The Milton Community Gardens

Local environmental group Milton Green recently sponsored a walking garden tour which included a close-up look at the Milton Community Gardens.

Currently located on the Allendale property across the street from the Milton Mall, this unassuming urban farm has been quietly producing tomatoes, beans and carrots for over fifteen years. And yet, most people in town don't even know it's there.

It's just as well that the Town hasn't gone out of its way to promote the garden or inform residents about its existence. Organizer Noelle Walsh has a long list of people waiting for one of the garden's 34 plots to become available, with many new residents and even a few out of towners wanting to get their hands dirty.

This is not to say that the Town and the Region aren't supportive. They prepare the plots, lease the land and insure it free of charge. Water tanks are filled throughout the season, and gardeners are provided with all the free mulch they can use. But the demand grows every year, so Walsh would like to see individual neighbourhoods start their own community gardens.

Happily, Walsh may get her wish. Chris Hadfield Public School recently received approval from the Town of Milton to start their own community garden in parkland adjacent to the school near Woodward and Dixon.

Starting next spring, students at the school will learn about gardening, food and agriculture by planting and tending to their own seedlings. Town staff will till the soil and provide water, and neighbourhood residents will tend the garden through the summer until the fruits and vegetables are ready to be harvested by the kids in the fall.

No word yet on whether other area schools plan to implement similar programs, but with any luck, community gardening in Milton will prove to be a growing trend.

  

June/July Garden Update

Sorry the blogging's been a little light, but hey - it's the lazy days of summer!

I thought I'd share some of the updated photos of the veggie garden, or at least updated as of a couple of weeks ago. In general, I can report that the newspaper/straw mulch plan has been a HUGE success! Weeds are at a minimum, I haven't had to water nearly as often, and the plants are healthy and happy.

The only failures so far seem to be the Bok Choy and the beans and peas. I think I'm just going to have to give up on Bok Choy altogether - the stuff starts bolting almost as soon as I get it in the ground and nothing I do can dissuade it.

As for the beans and peas, the only ones from the first planting that sprouted were the Broad Windsor beans. There was no sign of the snap peas or the string beans, so I planted a second round. Two weeks later only a couple had come up, so I tried French beans instead. I'm told beans and peas need a lot of heat which we just haven't been getting this year. We'll see. Interestingly, the bean row is the only area I didn't cover with newsprint.

First two plantings of Broad Windsor beans, a few weeks ago...

And the Windsor beans today - flowering!


The only pea plant to come up so far


The string beans are starting to come up,
but something's been chewing on them


And I don't even especially like tomatoes. Want some?


Bok Choy FAIL


Happy cabbage!


Mesclun lettuce mix in the middle, Swiss chard to the right


Romaine

The Garden: Let's Try this Again...

As I mentioned, I'm taking a different approach with the vegetable garden this year. The oregano and the lemon balm are history, the few remaining strawberries are restricted to the perimeter, and the plants are planted in nice neat rows.

I'm also experimenting with newspaper and straw mulch this year which, while quite a bit more work at the outset, will hopefully cut way back on the weeding later in the year.

Planted: bok choy, cabbage, Romaine lettuce, mesclun mix lettuce, Swiss chard, red shepherd peppers, Romano beans, purple string beans, sugar snap peas, and 7(!) different varieties of heirloom tomatoes. I don't even like tomatoes that much!

Anyone want some tomatoes?

Stage 1: Lots of digging. Grass should be declared a noxious weed.




Stage 2: Hoe rows and plant. I was going to lay the newspaper first and poke holes, but that doesn't really work for seedlings.




Stage 3: Strips of newspaper, with topsoil on top. Make sure the ground is well soaked first, and wet it more afterwards.




Stage 4: Straw. Not sure how good an idea this will ultimately be - it might all blow away if it dries out. But we'll see. The screen is my husband's contraption, for sifting weeds, roots and rocks out of the soil. It worked pretty well.

Springtime in Sprawlville

The problem with having multiple blogs, as with multiple children I suppose, is that somebody always ends up not getting enough attention. Which is probably why I only have one kid. But now that I'm back from the Liberal Convention, hopefully I'll find the time to do some more substantive posts to poor, neglected Sprawlville.

