In honour of Earth Day, we at Toronto Green Community have developed a wide range of info sheets on ecological gardening techniques. Available below in pdf form are one page info sheets on composting, container gardening, natural pest control, planting, preparing soil, selecting plants and starting your garden. And they’re all Free!
Please enjoy the information and feel free to respond with feedback or requests for more info sheets.
Filed under Composting, Container Gardening, Pest Management, Soil Health, Weeds
Our beautiful new composters have been built! After a few days of hard work from our committed volunteers, we have now replaced our somewhat sad looking 15 year old bins with six sturdy new ones, complete with sliding fronts for easy access to compost. Pictures will follow soon; since it’s Earth Day today, the office is abuzz with activity and there’s been no time yet to get over to the garden for a photo shoot.
TGC is doing three days worth of presentations at the Yonge Eglinton Centre in honour of Earth Day with info sheets on all things green and talks on composting and container gardening. We’ve had great volunteer support this week, and lots of enthusiasm for our table and what we’re talking about. I will include links to our gardening infosheets on the blog later this week, so you’ll all be able to access them anytime.
In garden news, planting time is coming up fast! We’ve already got some asparagus crowns that are ready to go into the ground and become a long-term asparagus bed, and our strawberries are getting entrenched as well. At the moment, it’s all about collecting seeds so we know what we have available to plant. If there’s anything you’d love to see in the garden this year, or any seeds you have available to donate, just post and let us know!
Filed under Garden Update
Another garden event is in the works! This weekend we will be demolishing our dilapidated compost bins and building new ones to replace them and start the season off right. As many of you who have visited the garden may have noticed, our compost bins have reached the end of their useful lives, and are beginning to decompose along with the compost inside them. Two of our fantastic volunteers, Fabio and Miguel, have written up plans for the new bins (as well as some other exciting other additions we hope to do in the next few months!) and supplies are being bought as I type which all means one thing. . . Construction Party on Saturday!
Anyone out there with an interest in learning how to build composters, or other simple wooden garden structures, is welcome to come help out, and all it will cost you is some muscular effort to haul out the old compost and do some hammering and nailing. If we get the job done quickly there’s still lots to be done in the garden, so everyone is welcome!
As this blog is intended to highlight food security initiatives going on in the city as well, I’d like to spotlight a fantastic project The Stop is working on, an extention of their Do The Math Campaign called “Eat The Math”. This challenge has 10 prominent Torontonians and their families eating as many city residents do, consuming only the contents of a food bank hamper for a week. Though the hampers are intended to provide food for only 3 or 4 days, many low-income Torontonians have no choice but to stretch them out for a week or more. Follow participants including Naomi Klein, Joe Mihevc, Nick Saul and others as they report on the inadequacy of the food assistance available in the city and the importance of Putting Food in the Budget!
Filed under Events, Toronto Organizations
down the garden path 