Ray's Giant Squash!

Ray lives right behind (in front of?) the plot we have our garden in. Every summer he plants his own garden consisting of climbing beans, tomatoes, loads of hot peppers and these giant squash. He doesn't know the variety, only that they come from his birth country of Trinada. Ray creates trellises from branches to get the vines to grow high in the air which is necessary when you see how big these squash get!

Ray inside his squash jungle

The best part of these squash vines is that they are night blooming. The beautiful white flowers unfurl at dusk and are pollinated by moths. We have jasmin scented nicotiana planted in out pollinator bed which smell strongest at night and also attract moths so I'll bet we are a popular place after dark!

Creating a Fedgerow!

When I was in England a few years ago I fell madly in love with hedgerows. Not just the rows demarking fields, hedges of brambles (blackberries to us), apple and plum trees, sloes (a type of plum) and other fruit trees and shrubs grow wild seemingly everywhere! And loads of these are on what's still considered common land. I stayed a few days with a friend in Reading which is basically a suburb of London and I found blackberries, apples and plums in bit of a park at the end of her street. I picked a basketful and made applesauce and blackberry plum jam. I ate so many blackberries from random bushes all across the Yorkshire. When I got excited about all of the readily available fruit people I spoke to were indifferent: it's so commonplace that most people don't even notice it exists. But if you look back at recipe books from wartimes and earlier, its clear that this supply of 'free' fruit was a valuable part of the average person's diet

When I was working at FoodShare I read about food forests which are very similar in principle to hedgerows. I was able to plant a small demo version in some underutilized space there but it never reached its full potential because it was abandoned when FoodShare moved to a new location a few years later.

I've wanted to create something similar ever since but lacked space to do it until we began the Laneway Garden Project. We don't have huge space to work with, just around 20' x 16" along the fence at the back of the lot. So calling it a forest is a bit of a stretch but I was certain it could be a hedge of fruiting plants and shrubs at least... a food hedge, or fedgerow!

Last year before the raised beds were even built, the very first thing we put in the ground was a serviceberry tree that we got from the city of Toronto's Tree For Me Program. Along with a rhubarb plant we had the beginnings of a fruit hedge. Later last summer we added a black raspberry that I've been dragging around through my last 3 apartments and a white currant bush. Earlier this spring we benefited from a friend of Janis's who donated some of her raspberry and rhubarb splits. So we were off to a good start!

This year we were the grateful recipients of not one but two grants, one of which was an Edible Community Garden Grant. from our friends at TreeMobile. We received a Fedge grant which allowed us to fill in our Fedgerow with a gooseberry, 2 haskaps (2 varieties to pollinate), more than a dozen strawberry plants, 5 asparagus crowns, some sorrel and anise hyssop! We planted some of the strawberries in old eavestroughs along the fence and the rest in ground beneath the shrubs.

 

We were also delighted to receive a shrub sour cherry tree. It will be planted in the pollinator bed so that it gets the max amount of sun.

Can't wait to pick fruit in our own garden!

Building a Mini Pond

Our garden plot is bounded by neighbours on 3 sides and over the winter one of the neighbours decided to install a sump pump that vented excess water through a pipe right into our garden area! Given that we had a very wet spring, the pipe was gushing about 5 gallons of water under pressure about every 20 minutes which created a huge muddy patch. It also ran down the driveway making it very slippery for the parking area.

We tried to discuss the issue with the neighbours but they are tenants who speak little English. We were able to find out that the property owner who installed it was away until mid summer. So we had a bit of dilemma. We could take on the trouble and expense of re routing the pipe ourselves but  that didn't seem like a good plan since it would have to be run over 20 feet. Or we could report it to the city and risk getting the tenants caught up in something that wasn't their fault. Neither seemed like a good solution.

The water from the pipe is clean water and we don't have access to a water source other than our rain barrels so we started to look at ways to make use of the water as a resource. I had seen a video of someone who turned their downspout runoff into a small wetland and wondered if I could do something similar.

Using a plastic half barrel planter as the base, I was able to create a 3 level water feature that allowed us to capture most of the water.  I dug a small pit and buried the half barrel about 3/4 of its depth. The top level is a ceramic planter turned on it's side with a small drainage hole - when the pump turns on, the water jets into that and collects there initially. That drains into the next level which is a round basin planter full of gravel. The water filtres through the gravel and drains into the half barrel at the bottom. The barrel is full of rocks and small plants. I laid pipe from the barrel to the two adjacent gardens with the idea that I would install them as overflow drains but didn't to finish that part. so currently the excess water spills over the side of the barrel and slowly drains. We are looking at potentially turning that spot into s small wetland planting area but need to see how it works in drier conditions when the pump won't filled the pond as frequently.