Archives for May 30, 2018

Books offer design, planting and harvesting advice and colourful photos

Gardens across P.E.I. are coming alive — if you’re looking for design inspiration, basic how-to’s or plant identification there are plenty of books to help you with your green thumb.

CBC convened a panel of experts with some recommended reading for garden enthusiasts — Dan MacDonald, owner of the Bookmark bookstore in Charlottetown, P.E.I. Library Service youth librarian Roseanne Gauthier and Victoria Goddard, an avid gardener and reader who owns the Charlottetown Cheese Company.

Check out these books

Gauthier’s first pick, for pre-schoolers, is Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert, available in a board book or paperback and is a popular choice at the library.

“This book is a really fun introduction to how plants start growing and then enjoying with your garden when it’s finished,” Gauthier said. In the vibrantly-coloured book, a child describes how they plant seeds and bulbs with their mother in the fall and how they grow and eventually bloom into a rainbow of colours.

“One of the things that children find really interesting is the idea that you start with a little seed and it can become a plant that you eat or this beautiful flower and that’s a really exciting discovery,” said Gauthier.

It’s a really beautiful book and the illustrations are absolutely magical.
— Roseanne Gauthier
Butterfly Park by Elly MacKay is a story about “community and belonging” in which the park plays a central role, said Gauthier. It follows a girl who has moved to a new town and is feeling lonely — she discovers a park next to her new home called Butterfly Park, which has no butterflies.

“She is determined that she is going to have butterflies in Butterfly Park, and all of the things she does to try to get the butterflies to come to the park capture the imagination of the town she has moved to,” Gauthier explains. The townspeople work together to create a garden in the park — in the end the butterflies, and the new girl, both feel at home.

“It’s a really beautiful book and the illustrations are absolutely magical,” Gauthier said.

Plant the Tiny Seed is a read-aloud activity book that Gauthier also recommends.

Goddard on gardens

“I really love the ones that are a bit more in-depth,” Goddard said of what gardening books she enjoys. “I find that it’s hard to find ones that aren’t just beginner, design-a-garden books.”

Goddard recommends Flower Gardens by Penelope Hobhouse (New Line Books), who describes what she learned by being a gardener in residence at one of the National Trust gardens in England. The book offers practical growing advice as well as discussing how to arrange gardens for best effect through the seasons, and is full of colour photos of flowering plants.

There’s nothing more frustrating than buying a gardening book and seeing a plant you like and then discovering it’s not suitable.
— Dan MacDonald

The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times is also on Goddard’s must-read list. It’s by American organic gardener and scientist Carol Deppe and discusses how to grow, store and use staple crops such as potatoes, corn and beans.

“Although it’s very different than the ornamental gardening books in certain ways, the idea that you are planning an entire ecosystem around your house for both beauty and bounty is a powerful one,” Goddard said.

Vegetable Literacy by seasoned cookbook author Deborah Madison combines gardening and cooking. She explores relationships among vegetables, edible flowers and herbs in the same plant family such as cumin, cilantro and dill.

Bookmark these picks

The Bookmark has been displaying and selling gardening books since the snow began to melt in March, MacDonald said. He leans toward practical guides for local gardeners.

MacDonald suggests Favourite Perennials for Atlantic Canada by Todd Boland (Boulder Publications). It’s a guide to the hundreds of perennials suitable to the challenging weather and soil conditions of the East Coast, and offers design suggestions.

“What I like about this book is the plants that are in it are suitable for Atlantic Canada — there’s nothing more frustrating than buying a gardening book and seeing a plant you like and then discovering it’s not suitable for our zone,” MacDonald said, pointing out the author lives in Newfoundland.

For the same reasons, MacDonald likes Halifax author Niki Jabbour’s Veggie Garden ReMix: 224 New Plants To Shake Up Your Garden And Add Variety, Flavor And Fun.

The Gardener’s companion to Medical Plants: An A-Z of Healing Plants and Home Remedies “is just a very beautiful book, gorgeous illustrations,” said MacDonald, who enjoys discovering new facts about familiar plants.

18-hour show featured dozens of Island performers

The 2018 QEH/Eastlink Telethon raised a total of $532,496 for priority medical equipment at Charlottetown’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital over the weekend.

Marlene MacDonald took charge of her 22nd telethon, anchoring the desk for the full 18 hours of the show with the help of more than 20 co-hosts.

Key donations included:

• $105,000 from the QEH Auxiliary for the Patient Tray Delivery System.
• $30,000 from Parkdale-Sherwood Lions Club for a new incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit.
• $9,508 from the Murray River and Area Ceilidhs.

The show included performances from more than 40 artists who volunteered their time.

Phone lines and the website for the telethon are still open for donations.

