Our Proposed Community Garden

I am so excited! It seems like this new community garden cannot happen fast enough.The interested parties have already met twice to discuss the garden. I have also met with the city parks department and they showed me a map of this park.They offered its use and was I ever surprised! This park has two sections, a north and a south side with no trees to shade any future gardens. Hubby and I and our team walked the park and it is perfect for what we have planned. The park is about three acres on each side. We decided the north side is the best as far as drainage goes.It has very few neighbours looking towards the park and is right next to a pair of tennis courts, a children's play area and a parking lot. Yes, parking is already there! Now I doubt the city will let us use the whole park but right now it just looks like pasture. I have a feeling it had dairy cows on this site years ago. Just look at its potential.

I have been drawing up a garden design, not once but twice now. If you look closely, this is the center of the community garden. I have included a sitting area under a pergola so people can take a break from their gardening chores.

We will also have a food sharing garden along with allotments. I think its important to give back to the community and any food grown in our sharing garden will go directly to our local food bank.

I incorporated a compost demonstration area, rain barrels,raised allotment beds, tool shed, sink and many other important features. In the corner of the children's garden will be a wildlife garden, native plant garden and a shared fruit garden.
These are grand plans and the garden will be done in phases. There is still lots of bureaucratic paperwork and presentations to the city to do. There will also be a neighbourhood survey done.
Today I do the first step, applying for an official name. Wish me luck.

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Its Official!

Its official. We finally received our incorporation papers. I know, what does that have to do with a community garden? Well you just don't start planting as we found out very quickly. You have to apply for a name for your society through the provincial government. First you apply for a name by checking trademarks and copyrights. Luckily Ladner Community Garden Society wasn't taken. You pay a fee for the name right away. The next step is applying for incorporation. You want to form a society and have directors as you can't lease public space without going through this process. Okay, another fee, a hundred dollars to be exact. Applying for incorporation is writing bylaws which can be painful at best if you want to write your own. Thank you Mark for doing such a wonderful job writing our bylaws. If you don't write your own, there are easier ways such as following out set bylaws as given in the Society Act. Our hard work as paid off as we received our red seal of approval

Growing Your Own Food

Carrot harvest Growing your own food just became even more important than ever. As prices increased this fall we saw lettuce and cauliflower go up in price. Reasons for that are many but the drought we had could be one of the reasons. Overall the transportation costs of everything are up due to the high cost of fuel and that's being passed on to the consumer. Of course, many of us are not earning any more than we did before. I predict that 2023 will see another resurgence of food growing like we did at the beginning of the pandemic. Some of us may be doing it with less space than we had before so that creates more challenges. Just to let you know how popular gardening has become, our community garden has a waitlist of over twenty people. They may not get a spot in the garden for several years. It's probably time for a new community garden to be set up in the community. To save money in the winter think about growing crops that store well like carrots, potatoes, win

Ladner Seedy Saturday is Only a Few Weeks Away!

Yes, it's time for Ladner Seedy Saturday and Garden Expo 2018. Our organizing committee is busy behind the scenes registering new and returning vendors, booking speakers and organizing the seed swap for the event. Are you a vendor wanting to come to Seedy Saturday? We still have a few tables left for lease. I am excited about our two speakers coming this year. Janis Matson is a well known garden speaker and owns Shoreline Landscape Design. Janis is an instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Langley and also teaches classes at VanDusen Botanical Garden. Janis will be teaching us how to use ornamental grasses in the home garden. Our next speaker is Randal Atkinson. Known as West Coast Garden' s Plant Expert Extraordinaire, Randal is the go to person for design, plant selection, growing and care of plants. Randal is passionate about gardening and loves sharing his knowledge with the public. You can often see him teaching classes at West Coast Garden centre

Ladner Community Garden

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