The Bulkhead Urban Agriculture Lab
The Grow project has taken up the transitional state of the Bulkhead site, installing a series of provisional platforms for growing herbs, vegetables, fruit and mushrooms. Many platforms have been installed and new ones are being added as the Lab grows and expands over the summer.
Stuffed Pallet
Today, we put together a vertical pallet to grow strawberries. We lined the inside of the pallet with a weed block fabric and sealed it with additional boards from another pallet.
Planting
After a trip to the nursery, we spent the day planting. When we got on site, we discovered that our friend from the Village had given us a head start and planted some seeds…radishes, lettuce, chard and carrots.
Roots and Herbs
Today we added the palette platforms for the potatoes. We lined coffee sacks donated by Origins Coffee Company with landscape fabric to help hold in moisture and block out light. We hope this method will allow is to get a good harvest of potatoes. We have five sacs prepared for planting.
Tomatoes Passed On
At the end of the day, after we finished filling the super sacs with soil, a neighbour from the senior’s complex in the Village came by to ask if we would like some tomatoes. She went home and collected a handful of seedlings and gave us a quick demonstration on transplanting. We didn’t have access to water set up just yet so we ended up filling a container at a nearby water fountain. We managed to get them wet enough for over night.
Bit by Bit
After getting the walkway and demo stage put together. We moved on to building the pallet platforms to support the super sacs. We filled each sac with about 2 feet of soil. The rim of the sacs will provide some protection from the elements.
Yardworks Donates 8 Cubic Yards of Soil
We are very grateful to Yardworks for their donation of soil to the Grow project. It’s an excellent blend that will provide good nutrition for our plants.
Gargantuan Rosemary Finds Home
Lamoureux Architect is in the process of remodeling their offices and Brad Lamoureux and Anne Maisonneuve kindly offered their rosemary plant to the Grow project. It was a long journey for this large rosemary.
Cleaning around the edges and under the mound
It was a rare sunny afternoon for our site clean-up. We approached the clean up with a light touch in some places and in others…it took a lot of cutting, pulling and thrashing.
The Bulkhead Lab is taking shape
Today, thanks to a kind donation from Yardworks we received 8 cubic yards for rainforest mix soil.
The fence is complete..for now
The third Grow workshop took place last Saturday. We managed to plant and hang the last of the pocket gardens on the chain link fence. Many of them are sprouting and filling out.
Carlos, AKA The Pallet Guy
Many thanks to Carlos also known as The Pallet Guy for delivering (and unloading) 75 pallets for the Grow project.
Design Nerds Jam 5.6 Grow
The Grow Design Jam 5.6 brought the Design Nerds and the Grow project together for some creative, collective brainstorming around growing food, collecting water and composting at the Bulkhead Lab. Ocean and Alicia and I introduced the Jam with some information about the Design Nerds, Grow and a look at some innovative art, design, and architecture projects that use living materials.
Rajdeep Singh Gill and Fabiola Nabil Naguib
Please join curator and scholar Rajdeep Singh Gill and artist, writer, and activist Fabiola Nabil Naguib for this talk, discussion and walking journey in expanding notions of sustainability.
Roaming the Village for the Second Workshop
The sun finally came out during our second workshop so we ended up roaming a little farther to look for infrastructure that could be used as support for growing. Heather came up with some interesting designs for floating gardens, might not be best for salt water but then possibly it would work in a water feature?
X Garden Box: an Avant Gardening Project
Vancouver artist, Lois Klassen joined us for our second workshop at Creekside. She brought along a book documenting her 2008 project X Garden Box. She was kind enough to share the PDF of the book which includes instructions for creating a growing container out of a cardboard box and chicken wire.
