Hello loyal lupins! It is Friday and I am posting as our greenhouse gals are puttering away at the Yukon College greenhouse getting everything planted for the weekend so watering is nice and easy for our new watering crew. We have contracted out our apartment building staff to help us with the watering. This week was entirely dedicated to planter boxes!! Our planter boxes, which are pictured in the post from last week, are all full with lovely dirt and soil. And now they have plants in them too!! Our hearty plants which were previously on the left hand shelving unit are now safely nestled in their beds. The girls in the greenhouse did an amazing amount of work this week researching companion planting and making it work with our box dimensions. We will have almost an entire planter box for tomatoes as we have SO MANY plants!!! We also built resumes this week to have updated resumes for the end of the program. Oh ya! We also moisturized the worms today! They were super dry and needed something to wake them up. They are back to eating healthily and hopefully they have a great weekend. As for this weekend - Whitehorse has an awesome Canada's 150 day arranged for tomorrow and it is also the start of the Adaka Cultural Festival which runs from tomorrow until July 6. We have a few participants already planning to attend the events and hope everyone takes advantage of the awesome opportunity. We will leave it here for now - for this week - and let everyone enjoy their weekends! Until next week....
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Happy Aboriginal Day (yesterday) everyone! Thank goodness this is now a recognized holiday! It also meant we got a fun little mid-week break to go see all of the amazing First Nations activities and projects going on right now. There is a voyageur canoe being carved, which is now outside and being steamed, that has been a project for this summer and is occurring just around the corner from us. One of our program participants helped move it outside yesterday - good thing we had the day off to help! We are thoughtful today as we want to recognize all of the awesome efforts of the local First Nations groups in the Yukon as they have had many conferences, projects for building and activities throughout the summer (already!). It is wonderful to share in the growth of our community. Last week the team, even though they were incredibly busy last week already, spruced up our OWN building too!! The photos below show our beautiful front boxes - they're even fuller now - and some hanging boxes. The hanging boxes are a new addition to our team and we've already gotten some compliments on them. Ah, so fun!! For our guys here in programs, they were certified in FoodSafe at the beginning of this week. So proud. So exciting! Much of the work done by our own guy who didn't do FoodSafe was transplanting our larger marigolds, the ones which were donated by Springtime Gardens, and some other vegetables which were getting cramped in their pots. We were so busy with the move that some of our plants could have used transplanting even last week. We also did a large amount of pruning as the move was a bit taxing on some of our plants and, again with the move, many of the maintenance tasks typical in a greenhouse had to be put on hold. It's nice to be back in regular operations. One of our gals will also be starting some seeds either this week or next as she has an interest in learning how to grow plants for tinctures. It is the first time in a while that we've had a participant interested in using the greenhouse for her own projects and we always welcome these ideas. It will also help build some skills which she can take with her after programs. Speaking of planter boxes - our tasks this week are focused on filling them! We filled one, as you can see through the progress photos, on Tuesday and are planning to fill the rest this week or early next week. We are recruiting someone from the woodshop to help with the lining and drilling as each box will be lined with poly and have holes drilled in the bottom. The poly acts to protect the wood from rotting out and the holes allow for air to get in, to aerate the soil, and to allow water out if we accidentally get too much water in there although that is unlikely as these beds are HUGE! We used four large totes/plastic containers of old soil which has been sitting around in the greenhouse with this soil simply acting as filler to bring our levels up. We put about one small bag of propogation mix in to the one box although I was informed that this was not the right thing to do ;). I mistook propogation mix for compost - it's not compost mix. It's best for starting seeds at the beginning of the growing season - lessons learned! Hopefully sharing that here will prevent someone else from making this mistake. We will use around 8 small bags of mushroom compost to make everything nice and healthy and used two bags of Sunshine Mix #4 from Cliffside Greenhouse. We love Sunshine Mix!! As you can see in the photos, we have our awesome cucumber trellises which were built by our winter greenhouse carpentry program - thanks again guys! The idea is that the cucumbers, once we plant them in the planter box, will climb the trellis and the cucumbers will be able to hang down, through the mesh, and grow more plants. It is also nice for our plants which like a bit more shade as they can grow underneath the trellis so we don't waste good growing space. The boxes will also allow us to clean up the greenhouse a bit by getting rid of large, old totes full of soil and plant some plants in there which will reduce the clustered shelves currently in there. My organizational brain is very excited to see the boxes full and the shelves a little more empty. This will also make watering much easier for our team as they can see whether they are watering everything. Today the team harvested all of the plants out of the garden tower so we may start fresh, or move the tower, if we wish. Now that we have a bit more time and heat and sunlight it will be nice to start fresh and watch some healthy growth particularly for this program as I think the growth they observed has been underwhelming. Here's to new beginnings! Hi everyone!! GUESS WHAT!!! WE DID IT!!! What in the world are you talking about? - you might ask. All of the build up of me saying "we're soooo busy" has culminated to this week. Culminated - big fancy word for built up to the highest point. This week we not only finished all of the planting at the city yard, 55 BOXES IN TOTAL, we also moved our belongings from the greenhouse at Changing Gear to our greenhouse at the Yukon College. I believe I mentioned that we had started this move