Local organic strawberries are ready!!!

Drop by the market stand at the gardens on Saturday or Sunday, or contact us at cogpww@sympatico.ca for more details.

Why buy local AND organic strawberries? Strawberries are one of the most intensively sprayed fruits - and there is no way to peel them. Nonorganic strawberries are highly likely to contain pesticide residue after harvest. When the PDP (the USDA's Pesticide Data Program) releases its annual list of produce samples with residues that exceed tolerance levels, strawberries appear more often than any other fruit or vegetable.

June 14-20 update

This week the crew took down the cedar trees around the Hummingbird Garden. They will be chipping them up once its a bit drier. You can now see the entire gardens from the roadway, so it gives people driving by an idea of the expanse of the gardens.

About 80% of the first round of planting is done – still need to do the planting of flowers in the Hummingbird Garden, cucumbers, storage beans, some squash, and parsnips. Plus, its time for the second sowing of corn and the third sowing of lettuces, spinach and beets.

Lots of straw to be spread still. We don’t usually grow with so much straw mulch - but we made a mistake ordering it and took too much. No problem, it will help build organic matter on our sandy soil, plus keep weeds at bay. Plus if we get a dry year, it will help conserve moisture.

With the plants out of the greenhouse, its time to renew that area. Over the next week we’ll harvest the last of the early lettuce, beets, etc. and sow a cover crop. For the summer the greenhouse will just have early tomatoes and basil. Then in August we’ll dig in the cover crop (oats and oil seed radish) and plant for late fall greens and early (March) spring greens.

Why does Santa Claus have such a nice garden? (He likes to hoe hoe hoe!!!) Hoeing now will pay us back with a much leisurely pace in mid summer (which we’ll appreciate in the heat).

Strawberries are coming ever so slowly. Good moisture – so they’ll be big - but no warmth to bring them along. We don’t expect very many for another week.

Tomorrow (Friday) a few of us will be here getting ready for Saturday’s garden tours. We’ll be hosting tours at 10, noon and 2:00 on Saturday - although its supposed to rain - so it might not be very busy.

June 1-6 update

I think this is the first year in over a decade that we have not had most of the vegetable planting done by June 4. Our weather has been wet and cold unfortunately. We still don’t have potatoes, peppers, beans, tomatoes, eggplant, squash......... started! YIKES!!

The good news is that we are getting the herb terraces and the perennial gardens weeded - and that is a strong start.

With most of the weeding done in the Hummingbird Garden we will be able to turn our attention next week to planting down there. Same goes for the herb hills.

Kim and Erin will be able to finish weeding and spreading straw down in the lower bush garden - that will allow us to focus on the main vegetable plot.

On Saturday, we hope to get much of the heritage vegetable planting done.

With the perennial and vegetable planting done - by the middle of June we’ll be focusing on maintenance and hoeing.

Great news - we just received funding for creating signage and a self-guided tour pamphlet for the gardens!

We have decided to go ahead and do some renovations inside so that our kitchen will pass a public health inspection and then we can use it as a food premise and prepare food for events and for sale. We’ll be adding a hand washing sink and a stove.

A trailer load of straw is being delivered tomorrow morning. So – we’ll be busy spreading that for a while.

We are also getting a tree company in to do a bunch of tree removals and chipping - so we’ll have wood chips for the perennial gardens. This will include removing all the over-grown cedars around the Hummingbird Garden. Its kind of unfortunate - but they are old, and they’ve never been pruned, so pruning them now will just leave empty looking branches. So - we’ll be able to plan for something else there to plant later this year.

Not much produce available this week - we sold some at the plant sales so we are kind of cleaned out!