Lots of garden-related activity at SPEC this month, so it's time for another update...
As some of you may know, SPEC worked with Kitsilano High School and Bayview elementary
over the winter and spring to establish two school gardens. Catriona Gordon worked with the students to learn about organic gardening, plant, maintain, and celebrate the gardens.
Over the summer, while the students are on holidays, we have partnered with two summer programs for youth to continue with garden maintenance and urban agriculture education.
So far, the kids have enjoyed harvesting peas, radishes, kale, lettuce and (huge!) zucchini from the gardens so far, and we're looking forward to the cherry tomatoes, corn, beans, carrots, potatoes, sunflower seeds, beets, and more that will be ready for harvesting later in the season.
Lots going on at the SPEC building on our rooftop garden as well, and thanks to our dedicated rooftop waterers, our plants are surviving the intense heat we've been having over the past week! Take a look at what's new on the roof...
some beautiful kid-friendly signs (Big thanks to Julia and Lynette for creating these for us!) :
a mini greenhouse for our peppers:
Unlike most of our other plants in the rooftop garden, which are heirloom varieties, these peppers are a commercial hothouse cultivar. We're "training" them to climb up and around a string, like so:
Some more signage to provide information about some of the uniquie features of our garden, including our self-watering planter and our solar cooker (plus more to come!):
Unfortunately, we seem to have developed a bit of a whitefly problem on our potatoes and tomatoes! We've put out some yellow sticky traps to deal with the problem:
We have been harvesting lots of summer vegetables from our rooftop garden - peas, lettuce, kale, radishes - and now some of our containers are starting to look a little sparse. This means we are nearing the transition into winter planting, which we hope to start early next week. Hope you can join us for some fun up on the roof!
