Karen Bertelsen

Ontario

Writer at Canadian Living Magazine

My name's Karen. I do stuff.

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Articles

What I'm Doing The Easter Weekend

1 week ago | theartofdoingstuff.com | Karen Bertelsen

Easter weekend is almost here, and I, like many of you, plan on spending all four days in the garden, with a blow torch. It's a really good way to avoid eating ham. I’ll be lining the garden paths with landscape cloth to get ahead of the weeds. The blow torch? That’s for cutting the cloth. It seals the edges and adds a little flair to what’s essentially crawling around in dirt with a flamethrower. Practical and not at all alarming to the neighbouring gardeners because - they're gardeners.
Your Lemon Scented Future

2 weeks ago | theartofdoingstuff.com | Karen Bertelsen

Today's post is provided so you can mentally prepare yourself for Monday's post. And your lemon scented future. I'm afraid so. On Monday, we'll all gather here again to let dirt know that we are the boss of it - once a year. It can skulk in the cataracts for months - but on Spring Cleaning Day we'll see every smudge, speck and splatter. Yes, the list is coming. Sixty-seven spring cleaning tasks. Some reasonable. But let's not worry about that yet.
Ice Cube Poppy Planting - Let's Do This

2 weeks ago | theartofdoingstuff.com | Karen Bertelsen

There’s a craze taking place in the poppy planting world right now. And it’s aimed at a plant with all the punctuality and temperament of Mariah Carey. Enter the craze: embedding poppy seeds into ice cubes. Poppies: move them and they'll die just to make a point. Try to arrange them and they squiggle their way to wherever they want to be. They don't care what you want. They're poppies. I'm not exactly a stranger to strong-willed plants. I'm quite famous for having tamed the luffah plant in Zone 6.
Cold Stratification & The Seeds That Love It

2 weeks ago | theartofdoingstuff.com | Karen Bertelsen

You can get much better germination with some vegetable and flower seeds if you put them through a period of cold before planting them. If you're having trouble germinating certain seeds it might be because you're doing every single thing right - except this one thing. Cold stratification is a period of chilling and it might be exactly what you need for your persnickety seed. It's especially helpful if you missed the window for plants that like to be planted when it's still cold outside.
Stuff to Read, Watch & Listen To: April 2025

3 weeks ago | theartofdoingstuff.com | Karen Bertelsen

Not a single television show I've watched in the past decade has given me the complex emotional roller coaster I experience while listening to Dust in the Wind. Yet I continue to search. Here we go!What I've Been Watching & Reading LatelyHere’s the stuff I liked, the stuff I almost finished mostly out of stubbornness, and one thing so terrible it earned its own special shoutout.
It's a Puzzle of The First Flowers of the Year!

1 month ago | theartofdoingstuff.com | Karen Bertelsen

I know what you’re thinking — She forgot about us puzzle people. A reasonable assumption. But no. I was simply waiting for the perfect moment. And today, as I trudged through my still winter-dirty backyard, I knew: the moment had arrived. That’s the romantic bloggy version. The truth? I picked my first posy of the year, snapped a mediocre photo of it, and hours later while flopped on the couch watching The Residence on Netflix, I thought, “Yep.
The Day Before the World Stopped

1 month ago | theartofdoingstuff.com | Karen Bertelsen

On March 10, 2020, I was boiling maple syrup in my backyard, nervously aware the world was about to turn into a disaster movie. I fed wood into my boiler, a bit worried I'd run out before the sap was done boiling. I should have been worried about the upcoming global shortage of good television and anxiety meds. We knew things were weird and quite frankly scary by March 10th. The news was talking nonstop about a novel coronavirus spreading across the entire globe. We weren't sure what was happening.
A Really Great Seed Starting Tip

1 month ago | theartofdoingstuff.com | Karen Bertelsen

You’ve got the seeds, you’ve got the enthusiasm and if you’re like most gardeners, you’ve also got about 47 open tabs with conflicting advice about when to start everything. Close those tabs. This weekend, I spent a lot of time with my seeds and my nemesis—ChatGPT—commanding it to come up with the perfect seed-starting schedule for me. And now it can create a perfect seed starting schedule for you.
How to stop food from freezing in your crisper. An easy DIY fix.

1 month ago | theartofdoingstuff.com | Karen Bertelsen

Iceberg lettuce got its name in the 1920s when farmers packed it in ice to keep it fresh during shipping. Unfortunately, if your crisper drawer is turning every head of lettuce into an actual iceberg, you’ve got a problem. Here’s how to stop your fridge from freezing your vegetables. I used to have one of those refrigerators with the freezer on the bottom, that were fancy about 20 years ago. You know ... the kind you have to press your face onto the kitchen floor to get the ice cube tray out of.
Philip in the Snow

2 months ago | theartofdoingstuff.com | Karen Bertelsen

This is one of the very few times I've ever dropped Philip's leash and let him run ahead of me. All so I could get this picture. Picturesque, right? This photo was a month ago, when snow was still a charming, romantic gesture. Now, it's a blobby, time-consuming obstacle that turned out to be much dirtier than when we first met. The snow is now too deep to walk through the trails, parks and on most of the sidewalks. #hamilton, ontarioPresently, the snow is properly olden-days, Skidoo suit era deep.