Greetings from the garden!
The Landless Gardeners have found land! We spent our first Saturday on the Church Street plot with shovels and pitch forks turning over sod to prepare the ground for a summer of growing food.
As the old saying goes, many hands make for light work, and that certainly has been the case over the last couple of weeks. Gardeners have been showing up in droves to get their hands dirty and now we've got something to show for all of that digging. The plot is now planted with a variety of veggies--cucumber, tomatoes, peppers, beans, peas, carrots, onions... (check out our garden map).
We had a lot of fun experimenting in the garden and getting some helpful hints from a veggie guru. We learned a few things:
- Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant (and other veggies, we're sure) need to be started early indoors.
- It is too late to start indoor plants now for our climate in New Brunswick so we're going to have to plan our other plots accordingly by planting veggies that can just be started in the ground.
- Transplants (we did aquire some tomatoe, eggplant, and pepper plants) need to be heavily watered after being planted in the ground
- ... and Alpaca poo is a great fertilizer to pump up the soil!
After our day in the dirt on Saturday, a few of the Landless Gardeners headed over to Renaissance College to take part in a "round table" discussion on food security in Canada. Alex Atamanenko, agriculture critic for the NDP, has been travelling the country talking with communities and getting input on what food and agriculture issues are on the minds of Canadians. There was discussion on GMO foods, the biofuel industry, international trade, food labelling, conventional and organic farming. Afterwards, Mr. Atamanenko took time to visit our plot and hear about what the Landless Gardeners are doing in Fredericton.
Overall, it was a great weekend for food growers!
We would like to invite anyone interested to our next meeting: Tuesday May 25, 7:00 p.m. on the lawn at Renaissance College (811 Charlotte Street). If its raining, come meet us at the Lunar Rogue. Hope to see you there!
The Landless Gardeners
