Demo Garden

Canadian Organic Growers Demonstration Garden

The Organic Demo Garden is located in the Experimental Farm on Prince of Wales Drive. On entering the parking lot to the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum, we are located beside the hedge on your right hand side.

We play an educational role and are active meeting and greeting visitors mainly during our Sunday morning shifts. We have a brochure box and one instructional board on the side of our compost bins. We get quite a bit accomplished and there are opportunities to impart knowledge and to learn from co-workers and the visitors who are often avid gardeners themselves, sometimes from far away places. You are able to do gardening at our own comfortable pace using borrowed tools from the Friends of the Farm.

Co-coordinators Jim and Denise, arrange parking details, make tools accessible, discuss and agree upon co-op student placements and fulfill the sign off of those student time-sheets, and finally forward suggestions and concerns to the appropriate COG, Friends of the Farm or The Central Experimental Farm people. People joining will be welcomed as an equal partners and for everyone’s benefit and enjoyment maybe some of you will find yourselves sharing your own knowledge and stories. For those interested in volunteering, a general orientation and plant/weed identification session will be given and a familiarization with tools and techniques will be offered. We have no expectation of any large harvests, rather we hope to showcase plants and educate. We give as many plants as possible to the COG Senior Organic Growers.

What Our Volunteers Do

Well, there is seasonal opening/closing, weeding, edging, pruning, setting out of seeds and seedlings, watering, turning of compost, screening compost, dead-heading, harvesting, planning and the acquiring of organic plants, compost material and manures. While performing these activities, we often find time to discuss amongst ourselves and with visitors. At the same time, quiet gardening is respected and available to our volunteers if that is their choice.A wish list includes us running mini-seminars right at the Demo Garden, with enough content provided that interested individuals will walk away after twenty minute with some valuable knowledge gained (this content will eventually be matched on our web). Ideally, we would be good enough for co-op students to take those seminars and come through a season of volunteering being able to go a prospective employer and say that they acquired not only a certain amount of knowledge, but that they worked in an active garden with proper tools and techniques and with organic plants. Especially, that they enjoyed being part of, shall we call it, the “Organic Demonstration Garden Summer School”.

COG Organic Demonstration Garden, Jim and Denise Davidson, Co-coordinators