Support Our Food Hub with Giving Tuesday

Our Food Hub is Little Mountain Neighbourhood House Society’s response to our community’s emergency food needs. Weekly, we feed 71 families serving 205 people & have 52 families on our waitlist. We provide healthy, locally grown and sourced produce and other foods in a dignified manner. We need your support to help us meet people where they are at and to create equitable and just food access. In Our Food Hub, we are growing our food and feeding our community.

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This Week in the Garden

Part of closing down for winter is doing maintenance on our garden tools. Art Bomke showed us how to first clean all the hand and long tools and then sharpen those with cutting edges, and finally oil both the blades and the handles to keep them in good condition for many years to come.
We also gathered around Monique's Garden bed to unveil the plaque now affixed to the side of the wooden container. She will be missed.
Angela
November 13

Work Party at the Garden

A cool but unexpectedly dry day! We are in tidying up mode now; the accessible beds were cleaned up, with the voluminous squash and cucumber vines removed, and weeds removed form the vegetable beds in preparation for mulching with fallen leaves, which will take place over the next few weeks.

The runner beans were thinned out as there is so much foliage that the beans are pale in colour as they have been shielded from the sun, but there are quite a few more beans to come. Bush beans have stopped cropping now so were cut down. Raspberry canes were also cut back, as although there are quite a few berries on them, there will not be enough sun to ripen them.

Further cutting back took place in the wild berry area, with both the red and blue elderberry shrubs reduced in height and thinned, as well as the thimble berry bushes. "Volunteer" oak saplings were also removed from this area, together with a vigorous growth of thistles! Today's harvest included carrots, parsnips, leeks, runner beans and herbs, and we all shared in a large squash from the Children's Garden which was cut into quarters for the volunteers and paired with herbs for a lovely roast squash dish!

Work Party at the Garden

A fine dry day to help our tidying up exercise! Another couple of beds were cleared to allow further cover crop seeding. The cover crop in the broad bean bed (due to be planted out at the end of October) has sprouted very thickly, so we might have to thin it out when planting the beans. Foliage from the spent squashes was added to the pile waiting to be composted, necessitating another turning of the system!

Three barrow loads of reasonable compost were emptied out of Bin 3 and spread onto the orchard area, then Bin 2 turned into Bin 3, and finally Bin 1 was turned into Bin 2, to make way for the enormous pile of material in the Collection Bay!

Some winter salad seeds and seedlings were planted out in the accessible beds, some of them having been taken from the vertical growing wall of the Shed, where they weren't doing very well - not enough soil perhaps? It's an experiment!