Follow our progress: White Oaks Project – Part 2

Click HERE to get caught up to date with Part 1.

Welcome to our garden! We are Meghan & Mackenzie, a Research Associate and a Research Assistant from the Niagara College Agriculture & Environment Research and Innovation Centre. In May of 2016, we started a project in conjunction with White Oaks to turn about 4,000 square feet of scrubby, rocky, roadside turf into a lush, sustainable garden capable of supplying a small farm-to-table restaurant. Impossible? Watch and find out!

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This was the first of three truckloads filled with dark, fluffy soil. Over the next few days we laid paper to smother weeds, topped it with soil, and built each bed up to the correct depth. The hardest part of this process wasn’t the seemingly endless shovelling and running of wheelbarrows to and fro, but trying to keep the paper on the ground while the gusting wind did its best to turn each strip into a kite. The end result was 1,280 square feet of growing space at an 8 inch depth, using approximately 30 cubic yards of soil in the process.

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After laying out the soil we put down a layer of mulch surrounding the garden beds.This fluffy pine based mulch was laid over paper sheets like the soil, and will serve as walkways around the beds while suppressing weeds.

Keep up to date on Meghan & Mackenzie’s progress by following http://growwithniagara.tumblr.com/ and by using the hashtag #growwithniagara