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The first full week of school is over! Somehow this week felt very long but also went by very quickly. We’ve been meeting lots of new students, doing lots of harvesting, and continuing to plan for the fall:) This was a busy week of tabling for us at the ccg! We were at CCU days on Wednesday and Thursday, and spent Friday at the SSD’s Mental Health Resource Fair. Tabling is so much fun because we’re able to give away free food and flowers while introducing ourselves to so many students and telling them about our programs! We’ve got lots of fun workshops and events coming up this fall, so we’ve been sharing some sneak peaks with students to give them an idea of our work. It’s always great to see the smiles on peoples’ faces when you give them a sunflower or a bunch of kale!  We also held our Welcome Work Party yesterday! All of our work parties are always open to everyone, and no experience is ever required, but today was a special work party tailored to introducing new volunteers to the space and to our work. It was so awesome to see so many new faces out in the garden!! Our work parties are continuing to take place on Friday afternoons between 2-4pm, so even if you missed the one today, we’d love to see you on another Friday! Coming up, we have a special board meeting on Tuesday afternoon! This is our board meet & greet, where staff and board members will spend some time together doing work in our shared garden plot and getting to know the space and each other a bit better :) We’ve also got a very exciting event on Thursday afternoon/evening, the Friends of the Garden get-together! This event is a casual drop-in potluck for all friends of the garden (plot renters, board members, staff, volunteers, community members), a chance to connect with other gardeners, ask questions and learn, share food, and spend some time in the space! This is the first event in our fall events lineup, where this year we’re striving to provide more opportunities to connect as a community. More information can be found here on our Instagram, and we would love to see you there! That’s all I’ve got for this week! I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend :)
Happy gardening, Jessi
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Happy Sunday, and a big congratulations to everyone who finished their first week back at school :) I took a little break from the blog last week, because I was busy driving back to Victoria from Ontario! So, this week will be a special ‘end-of-summer’ edition of the ccg blog! The last week of August was another busy one here. We held our last Wednesday work party of the summer, as we’re going back to once-a-week work parties on Fridays during the school year! Volunteers helped with getting plots ready for new renters, because it’s plot renewal season and we have some new renters coming into the space. So if you see anyone around the garden who looks new, say hi! Another exciting thing that happened this week was the Farm Crawl! On Friday, August 30th, we teamed up with the UVic Sustainability Project and the Community Action Bus to put on this awesome event! We traveled around on the big blue bus, stopping at Haliburton Farm, Sea Cider Farm & Ciderhouse, and the CCG, to learn about farming and food systems in our community. We had an absolute blast with everyone, and we are excited to continue this event in the coming years! This past week was also jam packed for us, as the start of the school year always is! We kicked off the week on Monday tabling at the Residence Move-In Fair, where we gave out flowers from the garden and introduced ourselves to a whole bunch of new students! On Thursday evening we held our last Poetry Picnic of the season, featuring Fatima-Ayan Malika Hirsi. We had a packed audience for the last one, and filled our open mic lineup too! It’s been so wonderful to see the Poetry Picnics grow over the summer, and this season finale ended the summer on such a sweet note! Thank you to everyone who’s come out, whether to participate or just listen. We love to use the garden space for non-garden events and activities, and it’s always so great to see how vibrant and creative our community is!  On Friday we spent the day tabling at Thunderfest, and we met SO many people!! Some of our staff did some harvesting in the morning, so we had lots of food and flowers to share with folks, as well as a sneak-peak at some upcoming Fall events! We’ve also had our second-edition of Sundew available for purchase at our tabling events for sliding-scale $2-10, and the sales have been going super well!  Speaking of which, I wanted to remind everyone that submissions for our third-edition of Sundew (coming out in November) are open now! They’ll be open all month, so if you have any pieces of writing, or art, or anything really, send em our way! Our website has more information about submitting, so check it out here if you’re interested! We also held our first work party of the school year on Friday afternoon, and had some new faces come out to volunteer. Our official “Welcome Work Party” is next Friday, September 13th, from 2-4pm and we expect to see lots of new people there! If you’ve been thinking about coming to a work party, this will be a great intro one - grab your friends and come spend an afternoon learning some new skills, meeting new people, and getting your hands dirty!  Coming up, we’ve got tons more tabling this week! We’ll be at CCU Days on Wednesday and Thursday, and at the Mental Health Resource Fair on Friday! If you have any questions, want to learn more about the ccg, or just want to say hey, stop by. We can’t wait to meet you!
