Live Green Toronto is here to give you the tips, tools and resources you need to go green - at home, on the road and at school or work.
Whether its through our video toolkit, with topics like making your home more energy efficient or starting a food buying club, the winning entries for our annual Live Green Toronto Awards, or #LocalDishTO recipes from some of Ontario's best chefs, we are your one stop shop for all things green. Proudly a program of the City of Toronto.
Hi, we have solar panels with the microfit program in Toronto, but we want to change the roof recently, so we need to find a pro team to take the panels off and put them back after new roofing, so may I get a quote please? Thanks
I'd argue respectfully that a gardener desperate to grow their own food has already likely scoped out locations before even considering speaking with other people about it. The other option is guerilla gardening; grow first, ask permission later.
Hi Nika! Thanks for your question. If your balcony is very windy, use trellises or vertical supports to keep your plants stable. Wind can also contribute to your containers drying out quicker so ensure you are watering daily, especially on very hot days. We talk about vertical supports and watering in this blog post: blog.livegreentoronto.ca/2021/05/turn-up-heat-on-your-balconycontainer.html and there's more on watering in this blog post as well: blog.livegreentoronto.ca/2021/07/maintain-your-garden-through-july-august.html
I have a second year strawberry plant that is only producing leaves. Why are there still no flowers? The leaves just seem to be growing non stop, and there are many of them, and they are very healthy and big. But why no flowers yet
If you want a lot of ideas on exactly what to plant on your property, with options for sun, shade, wet dry, this is the webinar for you! Pollinator and social benefits!
Hi there, this is no excuse to say I don't have a space to grow veggies After I saw your video. In such a small space you can grow lots of veggies, thanks for sharing.. Subbed #777 . 💕💕👍👍
Lorraine Johnson is very impressive! She has the kind of knowledge gained only from years of experience. Note that she actually knows her plants and is NOT (immediately) recommending planting clover or dandelions "for the beeees", which only add to the ecological stew of non-native plants diverting bees from helping native plants reproduce. Both are allelopathic, meaning they can change soil chemistry and actually actively attack other plants making it VERY hard to grow natives and even making the soil incompatible for them. Everyone crows how clover is a nitrogen fixer...but it is not native...our plants evolved to have less nitrogen in the soil. It has also been shown in hawkweeds that non-natives that arrive with no predators seem to "figure out" that they are not being attacked by the insects they would deal with in their own native ecology. So they actually genetically diverge and devote more energy to allelopathy, meaning it is easier for them to form pure colonies. Most non-natives have a longer growing season than our natives, so if you look in the late fall and early spring you will still find them growing. The competitive pressures on native plants are much, much larger than simply occupying real-estate. Native plants feed insects that turn into butterflies, pollinators (which need both nectar and pollen (the pollen with specific nutrient values)), and their larval forms (like caterpillars) feed our birds and other animals. It is NOT just "for the bees" that we are planting native...it is repairing the whole ecology from the bottom up. If you see a lot of "bees" (usually honeybees, a non-native species) on your pretty exotic flowers (like dandelions) maybe give thoughts to where they "should" be. With the bees on the exotic plants, they are not helping the native plants reproduce...so they are being pulled out of the ecology and not doing the job they evolved in the ecology to do. One in four plants in Canada (probably more, since that study was done in 2009) are either invasive or "naturalized" (a sweet sounding term for "there were too many to fight so we gave up and let them spread everywhere"). I monitor new introductions where I live and am seeing 2-3 new invading plants...a year. It is no surprise the animals that utterly depend on the evolved plant life are disappearing. They too have many additional pressures on them, such as the rapid spread of disease through bird feeders bringing multiple species together in abnormal ways that don't happen in the wild, our windows, high tension wires, and the wholesale devastation of the nocturnal insect ecology that moved and mated in only moonlight for eons, and were not splattered wholesale on car windshields. Remember that planting native plants is not just for the four thousand native N. American bees, it is also for the 12,500 moth, and 824 butterfly species, whose larvae make it possible for most songbirds to raise chicks...even those seed eaters need massive numbers of caterpillars high in protein, and nice and soft for their young, so PLANT YOUR BIRDFOOD! The kicker is that if you have a brightly lit space after dark, most of the bugs are dying (or diverted from mating and completing their life cycle) on the lights. So if you want to plant natives, please minimize night lights. Use as little as possible, direct only where needed, put them on motion sensors, turn them on only when you actually need them or are expecting people, close curtains at night, and use yellow bulbs. All these things are interlaced. It sounds like a lot...but there is nothing like when a species of bird like a warbler nests in your yard because you have become an incredible constructive force in the world's ecology. Nothing like making positive change...in your own back yard!
If the goal is to reduce emissions, then replacing natural gas furnaces and water heaters with heat pumps is the most effective intervention, given that the carbon intensity of natural gas is approximately 10x what it is for electricity from Ontario's grid (~20 g CO2e/kWh). Electrification provides far greater carbon reduction than either energy efficiency or rooftop solar for a grid as clean as Ontario's.
Hi, I would like to do a garden on my balcony. Would you help me to do that? I live in Yonge and Eglinton. I am from Costa Rica and I love having fresh vegetables at home. My apartment faces east.
Hey, @Jeimyg3! Glad to hear that you are interested in gardening on your balcony in the Yonge and Eglinton area! In addition to our three-part video series here on RU-vid, check out the following Get Growing Toronto resources: Webpage - bit.ly/3BB7SPl Blog Series - bit.ly/2UGYnxC Monthly Newsletter - bit.ly/3zt9Uzh
Very nice video. To read article on shift in the us carpooling market - www.businessupside.com/2020/10/06/shift-in-the-us-carpooling-market-a-car-pool-detail/
How about explaining WHAT kinds of plants that could grow in a spot like that? Or explaining the size of pot needed for certain plants? Or what about what to do in the fall to overwinter? This is a really great video as an introduction to get Torontonians (and anywhere in Canada with apartment buildings) growing things on their balcony, but it's very much lacking in instruction and guidance. I hope this is a topic you will come back to and elaborate on. Toronto is a unique location and not all of the gardening channels on RU-vid have advice for us who live here.
Thank you for your feedback @Jenny Livingston! We were limited with what we could put out there at the time but we will consider your advice for the future. There's plenty of information/resources on the questions you have online. In the meantime though, have you checked out the other two videos in this 3-part series? See here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE--c5BAZbSZuA.html and here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-X-V27AmfiNw.html.
Please be merciful and can the music. We don't need entertainment, and many people don't like this particular type of music, it's terribly distracting. We want to hear your teaching about plants, this is your gift. Thank you for sharing.
Hi there, @LuvGodluvpeople! You can find more information in the rest of the 3-part video series here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE--c5BAZbSZuA.html and here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-X-V27AmfiNw.html. Thanks for your question!
I'm sure properly storing food in your fridge is good for the environment. But how about, instead of making educational videos which blame individual residents for contributing to climate change, the city stops spending literally billions of dollars to rescue a crumbling elevated highway cutting through downtown which is only used by a tiny fraction of people in single occupancy vehicles?
