May In the Ladner Community Garden

Happy gardening to all our members at the Ladner Community Garden. What a different season we are having this year. The sun has been shining with a few showers in between to keep our gardens watered. Perfect for growing our vegetables. 

The grade three class planted this garden to assist our donations to the local food bank. Its time to plant a few more seeds in there where we can. Its all about successive plantings.

The potatoes we planted in March are doing great. Lets hope we can harvest a few next month.

 I took this shot last night. Its so nice to visit the garden in the evenings. Remember to have your plots planted by May 31 as stated in the garden rules. You want to be able to harvest as much as you can from your allotment. The gardening season generally runs from March to October but watch some of us grow winter crops this year.

 I think this plant is just beautiful. Those blue green leaves would be great mixed in a herbaceous border. Now I am getting ideas. I have corn and beans growing with my flowers at home. Anywhere I can find a bare spot I plant some more seeds.

So many allotments have new seedlings up! Keep up the good work everyone. Remember to mark your calendars. We are building a pergola on the weekend of June 23-24 and also having a community dinner on the Sunday. We would love to have volunteers if you are free. Just think, we will have a bit of shade to sit under soon. We will also be building an herb spiral soon so if you are interested in attending this class, let us know. Never heard of an herb spiral, check it out here. This will be a collection of herbs for all of us to share, kind of a communal garden.
If you have just planted seeds, be sure to water carefully until they have germinated. The top of the soil dries out quickly. Once your plants are up they don't need daily watering. You want to begin encouraging the roots to travel deep to find moisture. This will develop a stronger plant.
Good news, the allotments are full this year. We also have a waiting list of people interested. More and more people are wanting to grow their own food. That's a good thing.

Ladner Community Garden Plant Sale Alert

Its been a busy week at the Ladner Community Garden. We are getting ready for our first plant sale. The plants are potted up and are being labeled and priced this week. If you would like to volunteer to help out at the plant sale just comment below.
We have over 400 plants for sale, some special containers made up for Mothers day, vegetables and herbs.

Come visit the community garden to see what we are all about. We have a food bank garden where we grow food for the needy. We also have a teaching garden where children from ages 3-9 come to learn in the garden. Is your class wanting to explore gardening? Kids just love to dig, look for insects and explore nature. Maybe they will be our future farmers.

Did you know that West Coast Seeds has a seed trial garden on our site? This year they are testing a new wildflower seed. I cant wait to see the swath of colour this summer!
So mark your calendars. The plant sale is Saturday, May 12 from 9am - 12pm at the Ladner Community garden. The Ladner Community Garden is located in the 6500 block Holly Park Drive in Ladner, right behind Harris Nursery.

Our Fruit Garden Is Built!

In the original plans for the Ladner Community Garden we had designed a fruit garden. We knew we couldn't grow plants such as blueberries and raspberries in our 4'x10' foot beds without losing valuable vegetable growing space so this was the solution.

We had to remove three existing allotment beds in order to repair a very boggy area in the garden. Yes, we need some fill to fix this area so we can replace the three beds and get back to business. The three empty beds were moved to the fruit garden space where Jim leveled and measured to get them just right.

 My mouth just waters thinking about all the fruit we can harvest for our community meals this summer. We have five blueberry plants, some strawberries and a thornless blackberry plant waiting to call this home.

By the end of the day, this bed was planted up with British Sovereign strawberries. One of the neighbours kindly donated plants that he had been growing for fifty years. I just researched this strawberry and it was introduced in to BC in 1923. I can't wait to try this berry out. Hmmm, strawberry pie anyone?

Thanks to all the volunteers who came out to help yesterday. Not only did we move six yards of soil, we built three beds in the fruit garden and potted up almost 200 hundred plants. We also had a lesson from Don on growing vegetables year round. Thanks Don!
Don't you love our community garden? I love the sharing of ideas, new friends and of course, the harvests.

What Can I Plant in my Garden This Week?

If you haven't planted already here are some ideas for your garden plot. Its time to plant carrots, beets, Swiss chard, broccoli, cauliflower, celery transplants, onion and leek transplants, parsnip, kale and head lettuce. Phew, that's enough to get you going for now. If you want some growing information on any of these vegetables, check it out here. Enter a vegetable in my search box and you should find out all the growing information you need. If its not there, let me know.
The city has turned the water on so we are good to go. Not that we need it yet. With rain every other day it will be enough to get your seeds going. If you are planting transplants, try to plant them on a cooler or overcast day. Transplanting on a sunny day can be tricky. The new transplants will need to be watered carefully.

