Gardening Tips
Use compost and wood chips on your gardens!
Benefits
- Save water and labour: less watering needed, no weeding and more rain absorption
- No need for chemical weed killers or pesticides
- Nourishes the soil by adding nutrients as the chips decompose
- Keeps soil and roots from overheating in hot summers
- Stimulates growth: mulch-covered trees grow faster than non- covered trees
- Makes trees more resistant to disease and insects
- Reduces bruising of fallen fruit (under fruit trees)
Compost
Available for free!
1. At Environment Day locations
http://www.toronto.ca/environment_days/schedule.htm
Thursday events are from 4:00pm to 8:00pm
Saturday and Sunday events are from 10:00am to 2:00pm
Here's the location for the weekend prior to Fairlawn's May 5th Earth Angels Gardening Day:
Saturday May 3, 10:00 am to 2:00 pm
Sponsored by Councillor: Mayor Miller and Mammoliti
Location: parking lot on the south-east corner of Finch Ave West and Weston Road (former Canadian Tire site).
2. The City of Toronto’s free compost depots
They will be open from April to October 2007.
Residents can get up to one cubic metre of leaf compost
(approximately one car trunkful) at the sites listed below.
Compost is available on a weekly basis, while supplies last.
Community Location & Times
http://www.toronto.ca/compost/leaf.htm
Note: Bring your own containers and shovels
Wood Chips
Free!
For more information call 416-338-8733
Community Location & Times
http://www.toronto.ca/compost/woodchip.htm
Note: Bring your own containers and shovels
Three easy steps for using wood chips
1. Step One: Spread an 8 to 10 cm layer (3 to 4 inches) over garden beds (be sure to keep wood chips slightly away from tree trunks)
2. Step Two: Level out the chips
3. Step Three: Tamp down lightly
More great ideas for gardening
Composting
http://www.hgtv.ca/green/outdoors_compostingcompanion.aspx
10 easiest vegetables to grow
http://www.hgtv.ca/green/outdoors_10easiestveg.aspx
Green roofs
http://www.hgtv.ca/green/outdoors_greenroofs.aspx
Organic gardening ~ pesticide alternatives
http://www.hgtv.ca/green/outdoors_organic.aspx
Get rid of the leaf blower!
Retire the gas lawnmower and leaf blower. They are murder ~ especially on poor air quality/smog alert days. — Gas-powered mowers and leaf blowers feed hungrily off fossil fuels, releasing 80,000 tonnes of GHG emissions annually in Canada. Keep the leaves as compost and you can save 80 lbs of carbon dioxide per year. And no more gas or fumes!
Leaf Blowers and Clotheslines Don't Mix
a member of Fairlawn writes...
I was delighted to see that it has been decided that hanging clothes outdoors on a line is an environmentally friendly thing to do. I purchased a freestanding clothesline and hung out my sheets etc. last Saturday. As soon as I had done this though, the gardeners came to do the clean up across the road. So much for the clean laundry. They not only blew the garden waste up in the air and towards our yard but they also blew all the detritus in the gutter of the road towards our house. It was a really dirty cloud of dust all coming on to my laundry.
I believe that we should save energy; using clothes dryers uses a lot of energy. But how can we get rid of these blowers. The two just don't go together.
Also we had a Summer WaterSaver visit two summers ago by the city's landscape advisors who came to visit our garden to advise us on saving water in the garden . Their whole focus was that we should leave the normal leaves from fall in the garden beds and not take them off. It serves as mulch and keeps the soil cooler and wetter especially in the hot dry summers. The leaves break down in no time and the worms pull them down into the soil thereby aerating the soil as well as providng humus in the soil....all things that a good garden needs.
These city 'water' people also suggested that we get shredded bark free from the city to put all over our garden beds to help conserve soil moisture. We have made many trips to a city depot and have done this as well.
Why doesn't the city educate the gardening companies who could then educate their clients so they would understand a new way of thinking and gardening? Then they wouldn't have any need to blow all this dust around. Everything could stay just as nature intended. In the natural forests, no one comes and vacuums up the leaves on the ground. But the spring flowers still come up! When I visited my 100 year old mother today, what do you think she wanted me to do in her garden? Get rid of the leaves...... It's a mind set that we need to change.
