🌿 How do I get started? 🌿
Whether you live in an apartment with a balcony, tend a small backyard or have more land to work with, this is where we share what we’ve tried ourselves – from beds and container plants to living soil, wild herbs and simple pantry projects. It’s a practical starting point for permaculture and homesteading that can fit into real life.
For anyone who wants to move towards permaculture and homesteading with head, heart and hands – slowly, imperfectly and with real meaning.
Planning your vegetable garden: goals and eating habits
Before you order seeds or design new beds, it helps to step back and ask two simple questions: what do
Last Minute Gift
Still looking for a last minute Christmas gift that feels meaningful
Support the planting of fruit trees or the
Red Clover: History and Symbolism
Red clover is far more than a humble meadow plant. This article traces its role in agricultural history, explains how
🌿 Who’s behind AlpineRoots MapleBranches🌿
We’re Tanja and Gernot. We’re trying to figure out what a good life looks like when you take soil, water, climate and the people around you into account. Instead of forcing land into a shape, we try to work with what is already there – slope, rain, wind, existing plants and the story of a place.
Permaculture and homesteading are the tools we use to build systems step by step that are meant to last over the long term.
On this blog we share what we learn along the way – from small everyday tweaks to larger projects, detours included.
Our aim is to give you a clear picture of how we work and help you make more informed decisions for your own situation.
🌿Soil health – where everything starts🌿
Before beds, containers or fruit trees can really thrive, the soil has to work. Structure, aeration and soil life determine how well water is stored, how nutrients become available and how resilient plants are throughout the season.
Over the years we’ve focused on reading soils, improving them gently and keeping them alive in the long term. In our articles you’ll find basic principles, practical examples and lessons from our own site – meant to be useful, not polished.
If you want to go deeper, our soil health e-book is a compact guide. It is sold through our partner site Bras d’Or. For a quick start, you can continue reading in the blog.
🌿 Identify, use, and understand plants.🌿
Our plant profiles go beyond traditional herb books. You’ll find clear ID features, habitat information and notes on properties – plus simple ideas for food, storage and everyday use.
Whether it’s a wild herb, shrub or tree, the focus is on three things: recognising plants safely, using them in a meaningful way and understanding their place in the ecosystem. Many profiles are complemented by recipes, personal notes and practical tips from our own experience.
Over time this helps you build practical plant knowledge you can actually use.
🌿 Support our work 🌿
This blog is created by hand – no ads, no sponsored content. If our articles are useful to you, there are several ways you can support what we do.
You can help us grow by sharing our posts, commenting, and telling others about AlpineRoots MapleBranches. Every interaction and bit of feedback helps us improve our content and focus on the topics that matter most to you.
If you’d like, you can also support us financially: with a one-time donation, a monthly membership, or through our long-term projects on bras-dor.com. This gives us the stability to keep working on soil health, plant knowledge, and practical, real-life content.
🌿 Our passion project: Bras d’Or – touch wood 🌿
Bras d’Or – touch wood is our long-term project on the coast of Cape Breton Island. On a previously depleted site we’re planning a diverse mix of fruit trees, native shrubs and habitat strips that combine yield, biodiversity and soil protection.
This is where we put much of what we write about on the blog into practice: slowing water down, building soil, choosing species that fit the site and creating structures that are meant to work over decades – for people as well as for wildlife.
Step by step, Bras d’Or is intended to become a place that shows how productive use, landscape care and respect for a piece of land can go hand in hand.
🌿 Recipes 🌿
Here you’ll find our recipe overview. We built it as a collection point because many of our recipes don’t stand on their own – they belong to a plant, a season, or a specific topic. That’s why, when you click a recipe, the link takes you to the page where we introduce it in context, often within a plant profile or a themed post.
On the destination page, the recipe may not appear right at the top. That’s normal: the post usually explains the plant or topic first, and then follows with the related uses and recipes. Just scroll down a little until you reach the recipe section, where you’ll find the full instructions.
🌿 Stay in touch 🌿
Want to follow along a bit more closely?
You can sign up for the newsletter, read the latest posts or join us on our social channels.
If you’d like updates about new articles, seasonal topics and occasional offers around our projects, feel free to subscribe to the newsletter. It goes out only when there’s something worth sharing – no daily emails.