Spring should also inspire more frequent updates. I've got about half the garden dug up, and I have a couple of ideas that I hope will make things go a little more smoothly this year. One is to give up on my haphazard layout working around existing plants, and just go with straight rows. The oregano was nice, but by August last year I was having to hack my way through it with a machete just to get at the tomatoes.

The other idea is to lay down paper mulch in the form of newspaper. I first ran across this in conjunction with the no-dig method, but it's apparently just as effective on its own or under a layer of hay or other traditional mulches. In theory it's supposed to keep the weeds down, keep heat and moisture in the soil (or maybe not heat?), and then rot away by the end of the season. They actually have paper mulch at Lee Valley Tools, but at ten bucks a roll I figured newsprint would do just fine, thank you.

I picked up four different varieties of heirloom tomato seedlings from my Willow Creek friends at the Farmers' Market last weekend, and a bunch more seedlings from La Rose yesterday: mixed lettuces, swiss chard, bok choy, basil, and in a fit of optimism, a sweet red pepper plant. Now I just need some kale and an assortment of bean and pea seeds and a proper trellis, and I'll be ready to go!

BTW, the heirloom tomatoes came with an incredibly informative pamphlet with tips and tricks for growing tomato plants. Stuff a noob like me would never have known like pruning them back, or planting them deep to generate more roots. I'll ask Crystal and Kelly if I can post it here. Any other suggestions in the 'Vegetable Gardening for Dummies' vein are always appreciated.



I also wanted to share a couple of new blogs on the blogroll. Well, new to me.

openalex is a blog by Alex Aylett, who has some serious academic creds in the urban redesign and sustainability field. He currently lives in Durban, South Africa, so he comes up with some fascinating articles like this one about the Durban water & sanitation utility generating power from biogas and micro-hydro from excess water pressure.

The New Resilient is a group blog put out by some of the bright lights in the food security / sustainable agriculture / re-localization movement, like Jon Steinman of 'Deconstructing Dinner'. Always interesting stuff - and one of the nicest looking blogs I've seen in a while.

Home Farming In Guelph... and Washington!

A couple of friends of mine went to an open house over the weekend for an organization called Backyard Bounty, a group which turns people's backyards into 'micro-farms'.

The deal is this: you give their crew access to your backyard, front yard, side yard, wherever. They dig it up, they plant the vegetables, they do all the weeding, watering, etc. You sit back and watch it grow, and as the vegetables become ready for harvest, you get free food. But since you can only eat so much, the remainder is sold to local restaurants and markets.

Unfortunately they only operate in Guelph for now, but if the program becomes more popular, who knows?

And in a curious case of serendipity, I found this item in The Star this weekend:

Garden scores green thumbs up
Grow-your-own-food movement hopes patch of vegetables, herbs at White House to inspire others

WASHINGTON – Twenty-six elementary schoolchildren wielded shovels, rakes, pitchforks and wheelbarrows to help first lady Michelle Obama break ground on the first day of spring for a produce and herb garden on the White House grounds.

Crops to be planted in the coming weeks on the 102-square-metre, L-shaped patch near the fountain on the South Lawn include spinach, broccoli, various lettuces, kale and collard greens, and assorted herbs and berries. There will also be a beehive.

"We're going to try to make our own honey here as well," Obama told the Grade 5 students from Bancroft Elementary School yesterday. The youngsters will be return to the White House next month to help with the planting, and in late April to help harvest and cook some of the produce in the mansion's kitchen.

Obama said her family has talked about planting such a garden since they moved to the White House in January.

My only quibble: Obama's outfit wasn't exactly appropriate to the task at hand. Maybe I'll send her a Lee Valley Tools catalogue so she can get a sweatshirt, hat, knee pads, and a pair of decent gloves.

My Garden: First Fruits

Through no fault of my own, my veggie garden has been growing like gangbusters over the past few weeks - likely the result of all the rain we've been getting. The weeds and oregano have also been growing like mad, but I've managed to keep the worst of them down.

I've already been harvesting the bok choy (which is looking more like Swiss chard these days and making me question my memory), and have gathered a couple of handfuls of snap peas and some gianormous snow peas. And this week, my first tomato started turning red!



That one is on the heirloom plant I bought from Willow Creek. It grew weeks before any of the others and has just been sitting there, biding it's time. The rest are starting to catch up, though. They all look like giant jalapenos.



My other tomatoes are all doing well, too...