That’s all from me for now, I hope everyone has had a wonderful weekend! Happy gardening, Jessi Another week over! August is flying by and I can see September around the corner! This week we welcomed two new plot renters, which is always exciting! If you’re interested in your own plot (or one to share!), you can learn more about the process here. On Thursday we hosted our second-last poetry picnic of the season! A.R. Kung was our wonderful reader this week, and the turnout was great! Our very last poetry picnic will be held on Thursday, September 5th and will showcase the incredible Fatima-Ayan Malika Hirsi. All of our poetry picnics start with an open mic and are followed by a featured poet, so whether you’re interested in sharing your work or just listening to others, there’s something for you! The open mic is very relaxed and low pressure, so feel free to come out and try reading (I read my first ever piece in front of people at the picnic two weeks ago! And I survived!). If you want to learn more, check out our website here.  Another exciting event that’s coming up is the Farm Crawl! On August 30th, from 9am to 4pm, join us in reviving this historic collaboration! In partnership with the UVic Sustainability Project and the Community Action Bus, the Farm Crawl is a day of traveling around the unceded territories of the Songhees and W̱SÁNEĆ Nations to learn all about sustainable food production, farming, and food systems! Signups are open now!  That’s all from me for this week, I hope you all have a fantastic weekend! Happy gardening, Jessi Hello and welcome back! After a couple months away, I’m so excited to be back to sharing what’s going on at the ccg (and there is SO much going on)! First of all, the garden looks amazing! So full of colour and life, it’s so wonderful to explore and see what everyone’s growing in their plots, and what’s growing around as well (the blackberries along the fence are massive!!). It’s also been wonderful to see the garden community come out in the summertime! We love to see the fruits of everyone’s labour, and it’s so wonderful to run into folks watering, weeding, harvesting, and hanging out around the space. One of our goals for this year is to create more opportunities for engagement and connection among friends of the garden - our plot renters, our volunteers, our wonderful community. We have some really awesome events coming up, and have been busy brainstorming new ways to facilitate communication and connection! One of these is our move to Discord! We’re saying goodbye to Slack this year, and moving our communications over to Discord in the hopes of creating a more accessible and engaged space for learning about volunteer opportunities, sharing news, asking questions, distributing tasks, and overall just chatting about garden-related things. Juls is working to get everything set up, and will add an invite link to the website and our Instagram once it’s ready! In terms of events, we’ve got a lot coming up! On top of our weekly work parties (which are now happening twice a week, on Wednesdays and Fridays), we’ve also got our 3rd CCG x LMC Garden Music Festival coming up tomorrow evening from 4-7pm! This is an event you don’t want to miss!!  We’ve also got our second last Poetry Picnic coming up on Thursday, August 22nd! Poetry Picnics have been running all summer, showcasing local poets in the form of an open mic followed by a headliner. Next week’s headliner is A.R. Kung, poet and mariner from Victoria! Today we also announced an upcoming collaboration with the UVic Sustainability Project and the Community Action Bus… the Farm Crawl! On Friday, August 30th we’ll be travelling around to learn about sustainable food production, farming, and local food systems! Check out our Instagram to learn more!  Finally, we wanted to call your attention to a recent donation of seedlings we received from Get Growing, Victoria! We received a ton of plants, and have lots left over to share! If you’re interested, check out the free table at the garden:) That’s all I’ve got to share for this week, I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!
Happy gardening, Jessi Happy Friday everyone, I hope this has been a lovely week! This is my last blog post of the school year as I’ll be taking a 3-month leave over the summer to work up North, but I’ll be back in August! This week was an exciting one, lots of things are coming together with different projects we’ve been working on, and we’re all officially done with exams!  On Thursday we hosted our biweekly garden party with the SSD, where we started removing soil from our current (in)accessible bed! One of the projects we’ve been cooking up is replacing the current bed with one that’s actually wheelchair accessible, which starts with removing the soil, then taking down the bed (we’ll be saving as much material as we can to use in the new one), then we’ll work on building the new bed! We’re hoping to have the new bed ready to go for June! If anyone has any interest in helping out with this project please feel free to reach out to us, especially with labour, planning/designing, or acquiring building materials! We’ve also been working on our first issue of the new garden journal, Sundew! It’s been so nice to see all the incredible work that was submitted, and I’m so excited to see the final copy. We’ll be launching Sundew on Wednesday, May 1st with a journal and plant sale at Habit Coffee in Chinatown! 50% of proceeds from the sale will go to us, and 50% will go to QomQem Coastal Connections. Come by from 10am to 1pm to say hi and check out the first ever issue!  Today in the garden we hosted our weekly Friday volunteer party, where we continued working on removing soil from the raised bed! The weather cleared up for us in the afternoon, and we had a really lovely time! We’ll be continuing with this job next week as well, because we didn’t quite finish removing everything. If anyone is in need of any dirt, please feel free to take some, starting with what’s left in the bed! I hope you all have a wonderful summer, and I look forward to hearing about it in August!
