July News

Lots of garden-related activity at SPEC this month, so it's time for another update...

As some of you may know, SPEC worked with Kitsilano High School and Bayview elementary

over the winter and spring to establish two school gardens. Catriona Gordon worked with the students to learn about organic gardening, plant, maintain, and celebrate the gardens.

Over the summer, while the students are on holidays, we have partnered with two summer programs for youth to continue with garden maintenance and urban agriculture education.

So far, the kids have enjoyed harvesting peas, radishes, kale, lettuce and (huge!) zucchini from the gardens so far, and we're looking forward to the cherry tomatoes, corn, beans, carrots, potatoes, sunflower seeds, beets, and more that will be ready for harvesting later in the season.

Lots going on at the SPEC building on our rooftop garden as well, and thanks to our dedicated rooftop waterers, our plants are surviving the intense heat we've been having over the past week! Take a look at what's new on the roof...

some beautiful kid-friendly signs (Big thanks to Julia and Lynette for creating these for us!) :

a mini greenhouse for our peppers:

Unlike most of our other plants in the rooftop garden, which are heirloom varieties, these peppers are a commercial hothouse cultivar. We're "training" them to climb up and around a string, like so:

Some more signage to provide information about some of the uniquie features of our garden, including our self-watering planter and our solar cooker (plus more to come!):

Unfortunately, we seem to have developed a bit of a whitefly problem on our potatoes and tomatoes! We've put out some yellow sticky traps to deal with the problem:

We have been harvesting lots of summer vegetables from our rooftop garden - peas, lettuce, kale, radishes - and now some of our containers are starting to look a little sparse. This means we are nearing the transition into winter planting, which we hope to start early next week. Hope you can join us for some fun up on the roof!

update for City Square

it's been a couple weeks, and we've seen a lot of growth in the garden, thanks to our wonderful sunshine and ed's regular (and much appreciated!) watering. Here's what's new in the garden -

after all that trouble to move the compost and lay down wire mesh under the composter, it took the rats all of TWO DAYS to chew a hole right through the composter. I've heard plastic is like candy to rats. We lined part of the inside of the composter with wire mesh, and have no issues since. (touch wood). We are still looking for old CDs to use for rodent deterrents, please let us know if you have any to donate!

our luscious tomatoes, which despite being staked still seem to become a jungle. almost all are producing fruit!

this is our 'two sisters' mix (most of the beans were shaded out by the pumpkin)

Corn! Above are the male flowers with their anthers dangling in the wind, in search of the female flower (or silk). When the silk (see below) is pollinated, each will produce on kernel on the cob.

our potatos have (also) grown into a jungle, spilling out over the beds and partially shading the eggplant down the centre (although the eggplants don't seem to be suffering)

hmmm...purple potatoes - purple flowers, and white potatos - white flowers. cool.

instead of just drying up, our potato flowers are producing fruit! You'll see they resemble little tomatoes (and indeed are the same family), but these fruits are toxic and cannot be eaten.

our zucchinis are phenomenal! on this plant alone, six zucchins are currently growing. We've been enjoying the harvest for a couple weeks now.

our harvest from this week - lettuce, chard, a turnip, zucchini, and some cilantro

we were lucky to get a visit from our old friends Emily and Cap who helped out in the garden last year. Zorka gave them the tour, naming all the plants and techniques we were using.

beautiful carrots from our square foot plot. I'd love to rave about how great they taste, but unfortunately someone took them all! Another unpleasant reality of urban farming.

here is lindsay working hard to put new soil on top of the bed that wasn't working. We planted yellow zucchini, leeks, celery, beets, carrots and radishes, which have mostly sprouted now.

We'll be in the garden at 10 am again on Sunday, beginning to plant for winter gardening. Come join us!

'Yes I Can' - People Preserving Food

In the advent of the 100 mile diet, more and more people are taking to their hot water baths for some steamy home preserves. Interested in promoting SAFE canning techniques, a few hungry individuals came together last August and formed the People Preserving Food. At the end of May, we finished our first 'train the teacher' canning workshop. The experienced and inspiring experts, Diane Collis and Ellen Wickberg, walked the students (and soon to be teachers) through both a theory and practice session. The goal of the project is to have canning instructors in local organizations around Vancouver all working together to promote safe canning techniques.