... as are the mutant snow peas.



And I could have sworn this was bok choy. It certainly doesn't have that weird metal-on-teeth taste you get with chard... well, whatever. Leafy green stuff - it's all good.



Today I bought a book called "The Edible Canadian Garden", which has all sorts of very useful information that I probably should have had, you know, before I planted. But next year's garden is going to be awesome.

Hmm... maybe a greenhouse...

My Vegetable Garden

In case I haven't mentioned it before, I have a black thumb. I can count the number of plants I have successfully nurtured to maturity on the fingers of one hand. I've killed aloe plants.

Still, I persist.

This year, once again, I have hopes of wresting something edible from our tiny patch of arable yard (the rest being in perpetual shade). Whenever I attempt this, I always try to select vegetables that I actually eat on a regular basis, which unfortunately don't always include the easiest to grow species. So, no zucchini or runner beans, but yes to arugula and bok choy.

Tomatoes I can grow. We got lots of tomatoes.



In addition to installing the water barrel and hooking it up to that funky drip irrigation system from Lee Valley Tool, I have two other schemes in mind to be implemented (maybe) in the next couple of weeks:

1) Tobacco pesticide. Back when I had an interest in herbology I took a class in Organic Gardening 101, and I actually retained a memory of 'tobacco tea' being an excellent natural pesticide. I've looked into it again, and I suspect it might come in handy with the bok choy - although apparently NOT with the tomatoes.

As a matter of fact, I've been wondering if struggling tobacco farmers in Ontario might find a good market for nicotine-based pesticides now that the government is going to be banning chemical pesticides.

2) Newspaper ground cover. I've been reading a bit about no-dig gardening, and while I don't think I'm anywhere near that point just yet, there are a couple of ideas inherent in the concept that I think could be applied to my generic garden: newspaper and straw.

Ground cover controls weeds (great for lazy gardeners like me), but the commercial stuff is expensive and a pain in the ass. Newspaper is compostable, free, and easy to lay out around existing plants. And adding a layer of straw or hay would retain moisture, which was a big issue last year what with the heat and my lackadaisical watering habits. Plus it would cover the ugly newspaper.

I may or may not end up implementing any of these plans this year. We'll see how the summer progresses. At any rate, I do have one 'Note To Self' for next year: enough with the abstract garden design.

I liked the idea of just leaving stuff like the oregano and lavender where it wanted to be and trying to plant around it, but it's just too awkward to maintain and weed. I would like to retain as much of the strawberries as I can, but they seem to have mostly migrated to the edge anyway.

....

Now that summer is upon us and most of my contractual obligations are behind me, I hope to delve a little more deeply into what I originally intended to do with this blog: namely, explore the issues of sustainability and sprawl though a close examination of life in Milton.

More and better soon. I promise.

Best Gardening Thing Ever

I thought I was so clever.

I was thinking about setting up a rain barrel again this year, and was pondering ways to get the water to the garden with my usual minimal effort. I had seen 'dribble' hoses before, and realized how simple it would be to hook one up to a faucet near the base of the barrel and just let gravity do the work. Eureka!

I should have known it was too good an idea.

Gravity Feed Watering Kit

The kit is, of course, from Lee Valley Tools (home of all things wondrous), and is surprisingly cheap: $34.50 for all the hoses, fittings and spikes, plus another $17.50 for the barrel tap.

This system has no end of good things going for it. Drip irrigation systems lose less water to evaporation than sprinklers, and rainwater is better for the plants than tap water because it is warm and has no chlorine. And I can just turn it on and leave it, which is a huge plus for me.

Who knows? Maybe my vegetable garden will actually survive my inept ministrations this year.

Video Post #1: My House

Since this blog is all about local everything, I thought I'd start with the most local locale I could think of: my own house.

My house is something of a rarity these days - a small (about 1,200 sq.ft.), older detached home with a big yard and lots of trees in a mixed neighbourhood. We have no central air. We have no dishwasher. We have no granite countertops. It's messy and the lawn's a wreck, but in the grand scheme of things it's a very comfortable and relatively sustainable place to live.

For someone who grew up in suburbia, this is paradise.



(Just so you know, today's video blog was brought to you from my swanky new laptop while eating lunch at Coffee Culture at Main & Commercial in Milton. Free WiFi and the best grilled panini in town. Sweet.)