Guelph Organic Conference, 2011

The GCUOF will be represented at the OAC booth at the 31st annual Guelph Organic Conference, January 28th and 29th, 2012. You can find us at booth #9 on the main floor of the trade show in the University Centre.

Please stop by to say hello and to find out about upcoming opportunities at the farm.

Last year's on-campus Thanksgiving market.

Our first on-campus market of 2011 is scheduled for Thursday, September 15th from 3 to 6 pm at Branion Plaza (near the Cannon in the centre of campus). The market will continue every Thursday this fall while the food lasts!

Don’t miss our beautiful, certified organic produce including peppers, heirloom tomatoes, garlic, fingerling and blue potatoes and Sugar Baby watermelons! We’ll also be offering gorgeous bouquets of flowers grown at the farm.

Hope to see you there!

We’ll be selling our certified organic produce at the event from noon to 5 pm, or while supplies last. Visit our table to purchase freshly picked green and yellow beans, beets, herbs, our first tomatoes of the season, and more!

You’ll also have the chance to receive expert gardening advice from the Guelph and Wellington County Master Gardeners and to see yet to be released flower varieties on a tour of the trial gardens.

The Guelph Turfgrass Institute is located at 328 Victoria Rd. Admission is free.

Our certified organic lettuce is currently at its peak! We have big, beautiful heads of Red Sails (pictured) and Buttercrunch lettuce for sale at the farm site.

Stop by the farm any weekday between 9:30 and 4 and we’ll pick you a head of lettuce straight from the field. You won’t find food any fresher than that!

Lettuces are priced at $2-3 per head. Don’t miss it!

Organic Meadow has generously donated four stainless steel tanks to the GCUOF. John MacDonald, director of product supply and plant manager at Organic Meadow’s new dairy in Guelph, arranged the donation.

The tanks, which have a capacity of more than 300 litres each, will become central to a new gravity-fed irrigation system at the farm. Currently, all watering at the GCUOF is done by hand and can be a big job during hot, dry periods. The new tanks will help make watering transplants and  keeping our greenhouse from drying out a much less time-consuming task.

Thanks to Dave Perozzo, owner of the Guelph Grotto Climbing Gym, for loaning us his truck for a day so that we could transport the tanks to the farm.

Crop mobbers pulling thistles.

On Saturday, June 4th we held our first crop mob at the GCUOF from 9 am to 4 pm. The response to our event posting was phenomenal, with lots of buzz on Twitter and Facebook, the event posting being picked up by a number of farming-related websites, and many email inquiries flooding our inbox.

Planet Bean Coffee donated fair trade organic coffee, sugar and cream, and The Stone Store donated organic apples and snacks for the event.

By 9:45 am 8 crop mobbers had already arrived at the GCUOF and set to work. After a cool, wet spring we were anxious to get some serious planting and transplanting done – our greenhouse is bursting with transplants waiting to be planted in the ground. We hoped to weed and prepare large areas of our middle field for planting, establish permanent paths between the beds, and plant beans and other veg during the crop mob.

But then it started to drizzle, and then to pour, and when lightning began to strike at a distance that appeared to be mere metres away from our site everyone dropped their tools and left the field. The downpour and accompanying lightning storm really put a damper on things in the middle of the day. Our clayey soil became too saturated to work on and the storm deterred many of the people who had planned to join the crop mob from coming down to the farm.

However as the sky cleared and the sun reappeared a new and enthusiastic group of crop mobbers descended on the GCUOF, enabling us to clear a substantial area of thistles and other weeds!

The crop mob also got some media attention! You can look for a photo in Snap Guelph, an article in the Guelph Mercury and a piece on Locavore on CFRU in the near future.

Thanks to everyone who made it out to our first crop mob for making it such a success!

We are pleased to welcome St. Ignatius of Loyola Catholic School to Garden 2 Table!

On May 30, the 26 seventh-graders spent the afternoon pulling thistles, laying straw paths and planting leeks at the GCUOF. The class from St. Ignatius joins students from Jean Little Public School as participants in the Garden 2 Table program.

Garden 2 Table enables children in the Guelph community to learn about food preparation and ecological agriculture. In the spring Garden 2 Table students plant crops at the GCUOF which they harvest and prepare into a meal in the fall.

Garden 2 Table is offered in partnership with the University of Guelph’s School of Hospitality and Tourism Management (HTM).

Funding from the Youth for Sustainability contest has enabled us to extend our outreach and education programs and to serve a greater number of community members this year, including the group from St. Ignatius of Loyola CS.

We’re hosting a Crop Mob on Saturday, June 4th!

Crop Mobs are an opportunity for people with an interest in sustainable food production to get to know/socialize with like-minded people while gaining farming experience. Crop Mobs help local farms to get big jobs done quickly. Many hands make light work!

We can’t wait to get our land prepped and planted. With your help we can make this season our most successful yet!

When: Saturday, June 4th. 9am to 4pm. Come for a couple of hours or stay all day.

Where: Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming, College Ave and Dundas Ln, just off Parking Lot P18

Please bring:

•  a hat and sunscreen,
•  gloves and work boots/shoes,
•  garden tools if you have them (forks, spades, hoes, etc.),
•  water to drink,
•  your lunch

We’ll provide snacks and lots of water. Thank you Planet Bean for donating fair trade organic coffee, cream and sugar for the event!

Spread the word and bring your friends! Please R.S.V.P. to gcuof@uoguelph.ca. Hope you can make it! (There’s talk of going out for a pint at the end of the day…)

Martha Gay Scroggins, the GCUOF’s coordinator led a tour of the site and gave a brief talk about the history and development of the GCUOF project. The group spent the rest of the morning volunteering on the farm. They were great sports and good company despite the unseasonably cool and wet weather. With their help we were able to move raspberry suckers from the main patch into a new border, pot up flower seedlings for our upcoming plant sale and clear land for a planting of okra!

Later in the evening Martha Gay gave a talk on sustainable farming to all thirty visiting Southern Miss students at 10 Carden in downtown Guelph.

We really enjoyed the visit, Southern Miss students are welcome at the GCUOF any time!

The GCUOF is having a plant sale on Saturday, May 28th!

The certified organic vegetable, herb and flower seedlings for sale will include open-pollinated and heirloom varieties of tomatoes, hot and sweet peppers, celery, early cabbages, lettuces, parsley, sage, marjoram, okra, snapdragons, hollyhocks and much more!

Proceeds from the plant sale will go towards our education and outreach initiatives.

When: Saturday, May 28th, 9am – 12pm

Where: Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming, College Ave and Dundas Ln, just off Parking Lot P18