Change of Plans

I had the post on preparing your garden plot ready for this week, but your garden plot, or balcony, or whatever is most likely buried and/or frozen like mine. The ground, in particular, is quite likely to be frozen solid, with such low night temperatures and low daytime temperatures.

That's okay. I started these posts early in the season so that there'd be room to work around the usual Toronto spring ups and downs. If you're not caught up on the preparations in the previous posts, this is a good weekend to do it.


For my part, this week I've collected together some Toronto gardening sites, in case you want to browse.

All of these sites are inspiring examples of urban growing, but be sure not to let the scale intimidate you. These are people who can respect growing a bucket of tomatoes on a balcony or fire escape or some chard outside the back door.


You Grow Girl is a great site for shedding misconceptions about gardening, and seeing lots of examples (and photos) of gardening for food and beauty in small, unconventional, and public urban spaces. There are discussion lists where you can ask questions and share ideas, too.

Gardening by yourself is very nice, but community is great too.  If you want to garden with others, learn, or if you don't have much space to garden and you want to do more, Toronto is full of gardens to help out in. The list of gardens at Toronto Community Garden Network is enormous, spread out all over the city.

For example, Perth Dupont Community Garden has both individual garden plots and lots of shared growing projects, including a garden from which they donate produce to the Stop Community Food Centre.

On the other hand, Dufferin Grove has no individual garden plots, but a large garden maintained by volunteers and park staff. Produce is used in the park's great home-made food.

At U of T the Dig In! Campus Agriculture Network has a blog that follows food issues and events, often including public workshops. They have a rooftop farm, the sky garden, with its own blog.