Welcome to the Environment Hamilton's Blog!I'm Beatrice Ekwa Ekoko, the Volunteer and Membership Outreach Coordinator for Environment Hamilton.
Here, you'll find out why being a member or a volunteer of Environment Hamilton is lots of fun.
You'll be able to get more details about upcoming events, past events, planned events and other project information.
In the past few months we held a lichen monitoring workshop with Katie Stiel's project Good Neighbour Campaign and learned how to assess the health of trees in our community. This technique is one that was developed by our very own member, George Sorger, a professor at McMaster University.
Along with the eat local project, we helped educate local people about bee's and honey for 'February is Farm month.' This took place at the Hamilton Farmer's Market.
For members who wanted to learn about the Environmental Bill of Rights, Lynda Lukasik, Executive Director, gave a presentation where we learned how to use the registry to report our environmental concerns.
What's happening in these photos, you ask? These people look like they are having a ball! Our volunteer and member Emma Ditchburn explains:
Saturday morning about 30 women gathered at the Environment Hamilton office to learn about container gardening from Rita Bailey, a Hamilton based writer, gardener and educator.
Our volunteer and honorary member Rita Bailey (below) leads the Container Gardening 101 workshop-March 19, 2010.
According to Rita, it seems most of the things you need for gardening can be found at the side of the road when people get rid of them.
She even mentioned cutting up old venetian blinds to label – as when you plant anything, the date and what you planted should be noted. Rita also mentioned using a watering can with a very fine spray (one called a Haws can be purchased at Lee Valley), or a spray bottle in order to minimize impact on the seedlings and soil surface.
Having your plants on an angle can maximize the amount of sunlight they receive, and be careful when transplanting tomato seedlings as their stems are very important for immunity and nutrient support. Hearing that someone was able to grow 20 lbs of tomatoes on their roof is encouraging to say the least!
Potatoes can also have a high yield; as soon as they start to sprout, place another container atop with the bottom cut out and plant more, when your constructed tower will be full of potatoes.
Rita also mentioned using sheep manure as a nutritional input. You can ‘steep’ the manure in water to create ‘manure tea’ which can then be
used to water the plants while at the same time providing the nitrogen and phosphorus they need from a non-synthetic.
For further resources Rita mentioned Tregunno Seeds, and books by Lorraine Johnson and Sonya Day. She was kind enough to send each of us home with a tomato seedling and planted my own mesclin mix which has already sprouted.
Happy growing!
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