’re Up to This Fall
by Chris Shaw Sanford October is here, and while most people may be done thinking about their garden for the year, at Helping Nature Heal we are busy again after the late summer lull. Curious about what we are up to? Check out my fall course offerings- they all relate to the fall garden activities… [Read More]