This year you will need to add some soil to top off your garden beds. A lot of beds have settled and adding new soil will help. I see lots of activity with insects and earthworms in our beds so that's a sign of a good growing medium.
This weekend we will be preparing for our upcoming plant sale on May 12 from 9-12. The sale will be held at the community garden. If you have plants to donate, please let us know. So far we have over 200 plants for sale. We will be having a potting up session on Sunday, April 22 from 9-11am. We will also have a short meeting and Don will be doing a presentation on what you can plant now and how to read a seed packet.
This is an exciting time of year. We hope to meet you all this weekend.

Spring Has Arrived!

Here it is April and its finally starting to warm up. Plants are really growing quickly at the community garden. The Narcissus are in full bloom and the Tulips won't be far behind. Signs of spring means weeds are growing as well. I know, you didn't want to hear about those. We have been taking time to really dig out those awful quack grass weeds from around the allotment beds. Once that is done and a layer of fresh mulch is down, we will be all set for spring planting. If you haven't already planted, its time to plant lettuce, spinach, cabbage, radishes, onion sets, shallots, turnips and kohlrabi.

Check out our new Pansies in the rock garden bed. I love these dainty little spring flowers!

Thanks to Bonnie for generously donating some Swiss chard to our food bank garden. Yesterday the grade three class planted vegetable seeds in this area and we hope to see them germinate soon with all this lovely sunshine.

You have to take a peek at the West Coast Seeds trial gardens. Mark has planted wildflower seeds this year in all his raised beds. Imagine how fabulous that will be this summer. I can hardly wait! If you take a look, you will see tiny seedlings emerging in his beds.

I would like to welcome the Winskill community gardeners to our society. We spent the morning helping them get the spring cleanup done. I am anxious to see what will be planted in these gardens this year. It was a pleasure meeting all of you today.
Dont forget our potting up session and general meeting is on April 22 at the Ladner Community Garden at 9am.

Welcome to our New Community Garden!

As of this week, The Ladner Community Garden Society will be overseeing the gardens at Winskill Community Garden in Tsawwassen.

The gardens were started by Harry Caine, a local resident and member of the Lions club as an addition to the Lions Wellness Park next to it.  There is some great Delta history about how this garden got started on this site.
This year the gardens have needed some extra support so we were asked if we could oversee them. I am walking through the gardens tomorrow to see what we can do and to meet the gardeners who tend them.

These photos were taken back in early February so the gardens are needing a spring cleanup which has already begun. We hope to bring more beauty and bounty to South Delta. Please stop by and chat if you see us at the gardens.

Spring Clean Up at the Ladner Community Garden

Spring has arrived at the Ladner Community Garden. Today we had our first of a two day spring cleanup. We had to dig out weedy grass from around the raised beds and get our allotment beds cleaned up. One of our gardeners was excited to see that his chard had returned. Now that's a fun surprise in the garden!

Food Bank Garden

 We raked over the food bank garden on one side and split in to two separate beds. We hope to make one of them a healing garden and use the other for cubs to earn a gardening badge. If you live in Ladner and are interested in your cub group doing a badge or two , let me know by leaving a comment below.

Food Bank Garden

The east side of the food bank garden is just about ready to plant. A bit more fall rye to take care of first. Thanks to Bonnie for donating  and planting Swiss chard in the food bank garden today. Thanks to Don who came by and cut the lawn.

Our allotment gardeners were kept busy cleaning their beds in preparation for spring planting. We also had free seeds to choose from.

The children filled pots of soil and we planted sage for our upcoming plant sale. We knew that empty bed in the corner would become a useful place for soil.

Jim built us a storage area out of pallets donated to us by Save On Foods. Here we can store all the leftover driveway rocks for future use. All I could think of was planting those pallets as hubby shook his head thinking I was crazy.

Just a reminder to all of our garden family, the community garden has a policy of trash in, trash out. I was dismayed to have to bring someone else's trash home to my house for pickup. We can't compost plastic. The blue garbage bins will be removed this year. They were to hold weedy material, not garbage.

Hubby and I stayed behind to bag all the mouldy straw that had been dropped off some time last year. As you can see we have 11 bags to go to someones curbside for pickup. No more room in the composters for now. I scored today by finding a discarded Lavender in the compost. I proudly planted it in the rock garden. 

The wooden crate has been moved to the back of our shed to make room for new composters. Yea!!! For now we can use the crate to store pots so they don't blow away in the wind.
West Coast Seeds has planted wildflowers in their beds across the center of the garden. Imagine how colourful that will be this summer!