Ladner Community Garden

You are invited! Ladner Community Garden Burger and a Beverage Event Ladner Legion, June 12, 2011 12-3pm Silent auction and Door Prize Bring your friends for lunch on the first Ladner Village Market Day Tickets available for $15 at West Coast Seeds and Bryans Bookstore in Ladner or by contacting Kristin at deltagardener@dccnet.com Tickets must be purchased by June 5! All proceeds go to the building of the community garden.

Its only been one week since the volunteers helped build the Ladner Community Garden. Look how far we have come. The photo above is just three truck loads of the six loads we received from the city and then the manure arrived, all twenty yards of it. I figure it must have been about eighty,yes eighty,yards of soil and manure for us to shovel. I know how hard we all worked and how much we ached afterwards. This is what is left of that huge pile just seven days later. All I can say is wow! That is a lot of shoveling! Our beds are filled and our gardens are planted. Today the food bank garden took shape thanks to some serious hard work by a few dedicated volunteers. We couldn't wait to plant some seeds. In went potatoes, beans, rutabagas, onions, spinach and lettuce. We cant wait to share the bounty with the food bank.

The Ladner Community Garden is an organic garden. We encourage the use of organic fertilizers in our gardens. Why Organic? Organic fertilizers are released slowly in to the soil and microorganisms break them down in to water soluble form that is absorbed by plants. Synthetic fertilizers don't last as long as organic ones do. Organic fertilizers have a high ratio of organic matter to nutrient value.They are great soil amendments adding structure to your soil. Examples of organic fertilizers are:Manure, fish emulsion, blood meal, bone meal, compost, mulches, worm castings and kelp meal. When we filled the community garden beds, we added lots of manure so this year there is no need for any extra fertilizer. They are already to plant. If you look at the photo above, it was taken last summer at the Kirkland House Children's Garden. All that was used in this bed was compost and manure and look how it grew. I love to use compost in my garden. Topdressing your garden in the spring or t...

Its only been a few days since we built this garden and already most of our allotment gardens are planted. People are planting mostly vegetables with a few companion plants as well. I love seeing how each individual gardener plants their garden. There are so many different ideas out there on how to grow food. It will be interesting to see how things work out over the summer. It doesn't matter what time of day you go to visit the garden, there is always someone there tending their garden. It has really become a community of its own. In starting this garden , we hoped to create conversation. Well, that was an understatement. There are ideas shared, recipes given and new friends made. It was just what we envisioned when we decided to start this community project. One of the most popular fruits to grow are tomatoes.Tomatoes are not hard to grow but should be grown under plastic like in the photo above. Unfortunately our climate usually brings us blight and tomatoes are very susceptibl...

I am so blessed to live in this community of Delta. Starting this community garden project , I had no idea what resources were out there and have relied heavily on input from other community gardens. It has been a learning experience for all the board members of the garden. I would like to acknowledge some of our sponsors who truly believed in this project. One particular company I met at the Ladner Business Association. They asked if they could write us a cheque after hearing how much our start up expenses were. Bruce and Paula Lloyd of Cellular Mobile Services donated enough money to cover our insurance and paperwork costs. Yes, insurance, one of those things a lot of us don't think about when we walk in our city parks. A big thank you from all of us at Ladner Community garden. We also worked with the Corporation of Delta who spent thousands of dollars extending an existing water line to the front of our garden and arranging for some donated compost. In two days all our allotme...

Thanks to all the volunteers who helped make our Ground Breaking Day in the garden such a success. We couldnt have done it without you. You braved the drizzle the heavens sent upon us and never complained. Look at what we accomplished, a garden we can be proud of. I was too busy to take photos yesterday but my brother had his camera and has around 200 photos still to come. I hope everyone saw the group photo on our Facebook page here . I took the above photo today and was surprised to see lots of people already planting their beds. You can tell an experienced gardener when the Remay cloth comes out. This white fabric is used to keep pests away. That little white winged moth you see flying around right now would love to lay eggs in your vegetables. The use of Remay helps to prevent cabbage moth problems. I talked about recycling on my blog at Seed Sow and Grow . Reusing plastic in the garden is a great way to ward off creatures like cutworms. The bottom of this plastic container was cut...

Its the day before our Build a Garden Day and we are so anxious to get growing. The Corporation of Delta kindly donated 60 meters of compost and we still have another donation of soil coming from Pineland Peat. I was called last night to say one of our local farmers is donating a container of manure to help enrich our soil. It looks like we will have a very busy day tomorrow so bring your shovel and a smile. The raised beds will be transported to the site in the morning so lets leave some room for truck and trailer to park near the front of the park. The less distance we have to carry the boxes the better. We will have refreshments on site. Pizza, pop and a bag of chips for $2! There will be coffee for the early birds courtesy of Starbucks, one of our sponsors. It is supposed to be a bit overcast but as a gardener I am optimistic for sunshine. If that does happen, be sure to use sunscreen to avoid that first sunburn. Don't forget to bring a lawn chair so you have somewhere to sit...