Happy gardening, Jessi What a gorgeous week it has been! Personally, I’ve spent most of the sunny days staring out the library window, but everytime I went outside my mood was lifted! I hope you’ve all been able to enjoy the weather, even just a bit :-) Things in the garden have continued to grow with the warm and sunny days, and we’ve been starting to get into a summer routine. More planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting has gone on, as well as more work on some of our big projects! There are also more people around, tending to their plots and enjoying the space, which has been so great! If you see us in the garden, don’t be shy to say hello! What happened this week? We had our biweekly board meeting on Wednesday evening, where we discussed some upcoming projects and events, and changes to our structure for the summer! Some exciting things we chatted about are the grand opening of our new compost toilet (coming soon!), the launch of our new garden journal (Sundew! Will be launching May 1!), and some upcoming collaborations that are in the works! On Friday morning we held our rescheduled Container Gardening workshop! Hosted by Kayla from the Victoria Compost Education Centre, we learned some strategies for gardening out of containers, which is a great option for folks who have limited space or access to the outdoors. If you’re interested in the CEC’s work, check out their website! They have tons of helpful resources, including factsheets such as this one about container gardening. The CEC also runs their own workshops every Saturday! In the afternoon we held our weekly Friday volunteer work party, where we did tons more weeding and general maintenance tasks! Everything has been growing and it’s been tough to keep on top of the weeds with everyone so busy in exams, so it’s super awesome when we have volunteers help us out! It was a lovely afternoon in the sun, chatting and doing some relaxed work with out hands, and we got SO much done! If you’re interested in coming out to volunteer with us feel free to drop by anytime during a work party to check it out - there’s no sign-up or experience necessary, and if you have any questions please feel free to reach out :-) What’s happening next week? Coming up next week, we’re hosting a Garden Party on Thursday, April 25th in collaboration with the Society for Students with a Disability - come by the garden between 4-6pm for a relaxed afternoon of gardening and socializing!  On Friday next week we’ve got another volunteer work party scheduled (perhaps more weeding, perhaps not…). The time will probably be 2-4pm but keep an eye on our Instagram for updates! I hope you all have a fantastic weekend! Exams are almost done and summer is nearly here, you can do it!! Happy gardening, Jessi Happyy Saturday (oops busy Friday yesterday), I hope everyone has had a wonderful week! Classes ended on Monday, and campus has been in the full-swing of exam season. The weather has been pretty warm, and things have been growing in the garden (including the weeds)!  On Tuesday we had some board members helping out with repotting of hops that have been growing in the garden. These will be available for sale along with our first-ever issue of the new garden journal, SUNDEW, at the beginning of May. We’ve started going through submissions and planning for the final product, and we’re so excited to share the wonderful work we’ve received! On Wednesday this week we hosted a rock painting afternoon with the Society for Students with a Disability (SSD). It was so lovely to take a break to focus on a relaxed task, chat, and hang out! We’ve also been running bi-weekly garden parties with the SSD on Thursdays, and had one this week! The next one will be on April 25th, at 4pm in the garden :-) We finished off the week with another Friday volunteer work party! Volunteers helped us with weeding in the garlic plot, de-rooting the weeds and leaving the tops to provide nutrients to our plants. It was a gorgeous, sunny day in the garden, and it was so lovely to chat and work - and we also found the longest worm I’ve ever seen!!