People Preserving Food (PPF) includes the following people and organizations:

Ellen Wickberg - Kiwassa Neighbourhood House Canning Community Kitchen
Diane Collis - Fresh Choice Kitchens, Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society (http://www.communitykitchens.ca/main/)
Jill Dalton - Eastside Family Place
Diana Day - Vancouver Coastal Health (http://www.vch.ca/)
Debra Elliot - Circle of Eagles Lodge
Roberta LaQuagua - Your Local Farmers Market Society (www.eatlocal.org)
Melody Kurt - Hastings Community Centre
Ian Marcuse - Grandview Woodlands Food Connection
Tara Moreau - Society Promoting Environmental Conservation (http://www.spec.bc.ca)
Rihanna Nagel - Environmental Youth Alliance (http://www.eya.ca/)
Liz Perkins - Fruit Tree Project (http://www.vcn.bc.ca/fruit/)

The makings for fun and delicious rhubarb stew include:

Great teachers - Ellen and Diane.

Rhubarb.

Safe, clean and organized work stations.

Mixing.

Measuring.

Closing.

Submerging.

Boiling,

Befriending.

and,
cooling.

I wanted to say a special thanks to Lynn Leong who was instrumental in getting this project up and running. Thanks so much Lynn - we will miss you:)
cheers,
tara

A taste of Wendell Berry for you.....

The Man Born to Farming

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water descending in the dark?

Do you ever feel like this when working in the garden? Blissful...


our good friend kamran on a field trip to the garden - he really enjoyed his gardening experience!

remeber the picture of the cute zucchini and celery a couple of posts ago? look at this - do you see any celery? us neither... (mental note - zucchini takes up LOTS of space!)

but I must say, the flowers are beautiful indeed...and delicious too!

we have already begun the process of saving seeds for next year. this is teomi and zlatko tying mesh bags to catch the seeds on the flowering greens.

we finally have some labels on the vegetables! we've planted 7 different kinds of tomatoes in total, so it will be important to know which is which!


but not all is peaches and cream in the garden....
just as we suspected, rats had been crawling under our composter (an unfortunate reality of urban gardening).

so many thanks to beng's hard work installing this 1/2 " wire mesh beneath (thanks again our neighbourhood Canadian Tire for donating this!) and we moved the compost bin and set up another bin for leaf storage (thanks to our friends in Engineering).

also, the composted horse manure that seems so promising in the beginning, has seemed to stall the efforts of these little plants to fulfill their destiny. i'm afraid lois might be right - we may need to just cover this and begin again...the good news is, not only have we learned something new, our winter seeds have arrived and now we have somewhere to plant them!


NEXT SUNDAY'S MEETING WILL BEGIN ONE HOUR EARLIER, AT 9 AM.

After much activity lately, there is not much to update on, we continue to enjoy harvesting radishes, spinach, mesclun, lettuce, and basil from our garden, and are (already!) thinking about what to plant for the winter garden, blessed as we are here in Vancouver....

this is the new bed we created, which was inspired by a backyard garden I saw over the weekend. The wooden posts were scavenged from a back alley and cut down. In it, we planted some green zebra and orange tomatoes (seeds collected from last year's plants), and will plant marigolds next week to keep them company.

Our square foot garden, now beginning succession. We have harvested all the radishes from one of the squares, and have planted bush beans in its place.

We will be in the garden again next Sunday, as always, all gardeners are welcome, regardless of age or experience.

good times at city square

it's always great fun planting with little ones, playing 'name that plant' and feeling their enthusiam and curiosity about gardening, plants, and food in general. We planted most of what was planned, and it was a lot of fun...

here are a few pics from our planting with the kids from the City Hall Childcare Society -

celery with our zucchini

the kids with their radishes (which they promised me they'd try...)

planting corn! we have faith it will work....



this is a picture I found that Teomi took of our bean teepee...impressive....

there was still lots to do on Sunday -

check it out - white picket fences!

Lois doing some much needed maintenance to the kids bench

the sunny spot in the garden, the envy of all the plants...

our new gardeners, cherry and amir planting cucumbers

mmmmm, yet another delicious harvest!

it looks like it will be another beautiful week, we'll be in the garden next Sunday morning at 10, come join the fun!