Open Gardens on Full Moon Sky

With delectable food & sweet friends, we enjoyed our Open Garden Pot Luck yesterday. It was good for me to hear the comments and questions that came up as we were going through the garden. It gave me some perspective and insight on first impressions of the Gardens. For example, a comment that came up about the Meditation Garden was that it seemed as though it had been there for some years already. To me, that meant we had done a good job at designing, for the area had somewhat of a "natural" design to it. We had planned to play music, dance, do several tours of the gardens, do some 'official' talks... All of this, except one garden tour & a roundabout the medicine wheel, was, lets say 'postponed', for better enjoyment of food and friends. The food ended up taking the bigger part of our attention... Even the 'un-kosher' peaches and hard boiled eggs :) We had prepared pizza with veggies from the garden, as well as brucetta with tomatoes from Carya Farm (graciously offered :), and coleslaw with cabagge and carrots from Coop Tourne-Sol. The B.O.V. was probably not advertised as such enough, but the one brought was a success. I was surprised at the end of the evening that even the 'muddy punch' with green froth -kale, swiss chard, cabbage, carrots, celery, cucumber, beets, apple, lime) got almost finished :) Thank you all for coming and joining us for our gathering and open garden tour :)

Transitions & Communications

Last tuesday, July 13th, Emily and I were on the air with Ryan Young's show Ecolibrium (CKUT 90.3 fm) Check out: http://www.ckut.ca/cgi-bin/ckut-grid.pl

It was a great experience for all of us. Thanks to Ryan for inviting us!
We've been up to so much in the last few weeks. I can hardly realize 3 weeks have already passed since the end of june!

Liberated greenhouse plants

It all started with having to liberate the greenhouse by the first week of july for a "heat treatment" they (Greenhouse managers at Mac) are doing to prepare for the school year. Since our beds for the Meditation Garden weren't ready yet, we started building them with stones from the piles accumulated over the years of field cleaning at the Mac Farm. We had first thought of wood beds with untreated wood or pressure treated wood. Then we thought or rock beds for they would last longer. People we asked around seemed to disagree about which would be better in the end (practicality) so we started dreaming of this other option which, instead of buying and contributing to the consumption circle, we could "recycle" these local field stones :)

Beginning of a raised bed

Not quite the obvious task. None of us had done it before. We didn't build very high beds for security sake and anyways, we will not have plants in there that necessitate so much rooting space... or so we thought (stay tuned :)

Now the shrubs are in. 3 seating areas are created with rocks, wood stumps and hay (on a little hay hill ;) The soil has been delivered. Our task this week is to get the beds all ready. This means turning over the grass killed by the cardboard that has been laying on it for a while now. Hopefully this will be enough to discourage unwanted plants to grow there and be food for worms&friends. We'll mix some compost also from the Gorilla Composting of Macdonald Campus (our tripartite partner :) perhaps even leaning towards the "Lasagna" gardening style. Still need to look into this further.

Check out http://urbanext.illinois.edu/compost/layering.html for composting & http://firstlasagnagardener.blogspot.com/ for lasagna gardening

So in terms of beds for the Meditation Garden we are still planning on building one more. We were given funding by the Macdonald Community Garden to get shrubs and vines. As we were waiting on getting the foundations (the stone beds) established in the space before transplanting the shrubs, we will start taking pictures to show all of you via this web spider (uploading pictures on a Picassa Album -blogs are not the best for them, unless we just couldn't figure it out) how it now looks with those beautiful shrubs (blueberries, black and red currents, rasberries, roses, elderberries). We placed them in the space thinking of access to the fruit shrubs -harvesting!- and the beds, the general flow of the walking area, the visual pleasure and keeping a sense of enclosure while fostering the openess of the gardens.

And since this is an Open Garden... we would Love to see you too! So this is an invitation to all of You to come and Celebrate with us on the 25th of July.

This sunday at 6pm at the Meditation Garden (beside the Mac Community Garden) we will be holding a pot luck to thank all of you for making this happen and introduce you to our Gardens.

I would also like to invite you to join us for a Yoga/Chi Kung/Dance session at the Meditation Garden (under the CC's roof if its raining or too wet). Sessions are resilient to the participants. I'll guide a movement/centering hour were each participant can feel good after. Days are 6:15 to 7:15 monday evenings and thursday mornings. Contact us for more information. Check out my myspace for credentials postalpoems It's free :)

Andrea H
p.s. these pictures date from a few weeks back

Picasa Album
http://picasaweb.google.com/108130111427628017229/McGillStudentRunEcologicalGardens?authkey=Gv1sRgCPWP_oL-9Je-6QE&feat=directlink