More garden workshops coming

For those that have been enjoying the garden workshop series, and those that have not had a chance to check them out yet - there are 2 more workshops coming up in May.

May 8 - Compost Crawl - Compost scientist Katherine Buckley from the Ag Research Station will tour some of the gardens to show us how to make good compost out of our garden scraps. A chipper may be involved!

May 31 - Preserving - The first in a series of preserving workshops - how to save our precious veggies and fruit for eating through the year. Join us at 6:30 at the Brandon Friendship Centre. Meegwetch to BFC for giving us the space.

Next Gardening Workshop - Organics!

The second in our garden workshop series is coming up tomorrow, 6:30 at the Parks Complex Garage on McGregor. Linda Boys will give us the basics of organic gardening - hope to see you there!

Cleaned up gardens!

Garden Clean Up Day at Hummingbird was a big success - despite winds gusting to 70 km/h! A bunch of people turned up to pitch in and pick bricks, pull weeds, and move rubble. Brian brought his trailer and hauled all the bricks away, along with other miscellaneous rubble. Many hands made light work of picking up anything that didn't blow away.

We also moved some raspberry suckers from the side of the garden plots into the separate raspberry bed. Many of the plants from last year managed to grow legs and walk away over the winter, but there were plenty of suckers coming up in the beds to replace them.

The old plots are now tilled, and will soon be re-staked ready for planting (cold weather crops only!). The new plots have also been tilled over once but will likely need another tilling before they are ready to use. We hope to have everything ready to go by the beginning of May.

Hard work and silliness at garden cleanup!

Garden Cleanup Day - Saturday April 10

I know it's short notice, but at the garden meeting yesterday we decided to have a pre-tilling garden cleanup day this Saturday, April 10. Come around noon, bring a garden fork, shovel, pail, and anything else you might need to clean up your plots from last year. We will be tilling the ground for the new plots first, to get started softening the dirt, so we have a few days to get the perennial weeds out of the existing plots.

Now is our chance to get rid of the dandelions, move renegade raspberry canes, and generally get roots out of the way of the tiller. This guy above will just turn into more of his kind if he gets into the tiller, so we'd best dig them out before that happens.

Some of us have already done cleanup and are ready to go - but I hope to see many out there on Saturday!

Garden Workshop Series

The BNRC is hosting a series of garden related workshops this spring and summer. The first one - Gardening 101 - is coming up quickly! Details are in the poster (click on it to see a larger file). This will be a crash course on how to garden in Western Manitoba's climate.

The second workshop is coming up on April 12 - Introduction to Organics, for those of us that are new to using organic methods of growing veggies without chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

There will be more topics coming. I'll post details as I know about them. If you are on the garden e-mail list you should also watch your inbox!

Garden Season is starting!

Hummingbird Garden's season officially started with our gardeners meeting yesterday evening. Many of the gardeners met at a nearby school with the Healthy Brandon Coordinator and Brandon's Garden Coordinator. We had a few snacks, talked about what went well and not so well at the garden, and most importantly got excited about the new garden season!

We have filled the existing plots to capacity, and have a waiting list already. We had to make a tough choice - cut back on the space alloted to each person, or expand the garden space. OK, it wasn't really a very tough choice! We have some very able gardeners and some good connections to equipment and materials. So of course we will be expanding the plots to welcome more gardeners.

We also formed a garden committee to look after some of the day to day stuff at the garden. Neither of the coordinators is at the garden often enough to keep an eye on things, so we thought it would work best to look after it as a group. With a few of us working together, we should be able to keep things going all summer, even when some are away. So far the garden committee consists of Brian, Doug, Melissa, Terry, Fiona and Dana. We are open to having more as well.

The plan for expansion is to till a new plot area on the higher ground near last year's new plots. There are about 20 new people on the list so this will allow us to give everyone some space. Brian had already checked out the soil in that area to make sure it was going to be good enough soil. Of course the bricks are still free!

The first meeting of the garden committee will be in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

Big carrots

I had an interesting time with my carrots this year. The first batch I planted didn't germinate. Not even one seed. I don't know what I did - wrong phase of the moon, too cold, too warm, too dry, too wet? Maybe even seed too old. After a couple of weeks it was clear that nothing was coming. So I got some seeds in seed tape, and planted those.

I companion planted them in between green beans. I have read that they go well together, so I decided to try. Once the beans got big, I could barely even tell whether there were any carrots there! Then once the beans were done, I started poking between the leaves to look for carrots.
They hadn't come up that well, but there were a few carrots, maybe once every 6 inches or so. And this is how big they were! Big, solid carrots, with lots of root and only a small amount of leaf. They're nicely formed as they weren't touching each other.

They tasted great, too. Nice and sweet. Don't ask me what variety, I can't remember. I didn't keep very good records this year.