Its only two more sleeps and we open the Ladner Community Garden. If you have been by the park, the city is dumping soil for us to use. Thank you Corporation of Delta for all the help you have given us. Last night we started moving the raised beds nearer to our site so they are easy to transport on Saturday morning. Here is the first box going on the farm trailer. Thanks to my brother, Tron, who borrowed a trailer from the Guichons to get these over to our site. Hubby helped my brother load the boxes on the trailer. It was lots of work. They were stacked as high as they could go. I was sure glad I wasn't the one towing this load. My brother had no problems but try pulling out of my driveway with a load this big. Arthur Drive can be busy but we waited until the hockey game started and everything got quiet. Lucky us! Everyone was strapped down and secured for the trip. I followed behind with flashers on as we drove the farm roads to our site. There they go ahead of me. Now that the b...

This week is so busy with trying to get everything ready for Saturday, May 21, our ground breaking day. Our raised beds are built and we have a hay trailer coming to take the beds over to the park this weekend. We could use a few guys to help with the loading at my place and the unloading on Saturday morning at the park. Let me know if you can help. Just a reminder to save cardboard or newspaper for the bottom of your allotment beds. You can get cardboard boxes from many stores, even flats from the liquor store will do. We will be practicing lasagna gardening in the bottom of the raised beds so the grass doesn't grow through. Make sure you bring some on Saturday morning. We are looking for a volunteer to man the concession table, no cooking is involved so not a hard job but we will have thirsty gardeners. We also need someone to man a sign in table and to give out name tags.These are great jobs for those who cannot shovel soil. For everyone wanting to help out on Saturday here is...

Yesterday we invited volunteers over to 'build a bed' day. We figured if we got half the raised beds built before our ground breaking day on May 21, we would be ahead of the game and people much closer to planting their gardens. Lots of helpers arrived yesterday morning and quickly got to work.It rained lightly at first but the tent kept the power tools dry. We gardeners weren't put off by a bit of rain. If you look in the background of the photo above you will see they finished the first box.Each box is four feet by ten feet and ten inches deep. A great size to plant an array of vegetables in. As you can see the raised beds are quickly filling in the space under my rose arbor. I knew there was a reason I weeded that area on Friday. Everyone had a great time working together. Now can you believe this? All 46 raised beds were finished in three hours!! I couldn't believe it. It was a great job done by all. While some volunteers were building beds, others planted. Here w...

Thanks to everyone who showed up last night in the rain for our community garden meeting. It was so nice to put a face to the names. This coming Saturday, May 14, we will be building as many raised beds as we can. We will be building them at my home on Arthur Drive. If you want to help just give me a call or an email.We will try and do a sun dance and hope it helps with the weather. Either way , we will still be building rain or shine. This is so exciting, getting actually so close to planting. Have you thought about what you will be planting once your bed is built and filled with soil? Make sure to choose vegetables that your family will eat. Its no point growing stuff that they don't. Easy things to start with are lettuce, mesclun greens, spinach, radishes,potatoes,carrots,beets and arugula. Tomatoes are easy to grow too but are best grown under plastic to prevent having blight problems. Check out West Coast Seeds for their catalogue. It has a wonderful planting chart inside the ...

Its going to be a busy couple of weeks for the Ladner Community Garden and the Corporation of Delta. This Friday,May 13, the city has scheduled our water lines to be installed. That will happen on time unless there is some city emergency like a broken line somewhere else. They know we are very anxious to get growing. Yesterday, I had Bartlett Tree Services come and take some soil samples for testing.As you know, the soil is the most important aspect when it comes to growing food. We will have the soil test results back in two weeks. When the soil was being taken for testing, we uncovered lots of huge worms. That's a good sign the soil is healthy. With our heavy clay soil of Ladner, the worms do a great job breaking it up for us. If the weather is nice this weekend, we will plan on building some of the raised beds at my place. I have a large yard,okay that's an understatement, a huge yard, so lots of room for them here until we are ready to build the garden. If you would like to...

It finally arrived! We ordered the lumber last week and it arrived this morning. This is quite the set up with a remote control doing all the directing. I just prayed it wouldn't land on my garden. Its time to think about putting half of the raised beds together. The directors felt that having half of them built before opening day would save us some time. We will start to build the beds on May 14 at my place. Lets hope the weather warms up and the sun shines so we can get some work done. I went to the site of our new community garden and saw that city crews had been busy. If you walk the site you will see the paint marks that outline our boundaries. You will also see these deep holes in the ground. The one above looks like a water line so it wont be long before they start digging to extend the line for us. Thanks go to the Corporation of Delta for paying the cost of the water line installation. Without water, we wouldn't have a garden. Lots will happen over the next couple of w...

You know a gardener when the site of cut grass makes you happy. Funny how those simple things can mean so much. Well, that's just what happened at the site of the new proposed community garden at Kensington park. The city has been in and cut the grass where our garden will be. We walked the site today and it is dry, dry, dry, can you believe it after all this rain? We also noticed white paint marks on the ground. We didn't know what they were for so off to the city we went.The paint lines designate the amount of land we have in the park. We met with the city parks director and staff and found out they had been meeting to discuss the plowing of the land with one of our councilors.They are also figuring out when the water is going in and we will know more next week. So its time to get your seeds or transplants picked out as we hope to get planting before the end of May. Are you wondering what you should be planting in May? Here are a few ideas- Pepper and eggplant transplants,s...