Events

Education Days at Pine Street

These hands-on group activity days take place on Wednesdays between 11:00am and 4:00 pm at the Pine St Garden behind the Foodshare Centre at 271 Pine St. Bring a lunch, water and dress for the weather.

July Wednesday Work Parties - We will be weeding and watering our many garden beds and two mini-greenhouses, as well as planting winter veggies. Tasks are determined by the interests of the people who come to a work party, and by the seasonal needs of the garden.

Tour the Gardens

We welcome groups to tour the Community Gardens at 271 Pine St. We can show you around any Wednesday from 11am-4pm, or contact us to arrange a time. Prearranged tours include a walk around the garden, on-the-spot tastings of seasonal vegetables, information on gardening without chemicals and composting with worms, and question time. We are also happy to provide your group with a hands-on planting, digging or harvesting experience, by request. Occasionally, we have schools or community groups come weekly to participate in communal garden projects, and we welcome this community involvement! Tours are by donation, and you must purchase a group membership before participating in the garden. Contact us at 816-GROW (4769) or info@nanaimocommunitygardens.ca for more information.

Annual Rhubarb Festival Launches 12 Weeks of Plant Sales: May 1st through July!

Plant sales have been extended! Due to the dedication of our volunteers and the high quality of the seedlings coming from our greenhouse, Nanaimo Community Gardens' plant sales will be extended another month, to the end of July. For people with gardening questions, there will be July Master Gardener Clinics announced soon.

Come check out our plant sales at 271 Pine St, every Saturday and Sunday from 10am-4pm, Wednesdays from 10am-4pm, and Fridays from 10am-6pm. Our heritage plants are grown organically with no synthetic fertilizers or pesticides and all sales support the work of the society. The plants are grown by volunteers in the Greenhouse. Plant sales will continue through to the end of July.

More volunteers are needed to help staff our plant sales. Come share your enthusiasm for growing edible plants and flowers organically! To volunteer, come by during plant sales times or phone Willow Vardal at (250) 591-3136. You can also contact Community Gardens at 816-GROW (4769) or info@nanaimocommunitygardens.ca.

Rainy Day Escape: Volunteer in Nanaimo Community Gardens Greenhouse

Want to travel to the Tropics? Escape the rain and wind for blissful heat in a lush greenhouse paradise! You will find the freshest of salad greens, excellent conversation, and the chance to improve the food security of your community. Our large greenhouse is filled to bursting with green food plants destined for Nanaimo's back yards, thanks to Nanaimo Community Gardens' Hammond Bay Greenhouse volunteers. A heartfelt thank-you to our volunteers!

The Greenhouse is a volunteer run site located on McGuffie Rd. (off Hammond Bay Road, first left past Piper's Pub, heading south). Do not enter at the RDN driveway; continue past and park at the side of the road at the Community Gardens sign. The path to the greenhouse is through the trees on the right.

Greenhouse work parties are held each Wednesday and Saturday in June in order to prepare plants for sales. Join us to seed, transplant and water vegetable seedlings that will be sold in the community. Contact Jody at 250-758-0177 to check work party times.

Community Gardens Monthly Potluck
in the Pine St. Community Gardens (behind Foodshare), 271 Pine St, Nanaimo
Sunday July 11th, 5pm

Nanaimo Community Gardens Society is bringing back our monthly vegetarian potluck, on the second Sunday of the month, by popular demand! This time the potlucks will not be held after board meetings but will be their very own events. The aim is to provide free member education as well as share food, so when possible, we will have a guest speaker give a talk. Information on past speakers can be found below. To suggest a speaker, contact us! Everyone is welcome. There is always a lot of variety so bring your stomachs and taste buds and join us for a smorgasbord of yummy foods.

For the July potluck, we welcome the start of gleaning by celebrating fruit and our hard working fruit pickers. We will also be thanking our tireless plant sales volunteers for making our May-July fund-raising a success and getting more vegetables into people's back yards. Plant sales are continuing into July, so come to 271 Pine St for your cucumbers, zucchini, tomatillos and more!

All are welcome, so join us for a potluck in our communal garden. There should be good eating!

Volunteer for Community Gardens at an Event

Nanaimo Community Gardens Society will be attending a number of community events. If you would like to help out by staffing the table, helping with set up or take down, or being a relief person for any of these events please contact us at (250)816-4769 or email info@nanaimocommunitygardens.ca

Community Gardens Workshops: February-October 2010

See our upcoming workshops February - October 2010.

Wednesday Summer Work Parties at NCGS's Pine St Community Garden

We are a volunteer run community garden located at 271 Pine St, behind Foodshare. We host year round work parties and invite community participation in the Gardens on behalf of the land owners and the Nanaimo Community Gardens Society.