two weeks ago and we finished it during a very long moving day yesterday. I tell ya, our greenhouse folk are AMAZING! So, planter boxes. On Friday last week and Monday this week we asked for the help of our entire Employ Ability Skills team (all 9 of them) to help us finish the planting and we crushed it out in record time. Each box has about 30 plants which include marigolds, sunflowers, amaranth and pansies. All of the lovely little flowers we've been growing for the past few months. And now that they are in big soil they will also become bigger and heartier!! So exciting!! Thank you to the Chamber of Commerce for helping us complete another successful year for the city planter boxes. Speaking of planter box flowers... a bonus is that Catheryne ran into some ladies from Springtime Garden in Fort Nelson, BC who had come up to sell some plants. Not only did they run in to each other, the lady from Springtime offered for us to come grab some of the flowers that didn't sell as a donation to the Challenge program. A huge thank you to the ladies there for helping us beautify our boxes! We also snagged some extra stuff that is further along than our own plants to spruce up our back fill for if plants don't survive in the planter boxes. The generosity of this community never cease to impress. For greenhouse, we are ever so thankful to Changing Gear for letting us rent half of their greenhouse. We wouldn't have had such happy, healthy plants without their space and we greatly appreciate the owner's help in getting everything established. We are now officially out of the Changing Gear greenhouse and in to the Yukon College where it's a bit of a tighter fit but encouraging us to trim things and transplant things. We donated a few plants to the owner at Changing Gear, a couple of trays of marigolds and pansies, to help with his planter boxes. A great big thanks to Victoria Faulkner Women's Center for being our watering team on the weekends. We shared the rented space with them at the Changing Gear greenhouse and in return they helped us with the watering requirements. Thanks for an awesome collaboration this year! Phew! Planter box season is always our busiest and we have survived it. Work this week includes getting used to our new work environment at the College and getting our own Challenge planter boxes done, now that we have me our requirements for our work here. How exciting! One of our ladies is hoping to plant some things for tinctures to take home at the end of the program and I'm looking forward to reworking the garden tower to make it full and beautiful again. Cheers to what's coming! The photos below show warming our plants up to be put in to the boxes, hearty plant sin the greenhouse, the stages of filling the planter boxes, the final products and part of the process of moving out of the Changing Gear greenhouse. Look how empty it is now!! Thank you, as always, for your ongoing support and please enjoy our planter boxes as they grow comfortable in their new homes on the city streets of Whitehorse! Hello everyone, I will split these posts today in to one for last week and one for this week as they've both been busy. I feel like I'm constantly saying we're busy... but we are!! Last week the team got certified in First Aid!! Way to go guys!! Because of that, we had a little gap in production but mostly focused on transplanting and starting our plants outside so they would be used to the weather once being planted in the city planter boxes. As you will also notice, Gordon the Gourd is doing well. The photos below represent last week in the greenhouse where we were in full production and hadn't even started the city planter boxes yet. If I haven't already explained this, the city planter boxes go out on to the corners of the city streets in the downtown area every year. The Chamber of Commerce connects with Challenge each year to design the layout for the boxes and grow the plants, as well as place the plants, which will be out for everyone's viewing pleasure during the summer. The date the boxes go on to the streets is June 14 so we have been bustling about getting things organized and ready for moving and transplanting. The tower has been overrun by plants which are no longer growing. Unfortunately, we will be starting from scratch with these guys hopefully next week. As the city planters are time sensitive, they have been our focus. Our in house plants have done well as we accidentally over watered them last week so they, although having many dead leaves, are surviving well without our attention. Our worms have been less than happy with us for the lack of food over the last few weeks so we will also work on that next week. I wonder if we have live worms still in our garden tower.... things the future will tell us. Until next week (aka today as this is a belated post). Hello loyal fans!! Welcome to week six of our program! It is flying by... no lie! I apologize as it has felt as though the blog posts are few and far between and appreciate your patience. The greenhouse folk have been steadily plucking away at the transplanting up at the greenhouse to ensure everything is ready for the big planting day at the city yard. Coming up quick! The team is in to volunteer week now where we offer our many hands to local organizations which also helps boost the resumes we build later in the program. We don't usually get to go up to the greenhouse during volunteer week but we managed to set aside some time! We had our guys help get the planter boxes at the city yard all ready to go for planting, starting next week. They also helped with some transplanting, getting some soil ready and starting the moving process from Changing Gear greenhouse to the Yukon College greenhouse. It feels as though things never stop moving! That being said, pansies are done being transplanted! How exciting! The garden tower is coming along well although we are uncertain as to whether the worms have survived our attention being elsewhere. The worms in the vermicomposting home are doing splendid but it is harder to tell in the garden tower as the area is not brightly lit and we have the additional rung at the top making it quite difficult to see inside. Stepladders are recommended, friends. As for the greenhouse itself, it's a tropical jungle up there! I have posted a photo of our little plantses for your viewing pleasure. Pip pip for now little doves! |
about usWe are part of the Employ Ability Skills Program with Challenge Disability Resource Group. We take part in a 12-week program that allows us to learn new skills and foster our interest in growing our own food organically. Archives
August 2017
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