The M City complex and Hurontario LRT are scheduled to open in 2021 and 2022, respectively

The start of construction for a $1.5 billion condo complex is being hailed as a major step in Mississauga’s ongoing evolution into a full-fledged urban centre.

Developers are set to host a ceremonial groundbreaking Monday at M City, a 10-tower, 15-acre development to be built on the west side of the city’s burgeoning downtown core, at 3980 Confederation Parkway.

“I think it’s going to transform Mississauga,” said Mark Reeve, a partner at Urban Capital Property Group, one of the developers behind the project.

The first two towers of the complex are scheduled to be completed in 2021, one year before the scheduled opening of the Hurontario LRT, which will include a stop just blocks from M City.

There are hopes that the combination of housing and transit will help Mississauga in its ongoing evolution from a sprawling bedroom community into a modern city where people live and work.

Mayor Bonnie Crombie said the complex will help the area achieve its goals of becoming a “vibrant, livable, walkable downtown.

“The M City announcement is a really important milestone,” she said.

That vision for the city was most recently laid out by Mississauga in its Downtown21 master plan, which called for a “significant transformation” of the downtown core from a suburban to an urban space.

“I think it’s happening right now,” said Reeve of the master plan. “In five years, you won’t recognize [Mississauga,]” he added.

‘The future of the GTA’

Urban planners say the complex and upcoming rapid transit projects have put Mississauga at the forefront of Toronto’s suburbs when it comes to planning and intensification.

“Mississauga really represents the future of the Greater Toronto Area,” said Graham Haines, a research manager at the Ryerson City Building Institute. “It’s a municipality that’s starting to figure out how to build up instead of build out.”

In March, Haines published a report that examined how Mississauga can best prepare itself for its expected population growth.

With the right planning and developments, he found the city could accommodate 160,000 new homes, and as much as 80 per cent of all projected growth in Peel Region until 2041.

The best way to accommodate that growth, he said, is through the construction of so-called “missing middle” housing — homes such as townhouses and mid-rises.

While researchers say the towers at M City are a good fit for downtown Mississauga, they warn it’s not a model that will work across the city.

“It doesn’t mean that we need to build towers everywhere,” said Cherise Burda, the institute’s executive director.

Jobs still needed

Burda said the city is on the right path to achieve it goals, and that among the GTA municipalities, Mississauga is “leading the region in thoughtful intensification planning.”

However, the city needs more than condos and transit if it is to achieve its full potential. That will take jobs too, researchers say.

“This M City condos project is an exciting one for sure, but it’s largely residential,” Haines said.

The next stage is to attract more jobs and office towers to downtown Mississauga.

That effort will be the “key inflection point,” he said, that will determine the city’s success in its transformation.

Crombie says those jobs are on the way, as part of Mississauga’s expected population boom of around 200,000 people over the next 25 years.

That growth will create more than 100,000 new jobs in the city, she said.

‘There are a lot of wasted resources going into landfills,’ said Mike Chassie, VP of Halifax C&D Recycling

A local recycling company is looking to partner with bicycle shops across Nova Scotia to give old tires a second life under the hooves of horses, instead of seeing the rubber dumped into the province’s landfills.

Halifax C&D Recycling Ltd. started the program a week ago, without government involvement, and so far has partnered with Cyclesmith, a bike shop in Halifax.

The shop’s staff put used bicycle tires into a collection bag, and every one or two weeks Halifax C&D will come to collect them.

“Cyclists are more involved in the environment,” said Cyclesmith owner Andrew Feenstra. “They are more aware of what’s going on in the environment because they are outside all the time, so it’s just a natural progression and the right thing to do.”

‘Crumb rubber is a valuable product’

Mike Chassie, the vice-president of Halifax C&D Recycling, said the company hopes to include any bike shop willing to participate in the program.

“Bicycle tires are very easy to recycle,” he said. “They’re small, they granulate very easily so you can make crumb rubber out of it, and a crumb rubber is a valuable product, so you can sell it.”

The company is looking to sell the crumb rubber to the equestrian community as footing for arenas.

“The horses find it more comfortable to ride on and it’s safer,” said Chassie.

The recycling process will have zero waste, according to Chassie. Any pieces of “rubber fluff” will be incorporated into the company’s plastic lumber products, which are used for decks, molding and garden furniture.

Halifax C&D has come up with a variety other ways to recycle waste, including taking construction debris like drywall and turning it into bedding for cows. But the company is keeping an eye out for new opportunities.

“There are a lot of wasted resources going into landfills and we think with the right amount of research we can take them out of the landfill and market them as a product,” Chassie said.

Halifax C&D will donate $1,000 of the bicycle program’s anticipated revenue to the McIntosh Run Watershed Association, an organization committed to sustainable public access. The donation will help build and maintain the single-track trails in the watershed.

“People use their bikes on the trails, so we wanted to give back to an association that promotes healthy living,” said Chassie.