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News 2012
News 2012
We will be posting upcoming dates for garden events and workshops here. For the latest activities of the park's drop-in garden club, check out our gardening workboard.
Past workshops in 2012:
November 3, 2012 3pm - 5pm
Biochar is high quality that can be used as a soil amendment to create a healthier for plants and microorganisms.
From the August 2012 Newsletter:
Gardening news, with a bake oven postscript from Edithvale Community Centre
The Dufferin Grove “garden club,” which has city program staff support from Anna Bekerman, Rachel Weston, and Leslie Lindsay, recently got a wonderful surprise – a $1000 donation to buy pollinator plants for schoolchildren to plant in the park. The online magazine The Grid (connected with the Toronto Star) celebrated its first year of publication by hosting what they called a “pop-up lunch” at the 416 Snack Bar restaurant at Bathurst and Queen. Invitational chefs came from other restaurants, cooking a $5 fundraiser lunch, with the proceeds to be given to some worthy cause. The Grove School (a Board of Education alternative school) teamed up with The Grid to locate the donation at Dufferin Grove community gardens.
Kelly O’Brien made a lively video of the Grove students’ planting day (the link is posted on the dufferinpark.ca home page). York University pollination researcher and park neighbour Clement Kent gave the kids a talk about pollinator gardens, gardens which provide hospitality to bees and butterflies. He makes an appearance in O’Brien’s video, as does Rachel Weston, who works at Dufferin Grove one afternoon a week, in addition to her fulltime private landscaping job. Rachel made a new design for the pollinator garden near the cob courtyard, and that’s where the kids planted most of the new plants. The donation also covered art materials – wooden cutouts of birds and butterflies and insects, and paints for the kids to paint them. These colourful shapes are now hanging up in the park trees. Have a look!
The park’s “garden club” is open to everyone who likes to garden or thinks they’d like to try it. The gardeners meet on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and work in the park gardens together. Their meetings often include a picnic made with the garden produce. To find out more, e-mail gardens@dufferinpark.ca.
The garden club was the brainchild of long-time park staff Anna Bekerman, who volunteered at the park gardens before she even began to work as a program staff person. Anna is also one of the park bakers and Friday Night supper cooks, and she is often called on to talk to other interested groups about using community bake ovens. Recently, she gave a three-hour workshop to big group of staff and volunteers at the new Edithvale Community Centre in North York. The new community centre included a very nice outdoor bake oven installation, complete with a $4000 marble prep counter. The only problem is, the oven hearth is located so high up (due to the contractor’s concern about child safety) that it’s very hard for shorter adults to reach. The hearth is also quite small (it’s pre-fab), and so it’s hard to bake with a larger group. However, the oven is supplied with all new baking equipment from Nella cutlery, the councillor is fully in support, and the taller summer staff are keen to bake. A new bake oven story begins.