Questions & Answers

Is there anyone that is interested in meeting at a restaurant ( preferably in the North East of Calgary) to talk about gardening stuff? I live in Calgary and would like to start a group that would meet once a month or even every two weeks.. We could meet at a restaurant and have coffee. I know a restaurant that has a private dining room separate from the restaurant so that you can talk freely , you just have to order something off the menu. Let me know if you are interested. I think it would be fun.

We have free range chickens who roam our yard. They sometimes choose my flower and/or vegetable garden as a spot where they scratch, rest, dig, eat my plants and sit for a spell. Do you know of some natural ways to keep them out of my garden, I don't want to use chemicals. Thanks!

edit your profile? I can't figure that out

I'm curious to know if any of the farmers on this site 'practice' polyculture on their lots?...where the whole mini food chain is self-sustaining and produces very little waste?

Please let me know your stories and experiences!

We are sharing a community garden plot with a friend and we decided to experiment a little bit. A week ago we covered the soil with coffee grounds (about a half centimetre) and about 2-3 layers of paper/newspaper, added compost on top of it and then some dried leaves. This is a kind of sheet mulch - we just didn't want too many layers because it would have gotten too hot (for 1-3 weeks) and I've heard that could "burn" the seeds.

Yesterday we started planting some seeds (radish, spinach, peas, coriander, dill, kale, broccoli, lettuce and some flowers) that don't mind the cold (we had a frost warning yesterday!..) and we had a hard time figuring out how to do that efficiently because of the mulch.

Question 1: When you are transplanting seedlings you can put the mulch back around the plant (not too close to the stalk) but when you are planting seeds you have to leave the mulch out until they sprout, right?

Question 2: If so, how can you do that efficiently? Should we have planted the seeds and then mulched the whole thing once they sprout, i.e. did we mulch too early? We were worried that the "weeds" would take over if we didn't mulch right at the beginning.

Doing this on a 15x3 garden plot is really not that big of a problem but I'm thinking it would be really tedious to do this on a larger scale. With seedlings it wouldn't be as complicated but it takes a while before seedlings are ready and I would like to start whatever is possible from seed.

Thanks!

I have started a bunch of seedling in the mini green houses you can pick up just about anywhere. The long black jiffy ones. Well now my seedlings are too tall for the lids to stay on them. I don't want to transplant yet. Do you think it will be ok to keep them in their places for another couple of weeks? I'm worried about frost and cold weather right now!