Come to one of our Wednesday Summer Work Parties from 11am-4pm. Volunteers are preparing beds for planting, transplanting seedlings from our greenhouse, and weeding the raspberries, corn and beans. The garden is growing! Thank-you Pine St. volunteers! Drop by during sales times, or during our Wednesday Work Parties, 11-4 every Wednesday, to join in. This is a volunteer run Community Gardens site. If you wish to attend a planning meeting, please contact Lee at 816-4769 or info@nanaimocommunitygardens.ca.

Want to pitch in? If you have any of the following materials that you would like to donate to the Pine Street Garden, please let us know and we will be happy to take them off your hands:

  • Manure (horse, goat, chicken, cow, rabbit etc) with or without bedding
  • Spoiled hay or straw
  • Bags of leaves
  • Wheelbarrows or garden cart

Recent Events

Nanaimo Community Gardens AGM

We held our 2010 AGM on February 7th and elected a new board. Your directors for 2010 are Terra Bohart, Anne Gougeon, Jim Simon, Pat Wells and Lindsay Grill. Congratulations to each of them and thank you for the hard work they do.

This was also the first day that we were accepting memberships for 2010. If you were a member last year and anticipate participating in any of our programs (like Gleaning), you need to renew your membership. Or if you would simply like to support us and the work we do, a membership is a wonderful show of support. Download your membership form from this website to send in, or visit us any of the community events listed above to pay us in person.

And lastly, at the AGM we made a public thank you to the many volunteers, donors and sponsors that helped us make 2009 a most successful year. This list will be up on our website shortly so check it out. Two people who we especially wish to thank are Jessica Snider and Eleanor Wennberg. Most of you know Jessica as the Executive Director of Community Gardens. Last year Jessica resigned from this position and we feel her loss keenly. Jessica was responsible for much of the work that went on in the society and we wish to thank her again for her hard work and dedication. Eleanor Wennberg is the owner of the farm where NCGS had an educational garden site in the south end for many years. Her generosity over the years has meant so much for the society.

On April 24th we attended the first annual NALT Wild Greens Festival. Thank-you to NAULT for inviting us, and to our volunteers who helped sell plants and hand out information. The event was packed with enthusiastic people.

Past Monthly Potlucks

March

Our March Nanaimo Community Gardens potluck hosted a special guest presentation by Sarah York, an Invasive Plant Outreach Specialist with the Invasive Plants Council of BC. Sarah made a very informative presentation about the impact of invasive plants on ecosystems, showing us local examples of invasive plants. An invasive plant is one that spreads rapidly, choking out the other plants in an area until a complex ecosystem that supported wildlife and water systems is reduced to a monoculture where only the invasive plant, which is often toxic to wildlife, grows. Sarah wishes to raise awareness and to communicate about certain high priority invasive plants. This is all in an effort to prevent new introductions and to provide information about what we can do to "Stop the Spread". The presentation included a slide show talk, fresh samples and take-away resources.

Thank-you, Sarah York, for taking the time to educate us on such an urgent and important topic!

"Invasive plants are the 2nd greatest threat to biodiversity after habitat loss." -International Union for the Conservation of Nature. http//www.coastalinvasiveplants.com

April

Our April potluck hosted a guest speaker from Salt Spring Seeds, Dan Jason, who spoke on the motivations for saving our own regional seeds, and practical seed saving methods. An audience of 60 locals came to hear Dan Jason's talk. We shared a dazzlingly varied feast of vegetarian dishes in the Pacific Gardens Cohouse Society's beautiful communal dining area.

Dan Jason spoke on some of his favorite, protein dense food plants; wheat, flax, beans and rye, and handed out free seed packets to audience members willing to try them out. These are staple foods, easily grown on a ten by ten space. He spoke of ways local communities are starting their own community seed banks and seed exchanges. As a seed's main requirement is to be kept dry, a seed bank requires only a dry space to store seeds and some ready-to-hand information on growing the seeds. Dan Jason's book, "Saving Seeds As If Our Lives Depended On It', gives an overview of how to seed save different plant varieties in order to continue to get strong, nutritious plants. In fact, Dan sees saving our own seeds as a way to bring flavour and nutrition back into our favorite varieties by observing our own plants and selecting the seeds from the best ones. This is something that he points out that large seed companies have never done and are not interested in doing, as their main profit is in selling poisonous chemicals to farmers. But with a little observation, and simple seed saving techniques, we can grow and seed save our food, and turn the billion dollar food industry on its head just by changing our own actions, by getting together and saving our seed and exchanging it together.

We are looking forward to next Spring's Seedy Sunday. The seed exchange table will be busier than ever, because volunteer gardeners will be sharing seed we've carefully harvested and packaged for each other and new friends. Maybe some of Dan Jason's own red fife wheat will be passed to new hands.

Thank you, Dan, for making a special trip out to talk to us. And thank-you for bringing the Aunt Molly ground cherry seeds, we at Community Gardens wanted to offer ground cherry seedlings to our community this year, and now we can!

To check out what Dan Jason is up to at Salt Spring Seeds, see http://www.saltspringseeds.com