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7 Ways to Attract Cardinals to Your Backyard
2025-11-24
They’re not going to show up without a little wooing. We’ll show you how to entice them to your garden.
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Adding Trees to the Garden
2025-11-24
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A Feast for Backyard Birds
2025-11-24
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A Garden Stream
2025-11-24
Cascading water enhances a garden and attracts a larger variety of birds. The sound of a gurgling stream is an intoxicating draw to both people and wildlife. It enhances relaxation and helps filter out background noises that invade our lives.
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Backyard Camping
2025-11-24
Before you trek your five year old through the woods to set up camp, you might want to do a practice run in your backyard.
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Bee bungalow
2025-11-24
Believe it or not, Canada has about 2,000 species of bees! There are not only honey and bumble-bees but also leafcutter, carpenter, sweat, mason, orchard, and digger bees to name a few. All are important pollinators.
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Brush Piles
2025-11-24
Brush piles shelter wildlife from cold winter and hot summer weather and provide protection from predators and nesting cover. They are used by birds, small mammals and reptiles.
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Cold Frames
2025-11-24
For Canadian gardeners living in the cooler regions of the country, cold frames are an easy and inexpensive way to extend the growing season. By retaining heat and protecting plants from wind, you can use it in many different ways.
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Create Shelter for the Smallest Creatures in Your Backyard
2025-11-24
With so many insects disappearing, we need to do all we can to help them out! Insect hotels are a great way to provide shelter for all sorts of important insects through the year. Whether you want to help bees or butterflies, moths or ladybugs, an insect hotel will offer them a safe home where they can stay warm during the winter and keep dry year round.
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DIY Vegetable Trellis
2025-11-24
If you have limited space to grow food, consider growing vertically. Several vegetables can thrive as they grow vertically rather than sprawling across the ground. In addition to the commonly trellised tomatoes and pole beans, consider applying a similar approach with cucumbers, small squash and melon varieties.
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Eight Plants that are Perfect for Butterflies
2025-11-24
Are you ready to get outside in your garden? Keep these eight plants in mind if you’d like to attract butterflies over the warmer months.
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Feed the Birds This Winter
2025-11-24
You’ve been waiting patiently for birds to come flocking to your feeder and the only visitor you’re getting is a very pesky squirrel. Where are the cardinals? The juncos? Before you give up on feeding the birds altogether, you’ll be happy to know we’ve got a few quick fixes that’ll help you make your backyard a bird’s winter paradise.
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Five Reasons to Walk in the Great Outdoors
2025-11-24
<p>Get outside with your friends or family and explore nature as it comes back into bloom.</p>
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Get Your Garden Winter-Ready
2025-11-24
The frost, the cold, the snow… they’re coming! Is your garden ready?
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Grow Seedlings of Hope
2025-11-24
<P>We take trees for granted. Without them, life on our planet would end. These arboreal beauties supply oxygen, conserve water and fertilize soil. Trees also provide habitat for everything from millipedes to grizzly bears. One of the most wonderful things you can do for wildlife is to plant a diversity of native trees. You can buy seedlings or saplings from nurseries or, better still, start your very own from seeds. </P>
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Hedgerows
2025-11-24
Hedgerows have been part of the landscape for hundreds of years. Traditionally used in agricultural areas, hedgerows offer many advantages for smaller, more urban properties as well. Hedgerows also provide an invaluable natural service, offering food and shelter to precious wildlife.
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Help Bees in Your Garden
2025-11-24
Some thoughtful gardening and a little planning is all it takes to help our native bees. Follow these tips to provide habitat for a diversity of bee species:
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Help Wildlife Survive Winter
2025-11-24
Easy tips everyone can follow to make a difference for wildlife this winter
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Hiking for Newbies
2025-11-24
Never hiked before? Here’s what you need to know before you hit the trails.
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How bad is road salt and are there alternatives out there?
2025-11-24
Environment Canada states that approximately five million tonnes of salt is used on our roads every year. Cities like Toronto and Montreal use well over 130,000 tonnes of salt annually. You can only imagine that so much of the stuff is not good.
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How to Attract Bats to Your Yard
2025-11-24
Bats are small mammals with a mighty environmental and economic impact. Help Canada’s endangered bat species this summer by inviting them to your yard.
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How to Attract Nocturnal Animals to your Backyard
2025-11-24
Want to make your garden work overtime? Put some beneficial critters to work while you snooze the night away. Bats, toads and night-flying moths are incredible allies to have on your side if you want your backyard to look its very best.
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How to Attract Owls to Your Yard
2025-11-24
Make your property an inviting space for these iconic birds!
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How to care for injured turtle
2025-11-24
TURTLE S.H.E.L.L. runs a rehab centre for injured turtles. Here's what they recommend you do.
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How to Draw Spiders to Your Yard
2025-11-24
Spiders are actually the good guys, dare I say even allies, in your garden and yard because they eat the very insects that feast on the plants and vegetables in your garden.
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How to Grow a Low Maintenance Garden this Summer
2025-11-24
10 Native Plants that Takes the Guess Work Out of Gardening
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How to Make the Perfect Pollinator Garden
2025-11-24
Canada’s pollinators are mostly insects, with some pollination thanks to hummingbirds. Together these important animals provide us with so much of the food we need and love like tomatoes, carrots, blueberries and chocolate
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Ice Ice Baby!
