Harrowsmith

Great gifts Dear Harrowsmith team, I really appreciated your sustainable gift selections and the ideas in your winter magazine. Because of you, my closest friends received the gifts of CSA (community supported agriculture) food boxes and they can’t wait to receive theirs! — Toni L Editor’s note: We’re glad you loved them — and that your friends did too! Gift giving happens all year round so find our ideas at www.harrowsmithmag.com/good-gifts. Fresh Air Hi Jennifer, I am going through the 2023 Almanac, back to front. (Dunno why, but I always go through magazines that way.) I liked the Clean Air article, and wanted to share something that really gets to me: the number of cars and trucks in our rural area that sit for 10, 20, 30 minutes with their engines running. I see a…

It’s my favourite time of year. I know I say that every spring. I can’t wait for the bulbs to pop up in my front garden and I am pretty sure I say that every spring, too. It’s definitely the time of year to dream big and here are 4 things I am looking most forward to this season: 1. Replacing my evergreen boxwoods with evergreen yews. As my back garden gets more and more shady (because I over planted it with beautiful trees that I love, more on that on page 80), the yews are performing much better and are more resilient to pests. I can’t image not having a robust evergreen structure in my wildish garden, so I want to plan for it as it starts to have new…

Welcome Spring! This year, the official Spring Equinox (first day of spring) will occur on March 20th at 5:24 p.m. EDT for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. Celebrate this day when the sun crosses the equator line and heads north bringing with it these signs of spring: Increasing birdsong. Buds getting bigger on trees and shrubs. Earthworms popping their heads out of the ground. Here’s what’s on our reading list this spring THE TINY BUT MIGHTY FARM: Cultivating high yields, community, and self-sufficiency from a home farm by Jill Ragan (2023). Jill Ragan of YouTube’s Whispering Willow Farm teaches you how to turn a typical suburban backyard into a productive mini farm. With Jill as your friendly and encouraging guide, you’ll learn how to grow food for your family and, if you want,…

The sun was not up when I arose.It lay sleeping, the clouds were close.The sky was shot with pink and grey,With a hint of promise of a new day. Spring was coming to Bow Lake,With a hint of what the day would make.But now it was a false dawn.All was silent and still asleep. A quiet world, but yetNature was poised for a great leapOf bird song, and frog croaking.Insects humming hungrily and dragonflies gliding. The wind was calm, the lake mirrored the heavens.A Special moment of solitude, reflection and wonder.The loon family emerged, skating effortlessly across the lake,Fishing so quietly, water the only testimony to their wake. My coffee in hand with steam and aromaAwakened my contact with nature.The sun tentatively sent its first beams of light.A gentle breeze ushered the clouds. My moments…

Harrowsmith’s meteorology expert, Mark Sirois, shares the weather highlights each region in Canada can expect this spring. Atlantic Provinces Slightly warmer than normal temperatures can be expected this spring despite a cool start. Precipitation should be slightly above normal early and then get drier as the season moves along. Many foggy days early on over coastal areas as chilly air battles with warmer sea surface temperatures. Quebec Winter conditions will likely stick around into late March. By April we should see a progressive rebound in temperatures. April should be milder than normal followed by seasonable temperatures in May. Precipitation should be close to average, or slightly below for the period. Ontario It will start off colder than normal aided by persistent ice cover on the Great Lakes. Temperatures should start to rebound nicely by mid-April. May…

The spring equinox, also known as the vernal equinox, is the moment when the sun is directly above the Earth's equator, resulting in roughly equal amounts of daylight and darkness for most parts of the Earth. During the spring equinox, the tilt of the Earth's axis is not inclined towards or away from the sun, so the length of day and night is nearly equal everywhere on the Earth. This is why it's also called the "equal night" or "equal day" event. The spring equinox marks the beginning of astronomical spring in the Northern Hemisphere and the beginning of astronomical fall in the Southern Hemisphere. It also marks the time when the sun is rising and setting due east and west respectively, a phenomenon that occurs twice a year on equinoxes (spring…