Biodiversity Farming: Amateur Hedge Laying in Canada

A photo essay on installation of hedgerow by an amateur wildlife gardener

I run a large wildlife certified garden in Quebec, Canada. I tried for a season my hand at running a business doing market gardening. I found that the demands of that as a business far outstripped the rewards, went into software, and never looked back. I have since been experimenting with what I call “wild cultivation,” a patchy mix of mostly wildflowers, perennial herbs, native & naturalized wild edible plants, random grains, miscanthus, and a bunch of other stuff as it comes up.

Why Biodiversity Farming

I’ve been researching lately what would it mean to become a “biodiversity farm.” I no longer actually consider myself a “farmer” because I don’t run it as a business; it’s for pleasure, aesthetics, and to give something back to the Nature around us. But I think there’s something very powerful potentially in the idea of biodiversity as a crop — as the central thing that we are “producing” when we engage in alternative forms of agriculture like regenarative, wild cultivation, and other post-agricultural ecological land use concepts.

It’s clear to me from having worked in it — and seeing its effects play out in the landscapes all around us —…