If you're looking for a way to volunteer with the garden, we'll be doing another work party this coming Friday too! Keep an eye on our Instagram for info about that, and always feel free to reach out to us with any questions! I hope you all enjoy the sunshine this weekend! Happy gardening, Jessi Happy Friday, and more specifically, happy first Friday of April! This was the last week of classes, and the exam stress is evident around campus. But the excitement for summer is also evident, and that’s bringing me a lot of joy! Everyone at the ccg has been extra busy lately, wrapping up classes while diving into the garden’s busiest time of the year. But everyone is soo excited to see what this growing season brings! Water is (finally!) back on in the garden, and we’ve been doing lots of planning, planting, and harvesting! We’ve also been doing some sleuthing to track down specific plants, and are thinking lots about events and activities for this summer :)  Here's a recent harvest that was donated to the food bank! On Wednesday we had one of our most popular workshops of the last few months, our Flower Pressing and Herb Drying workshop! We learned about using the press, and took the time to appreciate the beautiful things growing around us in Victoria in the springtime. We were so excited to see new faces at this workshop, and would be happy to bring this back again next year! And today was an extra special day at the ccg, our Spring Social! All week I had my eye on the weather, willing it to be sunny and warm for our day in the garden, and even though it ended up being neither of those things, it didn’t rain! So I still think that’s a win! But really, it was so special to gather as a community in the garden, listening to the UVic Live Music Club’s fantastic lineup of performers, making crafts, and checking out the incredible work of our vendors. Thank you all so much for coming and sharing this afternoon with us, we so appreciate your support over this last year! Have a great weekend :)
Happy gardening, Jessi Happy long weekend everyone! This week was a mixed bag with the weather, but we’ve made it to the end and the sunshine forecast for this weekend feels like a reward! Spring is really here, which means the garden is starting to get busy! Staff have started planting herbs like shiso, oregano, and cilantro, the peas are going in, and the leeks will be harvested soon! We’ve also been exploring various partnerships and connections with individuals and organizations for over the summer, and working to get our water turned back on in the garden (which is essential for our work!!). In terms of events this week, we held a Dichotomous Plant ID workshop with UVic BUGS (Biology Undergraduate Society) in the garden on Tuesday, and had a table at the UVic Sustainability Project’s Environmental Roundtable on Thursday! Because of the long weekend, our weekly work party was canceled for today. We also won’t be running a work party next week, because of the Spring Social, so the next work party will be on Friday, April 12th!   Looking to next week, we have a flower pressing and herb drying workshop coming up on Wednesday, April 3rd at 2pm in the garden! And of course, our Spring Social is Friday, April 5th from 2-6:30pm in the garden! These are both open to everyone and we’d LOVE to see you there :) This is also the last weekend to submit for the first issue of Sundew! Submissions are due on April 1st, and you can check out the submission guidelines here.  That’s it for me this week, I hope you all enjoy your long weekend and are able to spend some time in the sun! Happy gardening, Jessi Happy Friday everyone, I hope you’ve had a great week! I can’t believe next week is the last week of the month, March has gone by sooo quickly! It feels like I say this every week, but it’s been another busy one at the CCG! We kicked the week off with a Native Plant ID workshop on Monday with Loreissa of A Place of Medicine. This workshop was held in the David Turpin courtyard on UVic campus, where A Place of Medicine has been tending to the native plants! We learned about native plant identification and what happens when you remove invasive species from an area (spoiler: it gives space for more plants to grow!). We also tried some nodding onion, and were visited by a local hummingbird named David! We would love to offer this workshop again sometime, so if you’re interested in this let us know! We’ve also been running tours of the garden with ES200 (Environmental Studies) classes this week! Every fall and spring semester, ES tutorials come by the garden to have a tour of the space. This is a wonderful way to introduce students to the garden, to show them where the portion of their student fees that we receive goes, and to invite them to get involved with the garden through volunteering, plot renting, or workshops and events that we offer! In total, we’ve hosted twelve tours for ES students this week!! On Wednesday we held our much-anticipated Journal Making workshop in the McPherson Library with UVic Book Arts! We learned about letter pressing techniques, journal stitching, and made our own Campus Community Garden journals :) Today started off in the garden with more ES tours! In the afternoon, we held our Seed Bomb Making workshop, in partnership with the UVic Sustainability Project (UVSP). We had so much fun chatting and making seed bombs together, and can’t wait to see native flowers start popping up!
Looking ahead, the end of March is an exciting time! Submissions for the first edition of the new garden journal, Sundew, are closing at the end of the month, so make sure to get your pieces in to us! To learn more, you can check the Sundew page on our website here. We’re also in full-swing planning mode for our Spring Social on April 5th! If there’s one event this semester that you don’t want to miss, it’s this one!!  I hope you all have a fantastic rest of your Friday, and a wonderful weekend! Happy gardening :) Jessi |