2025-11-24
<p>Ever wonder how icicles are formed? When the ice or snow sitting on your roof gets warmed up by the sun, it starts to melt and trickle down from the eaves of your house. If it runs off into an area where the environment is below zero, it starts to refreeze. Drip after drop, the water solidifies and becomes an icicle, growing longer with every drop. </p>
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It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas
2025-11-24
Forget the halls. Deck your yard to the nines this holiday with nature-inspired decorations!
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It’s easy to plant with birds in mind!
2025-11-24
Planting a garden designed for aesthetic appeal is a great way to enhance and beautify your natural surroundings. Planting with purpose and making that same garden a welcoming habitat for birds and other wildlife is an even better idea. Thankfully, with help from the Canadian Wildlife Federation (CWF), you won’t have to “wing it” when it comes to designing and planting a garden with birds in mind.
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Know Your Allies This Gardening Season
2025-11-24
There are many insects in Canada, especially in the warm summer months and they might not always get the warmest of welcomes. Before you go and make a solution of eco-friendly pesticide solution to take care of them, we’re here to tell you that not all insects in your garden are bad. Many are actually quite helpful! Is that a sigh of relief we hear?
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Know Your Snow
2025-11-24
<p>We happily catch it on our tongues and begrudgingly shovel it from our sidewalks, but how much do you really know about snow? </p>
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Make a Butterfly Garden
2025-11-24
Watching Butterflies flitting about and landing on flowers is rewarding for children and adults alike.
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Move Over Frosty
2025-11-24
We’ve got three snow critters to create outside with your favourite kids this winter!
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Native Lilies: How To Grow from Seed
2025-11-24
As with other native species, we try to plant the seed as soon as possible. As the embryo does not seem to be completely developed at the time of seed ripening, we allow, if possible, at least six weeks of warm (ordinary) fall weather before the cold hits.
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Putting up a bat house
2025-11-24
The scarcity of suitable roosting sites threatens bats' survival. Putting up bat houses is a great way to help bat populations.
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Restore a Ribbon of Life
2025-11-24
<p>Help promote biodiversity along Canada’s shorelines by providing a buffer zone of lush greenery for our aquatic friends. <br> </p>
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Searching for Signs of Spring
2025-11-24
<P>Spring. Leading groundhog authorities and the calendar tell us it’s just a few weeks away, but depending on where you are in Canada, looking outside your window might bring on more of a spring chill than spring fever. As unpredictable as Mother Nature can be at this time of year, we do know that she won’t let us down. With the promise of warmer weather, singing birds and blooming flowers just a short wait away, make sure you keep your eyes open for these sure signs that spring has sprung. </P>
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Setting up a Rain Barrel
2025-11-24
A simple and effective way to meet your garden’s watering needs is to install a rain barrel in your yard. You'd be amazed at the amount of free water that falls from the sky and rolls off your roof every year, to save for a…non-rainy day! Here are some tips for installing and using your rain barrel.
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Shoreline Cleanup
2025-11-24
From plastic straws to coffee lids, everything we throw away ends up somewhere. If it doesn’t make it to a landfill, it will find its way to waterways like rivers, lakes and oceans. It really doesn’t belong there – animals can mistake that junk for food and they can get tangled up in it too. Spend some time this June making a body of water near you a cleaner environment for the animals that live there with your own shoreline cleanup.
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Simple Tips to Care for a Live Christmas Tree
2025-11-24
Live Christmas trees... Indoors. It’s a trend on the rise! With proper planning and care, you can have both a festive, healthy live Christmas tree indoors. Plus, it’ll make for a beautiful tree to plant in the spring!
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Snake den
2025-11-24
Snakes eat mice, birds, grubs, and slugs and provide food for owls, hawks, and many mammals. So these cold-blooded animals are an important link in several food webs and consequently are worthy of our attention. Caring for them in winter involves re-creating the subterranean dens and cavities in which many hibernate to survive.
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Spring Cleaning the Great Outdoors!
2025-11-24
<P>Everyone likes a little help with spring cleaning, and Mother Nature is no exception. So grab some gloves and a (biodegradable) garbage bag and head outside! </P>
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The Trickle Effect
2025-11-24
Wildlife can often be lured by the tempting sound of dripping water. Try rigging a recycled plastic or metal container from a branch just over a bird bath. An old coffee can is perfect.
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The Twinkle of Mother Nature’s Sky
2025-11-24
<P>Discover nature’s night lights with some summer star-gazing. </P>
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Tracking Down Winter Wildlife
2025-11-24
<p>The morning after a snowstorm is the best time to find your inner sleuth and go tracking in the backyard. Many animals are nocturnal and conduct their business under the protection of dense cover. But thanks to freshly fallen snow, we can garner clues as to how they live. </p>
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Using Groundcover in Your Garden
2025-11-24
What exactly is groundcover? And how can you use it to enhance your yard?
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You Won’t Be-leaf It ‘Till You See It!
2025-11-24
<p>As the days become cooler and shorter, it is time to go outside and see what we don’t really see every day: the colours of our changing landscape. The multitude of shades comes to us via tree leaves, shrubs and grasses changing colours. Why not try and preserve them? </p>