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
Summer Report and Thoughts on 2019
from Jim Davidson and the Demo Garden Team
In 2018, we were into a drought. If we went more that a couple of days without watering selected parts of the garden we had severe wilt in our vegetables and transplants were at risk. Fortunately, our Front bed, the Xeriscaping one, was never watered.
Watering was between a half hour to an hour several times a week. We tried a Rainbird sprinkler once or twice, but found it wasteful and once it caused a couple of taller plants to fall over, having taken too much pressure on their leaves and having a fully sodden root system.
Nonetheless, there were fantastic Nanking cherries, apples and leeks in 2018 at our garden.
In November, we planted garlic amongst the various beds and in part of one of the vegetable beds we heeled-in clumps of extra feathered grasses, golden currants and gooseberries.
The compost bin is a traditional one now, with brown/green layers and with plenty of moisture due to watering. We might use quite a bit less water in 2019, if we get our composting fine tuned.
Thank you to the 2018 team. We had an instructor-lead planning session in the Spring. This resulted amongst other things, moving the Strawberry patch and mulching the Fruit bed with twigs on layers of newspaper.
Next year we should be doing square foot gardening, getting Bee houses set up, demonstrating more gardening techniques and probably putting compost more directly into beds (instead of going into the Vegetable bed and then taking that soil a year later into the other beds… the thought was, that we would eliminate weeds by removing them in the vegetable beds).
Our annual Garden Celebration in July at our site is already in the early planning stages.
Jim Davidson
Demonstration Garden 2018 Year End Report to Friends of the Farm
In 2018 we went from eight volunteers to six by mid-Summer. We work mainly on Sundays.
There were a total of 362 hours contributed. There was an observation that many of the hours were spent contributing to the COG Newsletter “Down to Earth”, attending workshops where the Demonstration Garden was mentioned and attending a Mason Wax Bee workshop by the Wild Pollinator Partners at the Fletcher Wildlife Garden. Such non-gardening hours are seen as part of an outreach program. We readily acknowledge Friends of the Farm and offer its telephone number.
We were behind in edging this year. Strawberries were very successfully transplanted into our vegetable bed and are now too numerous. We will switch to Alpine Strawberries. We did our 3rd Gardener’s Celebration COG Demo Garden on July 22nd, 2018, while not a party or picnic, it featured a young musician, a choir and mini-garden tours.
Submitted by Jim Davidson,
Co-coordinator, Canadian Organic Growers Demonstration Garden