The Wagon Wheel Gardens

08/25/2026

:)

08/25/2026

Wow!

Please be advised that there are currently three units available to rent at Sagonaska Place (1 North Front Street, Belleville). Please see details in the flyer below, and if you have any questions or would like to apply, please email Angie at [email protected]

08/25/2026

;)

08/25/2026

Love it

08/25/2026

Lol

08/25/2026

Beautiful, Yoyanere

Traditional plant knowledge carries generations of observation, care, and responsibility.

Across Indigenous communities, women continue to help pass this knowledge from one generation to the next. These teachings can include gathering plants for food, medicines, teas, ceremonies, dyes, and other uses, as well as the protocols that guide when, where, and how plants should be harvested.

In many Nations, plant knowledge is connected to language, seasons, kinship, and place. The name of a plant may hold clues about its use, its habitat, or the responsibilities tied to gathering it. Harvesting can also involve teachings about taking only what is needed, leaving enough for the plant to continue growing, and recognizing the relationships between people, animals, water, soil, and the wider landscape.

Colonial policies, residential schools, forced displacement, and restrictions on cultural practices interrupted the transmission of Indigenous knowledge across generations. For many families and communities, reconnecting with plants is not only about learning practical uses. It can also be part of restoring family teachings, cultural practices, language, and relationships with ancestral lands.

Women have long played important roles as knowledge keepers, harvesters, teachers, healers, artists, and caretakers of community well-being. Today, many continue that work by teaching children, supporting community workshops, documenting language, and learning from Elders while respecting what knowledge is meant to be shared publicly and what remains within families or Nations.

What plant teachings or seasonal harvesting traditions are important in your family or community?



Sources: Native American DNA

05/24/2026

:)

05/24/2026

Controlling is the challenge

05/23/2026

:)

You prune every fruit tree the same way and wonder why the peach stopped producing.

Each fruit bears on different wood. Some set fruit on branches grown last summer. Others need spurs that took years to develop. Prune a peach like an apple and you remove the wood that was about to carry next season's crop.

The cut that helps one tree strips the harvest from another.

🌱 How each group bears fruit:

- Peach and nectarine — fruit on one-year wood. Those long flexible shoots from last summer carry the crop once, then they are spent. Without a hard annual prune that clears most of last year's growth, the tree fills with dense canopy and produces less each year. Few fruit trees respond more to correct pruning
- Apple and pear — fruit on short stubby spurs along older branches. Those spurs produce for a decade or more. The goal is the opposite of peach, which is to preserve spur systems, thin for light and air, and remove crossing branches and water sprouts. Heading back spur-bearing branches triggers a flush of leafy shoots in place of fruiting wood
- Grape — fruit on last season's hardened canes, not older wood and not new green growth. A heavy dormant prune each winter looks aggressive, but it directs energy into the buds that actually produce clusters. The most productive buds sit close to the cane's base
- Cane fruit and blueberries — two systems in one group. Summer-bearing raspberries and blackberries fruit on second-year canes that die after harvest, so cut those to the ground. Everbearing raspberries fruit on first-year growth and can be mowed flat each winter for a simple fall crop. Blueberries fruit best on wood that is a few years old, so remove the two oldest canes each winter and let fresh replacements grow in

🌿 Four patterns to remember:

- Peach — cut hard every winter. Keep short one-year shoots, remove the rest
- Apple — light thinning. Protect the spurs
- Grape — clear most of last year's wood, keep a few buds per cane near the base
- Berry — remove what already fruited, keep what has not yet

The fruit that fills a branch this summer was decided by the cut you made last winter.