If you are following this blog, you may not need any other help right now. But if or when you want to know more, here are a few sources. All of these can be intimidating and cause information overload. But all of them are full of interesting and valuable information, when you're in the mood to digest it.
Gardening References
Canadian Organic Growers Web Site
- great simple pamphlets for gardeners on the Toronto Chapter's resources page
- if you become a member, you can receive the quarterly magazine, which I love, though it's mainly focused (of course) on farm-scale topics
- COG also has many other services and events, and the COG Toronto chapter has an annual conference
Square Foot Gardening, by Mel Bartholomew
- focused on home gardening and keeping it small (the only book I've read like this)
- very well organized, with fantastic tables of when to plant and transplant throughout the growing season
- a strong influence on the approach in this blog
- systematizes and simplifies larger-scale bio-intensive approaches
- still somewhat intimidating: the author is more... organized than most of us
- not as much attention to plant and soil biology as in some other books
- there's an associated web site - but it's a little hard to navigate
How to Grow More Vegetables, by John Jeavons
- focused on achieving food self-sufficiency and sustainability (so it's about larger-scale growing than this blog)
- presents bio-intensive methods that are also the foundation for the simpler approaches in this blog
- intense attention to working with natural processes to enhance plant and soil communities
- passionate, fascinating, and inspiring, but also overwhelming
The New Organic Grower, by Elliot Coleman
- focused on small-scale organic farming (so much larger-scale growing than this blog)
- straightforward and based on the experience of a long-time farmer
- excellent, well-organized details on everything, lots of practical information
- another great book, but once again it might be overwhelming for the beginner or home gardener
Growing in Toronto
There is an amazing set of Toronto-based sites and blogs where you can get ideas and inspiration and find out about events and projects going on around town. Here are some of them.
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 one pot 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 also 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.
Looking for Other Web Resources
When it comes to finding specific information about gardening, web sites are usually less well organized than the "Garden References" listed above. And unfortunately, they are often also wrong: they don't call it the "misinformation age" for nothing.
I do use web searches as a quick resource for plants that I'm not too sure about: how it grows, when to plant, etc. However, this is where the misinformation comes on strong, and you have to be pretty thorough and compare lots of sites before you can feel confident you've actually got good information. A lot of plant myths seem to be common.
Furthermore, regional differences really matter. What's true in Virginia is not true in Toronto. So it often takes a lot of cross comparison work to extract trustworthy information about vegetable gardening from the web.
Lastly, approaches to sustainable growing are changing fast, and especially urban growing, as more people do it and innovate new approaches. Interest in food security and recovery from corporate control of the food supply is also accelerating this trend. The web is the great way to just explore and find out about new ideas or approaches, and think about which ones might be helpful for you.
