April is Planting Time!

April is here and if you haven't planted your vegetable seeds yet, its time to get busy. Plants such as peas, broad beans, spinach, lettuce, carrots, arugula, potatoes and onion sets should be in the ground. Its still too early for plants such as basil, peppers, beans, cucumbers or squash but getting your seeds chosen is wise while selection lasts. I like to wait until night time temperatures are a steady 9-10C before placing my warm weather crops outside. Don't forget to harden off your new transplants before planting. They need time to adjust from a warm cozy greenhouse to the lower temperatures of the garden. Take them out for an hour each day to get them used to being outside and lengthen the time as you go. This hardening off can take up to a week but your plants will adjust better.

Thanks to the allotment gardeners that have cultivated their gardens. Try to have your gardens planted by the end of May so you have a successful harvest.

Have you seen the rockery flowers yet? The Hyacinths are stunning!

We also have some gardeners growing Tulips in their space.

The Narcissus are so dainty with multiple flowers on each stem.

The Iberis or candytuft makes me want to run out and buy one for my garden. Its lovely mounding habit makes it perfect for the rock garden.

The new shrubs are doing well along the fence line. This is the flowering currant planted last summer.

The grade three class planted Muscari under the shrubs last fall.

The Kale is starting to bloom as it prepares to go to seed. Don't forget to collect seed later on once the pods have formed. The yellow flowers of Kale are a bee magnet so we will be attracting pollinators to the garden.

The Forsythia is just about finished blooming but the yellow and blue look great together.
Thanks goes to Kristian for building some mason bee houses and installing them on the pergola. Please help yourself to soil for your gardens. We will use some of the soil to level the dips in the lawn and to top off flower beds.
Our next meeting for community garden members will be on April 23 at the garden at 7pm. Are you receiving our newsletter as it just went out? If you haven't, please let us know.

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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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