Follow our progress: White Oaks Project blog now live

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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Here’s the site we were given for our garden. It’s not what one would usually consider an ideal location: it’s near a major highway and across from a huge outlet mall, resulting in endless traffic. Taylor Road originally ran right beneath where the garden now lies, leaving only a shallow layer of dense, near-dead dirt that was more stone than soil. Scruffy grass and stubborn weeds barely managed to eke out an existence on this barren stretch – how were we supposed to grow vegetables? The answer was surprisingly simple: We rejected that reality and substituted our own.

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