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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
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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
We hosted a “Bee a Meadow Maker” event on Tuesday afternoon, where we invited volunteers to join us to help move native plants to the bee yard, and started to turn it into a thriving native plant meadow! Thanks to everyone who joined us for this sweet afternoon activity, we’re really excited about this transformation in the garden, and can’t wait to see the fruits of our collective labour! Today we had our usual work party, and it was such a lovely afternoon in the sunshine! So many people were out in the garden, and it was so great to chat with everyone! We helped some new plot renters get a plot ready, planted some veggies and flowers around the garden, and soaked up the sun. We’re so excited for the nice weather, which just makes Friday afternoon work parties that much more wonderful :)   We also officially announced our Spring Social today, in collaboration with the UVic Live Music Club! Mark your calendars for Friday, April 5th at 2pm, and join us in the garden for an evening of live music, crafting, vendors, food, and tons of fun!  Looking forward to next week, we’ve got some more special workshops coming up! On Tuesday, March 18th from 1-2pm we’ll be in the David Turpin Courtyard to learn about native plant identification from Loreissa of A Place of Medicine! And on Thursday, March 20th we’re back in the McPherson Library for a hands-on letterpress printing and journal stitching workshop from UVic Book Arts! As always, check out our Instagram to keep up to date on events and workshops, and we hope to see you this week! Thanks for making this another lovely week, and I hope you all take some time to enjoy the weather this weekend :)
Happy gardening, Jessi Hello and happy Friday! The first week of March has been an exciting one, with spring planning well underway in all aspects of the garden. We’ve been planting (and getting snowed on), mulching, pruning, and planning lots!   On Monday afternoon we participated in a teach-in with the other UVSS advocacy & affiliate groups called Where Is Your Money Going? where we talked about how advo & affiliate groups use student fees for all the programs and services we offer! It was great to have the opportunity to share the work we do in the garden with everyone - if you missed the teach-in and are curious how the ccg uses fees, feel free to reach out to us on Instagram or by email! We’re always excited to answer questions and tell you about our work :) On Wednesday night we hosted our biweekly board meeting, where got together with our board members to give updates on events completed and those being planned, discuss projects being worked on, chat about ideas for garden planning and project planning, and have a lovely time with our garden board community! We do have a couple of available spots on our board, so if you’re interested in learning more let us know!  We had another busy Friday, with a couple of events going on. First up was part 2 of our two-part How To Garden workshop! Hosted by our wonderful Garden Coordinator Lyndsay and Site Officer Jack, this workshop focused on providing all the basics to getting started with gardening. Don’t worry if you missed this series! You have another chance to catch the full workshop tomorrow, Saturday March 9th, from 10am-1pm!
It’s March 1st! The last week of the month was a busy one at the garden, with lots of events and more preparing for spring! On Monday an Indigenous-focused science BEd group from a post-degree professional program at UVic came to help out at the garden, which was excellent timing considering the cold weather over this week. The group helped to prepare the garden for the cold with leaf mulch! It was a beautiful sunny day, and we had a lovely time - check out these pictures of the work done, taken by Juls, our Assistant Coordinator :) We had originally planned to host a Mindful Rock Painting event with the UVic Society for Students with a Disability (SSD), but we’ve moved this event to Wednesday, April 10th! We’re really looking forward to this one, which will be in SUB Room B028 from 1-3pm. This will be such a lovely way of taking a break from the chaos of exams, and we hope to see you there! The rest of our events this week all happened today, on Friday! We had three events going on today, so it was a real team effort to keep everything running smoothly. First up was our how to garden workshop! This was the first in an ongoing series, which continues next Friday, March 8th at 1pm. Run by our very own (and very wonderful!) garden staff, this practical series aims to teach the basics of gardening, harvesting, and best practices to help build foundational skills. No worries if you missed the first part, part 2 is open to everyone!  Another thing that happened today was our Meet the CCG event with the sustainability LLC (living learning community in the dorms!). We had some snacks, played some trivia, and then headed over to the garden to take a tour. We’ve been getting to introduce the space to lots of new folks lately, which is so rad! It’s such a special place, and it’s so special to share it with all of you<3 Finally, we had our usual work party today as well! From 2-4pm, folks helped out with some more spring cleaning. Work parties happen every Friday, and are an essential part of our work at the garden! If you’ve ever wondered how to get involved with the CCG, work parties are hands-down the best way :) Thanks for a great month, we’re excited for what March will bring!
