It's Time to Plant Cool Season Crops

With the weather starting to clear it's time to think cool season plants for the vegetable garden. If you are growing in raised beds at the community garden, it's time to plant radishes, peas, kale, spinach, lettuce and onion sets.

Check out the garden centers now for the best selection in seed potatoes. Remember to rotate your crops so you don't plant the same crop in the same spot this year. By rotating your crops you will minimize problems with pests and disease.
If you haven't topped off your gardens with compost, manure or new soil, do this before you plant. With the rainfall we receive over the winter, nutrients are leached out of the soil. Its time to feed the soil so it can feed your plants.

Direct sow peas in the garden as they don't like to be transplanted. Be sure to add a support system using poles and netting for the tendrils to cling to. If you like to save your own seed, look for open pollinated types of peas such as Lincoln Homesteader. Open pollinated seeds come true each year unlike their hybrid cousins.
Be sure to keep your seeds watered until they germinate. If seeds dry out they will die. Once they are up and growing you won't need to water as often. Its usually in late April that we start to get a dry spell. Do a finger test to see if the soil is damp a few inches below the surface. If it's damp don't water your seedlings. You want to encourage the plants roots to go down deep to look for moisture. Frequent watering has plant roots in the top part of the soil and that means extra watering. Let's not be slaves to our gardens this summer. Water well once each week and apply a mulch of straw, hay or leaves to keep moisture from evaporating.
Happy gardening,
Kristin

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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!

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Ladner Community Garden

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