Planting Day May 2nd

Hello Gardeners,

First off, a big thanks to all who came out and ruffled up the beds, nicely turning the mulch into the soil and generally preparing the beds for future seeds. We also managed to build new beds, and erect the sign, as mentioned in the previous post. Again, thanks to the Arusha center for providing us with funds to do so, and to the city for providing us with soil. We had a little set-back last week because we didn't have water, thus we couldn't actually plop the little seeds into the dirt, but the city will have turned on the plumbing now, and so planting should be a go for this Thursday, 7pm. Hope to see you there.

As we're about to seed, I've been considering a lot about it means to garden. Often, because our season is so short, I run headlong into gardening without considering valuable aspects which are external to the planting itself. The seeds and the vegetables that come from them are certainly a massive part of gardening, but it's also about community and environment. As Sunnyside aims to move towards a more permaculture approach to gardening, our tactics for growing food will change drastically. Ultimately, the goal is not simply to provide food for the community, but to strike concord with the environment. As the natural environment becomes a sanctuary, hopefully the community, too, will grow into a supportive and self-managing ecology.  Already we have an incredible group of people helping out with the garden, and so I'm truly excited to see what will develop from this. To try to complement my thoughts, I've added Mark Lakeman's video "The Chronology of City Repair" 1/14. To watch the whole lecture is about an hour, but that is the best spent hour of video watching I can imagine. As we come together to make Calgary a food sustainable city, let's keep the non-food aspects in mind because they are as central to our survival. 

See ya soon,
kye

Two Beds and a Sign!

Thanks to the Arusha Centre's Take Action Grants and Timbertown, funding and materials were received to hire Patrick Sweet (top left in green) to paint a custom garden sign from a repurposed headboard and to add two new beds to the four built last year.

Thursday, 18th CANCELLED

Hey all,

Posting to inform that this Thursday, the 18th will be CANCELLED due to the weather. With all this snow on the ground, it just doesn't seem that sensible. The plan is now for next week, Thursday, April 25th. On the 25th we will put together the new beds and then plant some seeds.

New planting day
When: April 25th @ 7pm.
Where: Sunnyside Shared Garden
Bring: Friends, gloves, planting tools, warm drink

See ya out there,

kye 

First Planting Day April 18th 2012

Weather! What can I say, we live in the most capricious of environments where it can snow every month, and gardening is always ridiculed as some impossibility. But we know that isn't true. Sure, we can't have peach trees outdoors, but we certainly can grow a massive variety of produce from lettuces to tomatoes. Sunnyside Shared will begin this season with a planting day on April 18th, at 7pm. Because there are still several weeks which could potentially dip down to freezing, we are only going to be planting hearty tough plants like Kale and Spinach. The whole planting shouldn't take too long, but we'd love to see you out, and get a chance to meet some of the faces for Sunnyside's 2013 season. You've likely got some brilliant ideas that would benefit our season, so come throw down some little Kale seeds on April 18th and tell your community about them. And besides, afterwards, there's a good chance we'll go to The Royal Oak Tavern where there's delicious local beer and food.
Don't know where we are? Check the map below.

First Planting Day April 18th

Here's a video that I'm sure everyone in the food community has seen: basically it stands for everything we're trying to do, get food to people and grow it local. I want to post this video as a reminder of the power an individual has within their community. It's so easy to be discouraged by the poor political choices that inundate our lives by those in power; however, as Ron shows, we can all make change, massive change, but we need to commit to working together.

SunnySide Shared Garden hopes to bring our community tighter and open our communities eyes to the reality that we can control our own existence. Fortunately for us, Gardening is already cool as hell, everyone wants to do it, we just need to help provide awesome spaces for it to happen. That said, come meet us in the Garden Thursday, April 18th. Grab your shovel and get gangsta with some dirt. We'll be there from 7:00pm till it's done. And we'll likely go to Royal Oak tavern after, because you need to support local bars too.

Hope to see you there,