Happy gardening, Jessi Hello and happy Friday! This reading week has come and gone so quickly, and I can’t believe it’s already the end of February, but things are starting to grow all around the city and spring is very nearly here!  Even though this was reading week, it was still a busy week in the garden. Every new season brings new preparations to be done and new challenges to face, and spring is no different! The weather has been back and forth, teasing springtime and then bringing us back into winter, so a big challenge this month has been in getting our timing right. This week, Jack was busy planting spinach, radishes, carrots, parsnips, mustard, arugula, parsley, AND cilantro! To help make sure the things we’ve started planting will make it through the indecisive weather, Kate organized building some cold frames this week. Cold frames are bottomless boxes that are placed over plants in the garden to protect them from colder temperatures, kind of like a mini greenhouse. We made ours using scrap wood and sheets of plastic that we had around! Another seasonal preparation task that happened this week was pruning! Lyndsay and Anuinder spent a lot of time in the food forest, pruning our currant, blueberry, and goumi berry plants! Pruning is an important seasonal task; it helps keep our plants happy and healthy, increases their fruit production, and overall ensures long-term thriving of the food forest! There were also a couple of events this week, both of which happened today, actually! First up was the Special Collections Garden Tour, which was a real treat! Heather from the McPherson Library’s Special Collections organized a mini-tour of garden-related items from the library archives. There were posters, zines, and lots and lots of books! We learned about native plants, the development of UVic, the history of food growing in Victoria, and so much more. We are definitely interested in doing another tour in the future, so keep an eye out if you missed this! The other event today was our work party! The focus of today's work party was spring cleaning, involving a variety of tasks to help the garden prepare for springtime. The main task was cleaning up the pathway to the garden! I hope you all enjoyed your reading week, and have a wonderful weekend :) Happy gardening, Jessi Hi everyone, my name is Jessi and I’m the CCG’s new Outreach Coordinator. Before joining as a staff member, I was involved with the garden through the board of directors, and I’m really excited to keep growing with you all :) This was a busy week at the CCG, spring is in the air and we’re hard at work getting ready for a bountiful growing season! Almost all of our plots are rented out, and we expect to have a full garden over the summer. Our new seeds arrived this week, and they’ve started going into the staff-run plots. We also wanted to give a reminder that staff are available to help new plot renters with scaffolding and getting set up in the garden - send us a message or chat with us in person if you’re looking for gardening support!  Another exciting thing that happened this week was the UVic Gender Empowerment Centre’s SEXPO 2024! This four-day event featured panels, workshops, art, vendors, community resources, and entertainment centered around informed and empowered sexual wellness and expression. The CCG had a table at SEXPO on Wednesday and Thursday, and we brought a button-maker with us! We had so much fun chatting with everyone, and making saucy button collages out of old gardening magazines we discovered in the office! Check out these photos of some silly buttons made by pals of the garden :) The CCG also partnered with the Victoria Compost Education Centre to put on the first of two workshops today! For this first workshop, Kayla from Compost Ed came to the SUB to teach us about yard-free composting, and will be returning for part two, which focuses on container gardening, on March 16th! The Victoria Compost Education Centre is a wonderful organization and we’re so excited to learn from them and incorporate their teachings into our practices, both in the garden and at our own homes. If you want to learn more, you can check out the Victoria Compost Eduation Centre’s website here! Looking forward, we have some really exciting projects in the works! During reading week (which is next week! wow time flies!) UVic Libraries’ Special Collections is putting on a Garden Tour, showcasing historic garden-related items kept in the library archives! This special tour will take place on Friday, February 23rd at noon, meeting in the Special Collections reading room (bottom floor of McPherson Library, at the back). The CCG has changed a lot over the years, and we’re really looking forward to taking a look through the history with all of you! We’re also excited to be launching a new project, our brand-new campus community garden journal, SUNDEW! The journal is named after Sundew, a funky carnivorous plant of which there are a couple species native to BC and living on Vancouver Island. These little guys thrive in wetlands like marshes and bogs, and are easily overlooked as part of the landscape. Sundew the journal aims to shed the light on something small making a big impact, finding inspiration in the garden’s humble beginnings as a community garden started in 1996 by a group of hard-working volunteers. Submissions are open now, and we’re accepting a whole lot of everything! This is a journal for everyone, so please feel free to submit whatever speaks to you - we’re really looking forward to putting it together! For details on submitting and some loose guidelines, click here. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to us on instagram or email [email protected]. That’s all the news I have for today! Check back next week for another weekly recap, and follow us on Instagram to stay in the loop about all things CCG. Happy gardening! Jessi :) Over the summer we have been compiling some of our gardening advice into short videos on our YouTube Channel! Check this video out on how to plant a Zucchini plant. More videos to come...  Pruning Workshop Notes:
February 8th, 2020 Tools:
At the garden, our apple tree has been pruned using the open centered technique. Other techniques include espalier pruning that has your tree growing on one plain. Last year our tree had a hard pruning, for deciduous trees, keep in mind that the harder you prune, the harder the tree will respond (or come back). Unless hard pruning, on a normal year, you should take no more than 25-30% of the whole tree. Having said that, you should remove all dead, diseased and damaged branches. How do you know what to prune? The goal is to take the tree back by ⅓, keeping a balance of new and old growth and fruiting and not fruiting branches.
What about Fig Trees? Watch this cool video by Bob Dunan for tips and tricks! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB0D_tuKgtQ |
