Seeds From Grow
The Grow Seed Exchange brought about some seed sharing at the Creekside Communtiy Centre. If you happen to be the happy recipient of one of the Grow seed packages but don’t know a lot about planting and growing the seeds look for details below.
Grow Walk
Please join Jason Packer, sustainability consultant with Recollective for a lively walk through the Olympic Village. Jason will discuss the green features of the development and how these innovations reflect the changing landscape of sustainable design. How can sustainability be built into our urban environments and enacted in everyday life will be explored in this walking dialogue.
Potatoes and Tomatoes
It’s harvest time at the Bulkhead Lab. While many people have been helping themselves to the bounty there’s still ample amounts of produce to collect. This past Saturday Nigel and I dug around in the coffee sacks and were very surprised.
Swarming
The evening of the Swarm 12 event was pretty spectacular. The weather was beautiful and the sunset on the water incredible.
Alexander McNaughton local urban farmer, wild forager and cat about town prepared and served some fresh samples of organic food from the local foodshed.
Grow Seed Exchange
The nights are getting darker, the days crisper and the leaves are starting to turn. As fall is now here, we wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the hard work and effort of all the people that contributed to Grow with a special event called the Seed Exchange.
The Bug Lady
Maria Keating, an entomologist with City Farmer came by for lunch on Friday. She brought a basket of carnivorous plants and her extensive knowledge about plant/insect/human relations.
The Straight: Two Urban Agriculture Projects
In collaboration with other groups and individuals, Grow cultivates a wide array of vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers in reclaimed and repurposed containers, all sitting on recycled wooden shipping pallets. At the same time, it sponsors walks and workshops, and—against a backdrop of high-end condos and the nonconsultative hideosity that is B.C. Place—promotes dialogue around issues of “sustainability, food security, and collective initiatives in urban areas,” — excerpt from Robin Laurence article Two urban agriculture projects bring art to Vancouver’s gardens, Vancouver Straight
SWARM12
Join us at the Bulkhead Lab for SWARM #12.
1 metre to 100 mile organic food samples prepared by Alexander McNaughton will be served.
Grow is a public art project situated on the periphery of the Olympic Village in South East False Creek, Vancouver.
Green Graffiti with EYA
Kristina Parusel from the Environmental Youth Alliance met with me on Friday to help build a small-scale living wall at the Bulkhead. The living walls are part of the EYA Green Graffiti program which takes urban agriculture vertical. Using an aluminum unit that contains 24, 6″ x 6″ cubes, fruit, vegetables and herbs can be grown. I was surprised when Kristina told me that they’ve successfully grown tomatoes, beets and cabbages in these small 6″ x 6″ cubes.
Grow Workshop: August 13th, 2011
Please join Chloe Bennett, a student of Landscape Architecture at UBC for a lively discussion about mason bee habitat. Mason bees are small blue coloured bees that are important garden pollinators. They have specific needs for nesting and Chloe will be able to guide you in the proper methods of building a mason bee home. She will also share her experience in creating the Vancouver roundabout project Bees Please.
Canopy/Water Collection
Over the past couple of weeks Kim Cooper and I have been creating a canopy that can also function to collect rain water. We initially met and looked over the site to see how we could take advantage of the natural slope and the different posts and poles already present.
We sketched out some ideas on how to use some of the remaining vinyl material from Eric Deis’s photo mural “Last Chance” to capture and funnel the water.
The Vancooper Hen House at the Lab
Duncan Martin from Backyard Bounty joined us on July 24th to give an informal workshop on raising hens in your backyard. He makes these tidy coops out of cedar and wire mesh. They are made to the parameters set out by City of Vancouver bylaws.
The “Vancooper” was installed at the Lab on the Friday before the workshop.
Kale Chips
O.k, so I probably planted way too much kale. I was excited about growing it and had no idea just how prolific it would be. I was trying to get creative about ways to cook and share the kale and I hit upon kale chips. If you haven’t tried them before, I highly recommend this tasty and healthy snack.
Green Wall/Bird Feeder
Elisa Yon discovered an interesting project by a Mona Hatoum called The Hanging Garden. For this project Hatoum filled 770 jute sacks with seeds to create a 10 metre wall. These sacks sprouted transforming this imposing barricade.
Bombs Away
We spent this weekend creating some seed bombs. If you haven’t made your own bombs before. It’s quite simple, you can use this recipe provided by Andrea Bellamy on her blog Heavy Petal or check out this video by UK guerilla gardener, Richard Reynolds. The basic ingredients are clay, seeds and compost.
Nets
Meaghen Buckley created a series of nets along the rusted steel elements on the edge of the Lab. She crocheted both natural and synthetic fibres into large asymmetrical shapes creating different tension points in the net which allows for the wind to move freely in and through.
Homes for Bees
Chelsea Trousdell, one of our regular volunteers at the Lab brought some untreated fir to make homes for mason bees. If you aren’t familiar with mason bees, they are a dark metallic blue/green colour and resemble black flies. They are solitary insects that nest near each other but do not share a nest or hive. Females seek out holes in wood to use as a nest. Once the eggs are laid they will plug up the holes using mud, hence the name mason bee. These active pollinators are great for vegetable gardens and they are non-aggressive.
Upcoming Workshop: Sunday July 24th
Please join Duncan Martin and his chickens from Duncan’s Backyard Henhouses for an afternoon at the Bulkhead Lab. Duncan will be leading informal demonstrations and discussions on the basics of proper care and keeping of small urban flocks of hens. This interactive session will invite participants to discover best practices for keeping small flocks of hens in their own backyards.
Seed Bomb Making at the Bulkhead Lab
Join us for some seed bomb making at the Bulkhead Lab. We will form clay, compost and seeds into small “bombs” to be lobbed at The Games are Open, a large-scale sculpture of a bulldozer created by Berlin-based artists Köbberling and Kaltwasser. Constructed out of wheat board this sculpture is intended to slowly decompose over time, eventually becoming a plant nursery. The seed bombs will contribute to this burgeoning ecosystem.
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.
