About Peel Teaching Garden®
Peel Teaching Garden was registered in 2004 to fill a gap in the educational programs locally available to home gardeners. Peel Teaching Garden is located in Brampton, Ontario, Canada, and it is staffed entirely by volunteers.
The task of Peel Teaching Garden is to rediscover, to pool, and to share, the skills and the craft of the practical home gardener.Background
Just a couple of generations ago, the skills required to cultivate a garden were quite commonplace. People with space for a garden could, almost instinctively, plant flowers, raise crops and prune their own fruit trees. Today, for many, just figuring out how to open the safety-catch on secateurs is a challenge and as for knowing which way to hold the pruners and which bits to cut off the tree ....??! City and sub-urban dwellers now vastly exceed in number the people who live on or from the land and the skills exchange between town and country has almost ceased to exist.
Especially in the urban setting, knowledge of gardening as a craft has become so diluted by time and so distorted by marketing, that people literally don’t know the difference between a spade and a shovel, far less do they know which tool is to be used for what purpose.
For people who contemplate a career in horticulture, local colleges and universities offer excellent introductions to the scientific and business aspects of the industry. For the home gardener though, these courses are usually too costly, require too much time, and delve into matters which are not necessarily backyard relevant.
At the other extreme, garden clubs and their kin are inclined to spend most of their time and resources on organization, fund-raising, and socially-oriented events. While some percentage of the membership might be involved in group projects involving actual hands-on gardening, the education component of the organization is likely little more than a flower arranging demonstration or sitting in the dark while someone projects innumerable pretty pictures on the wall. If more formal education is offered it is will typically be at a very basic level introducing little which could not be picked up by talking to a next door neighbour.The Concept
Peel Teaching Garden was conceived to occupy the widening void between agribusiness and backyard practical.
To be of interest to people of all origins and levels of gardening experience, the program needed to introduce, in a non-intimidating way, both the most basic of garden techniques - how to wind up a gardener’s line or how to load a wheelbarrow - to just what does ‘pH’ stand for and why is pure water 7.
To be accessible, there needed to be little or no financial commitment on the part of students.
In the background, ‘Organization’ needed to be out of sight and the whole process needed to generate the very minimum of administration and paperwork.
What was offered was a series of ‘free’ classroom seminars which explored the Whys and Hows of gardening.
An agreement was reached with the Region of Peel Agricultural Society wherein the society donated classroom space at no charge. In return, each seminar attendee committed to contribute an equivalent number of hours of actual garden work maintaining the flower beds at the Brampton fairgrounds. It was an elegant plan; nobody needed to spent any money and all the participants could take away more than they came with.
The First Year
In practice things worked out more successfully than might have been expected. Starting in January and ending in April, there were four, two-hour, seminars which took an eclectic look at all manner of things from how to sharpen a spade to what holds a tree up. In the gardens, what was planned as simple work parties turned out to be a season-long extension of the teaching/learning process.
People who were skeptical during the seminars turned into believers when they put theories into practice and saw the results. The gardens also became a social place. Working in groups of two or three, people got to know each other as they got to learn new skills and techniques. Perhaps most importantly, as everyone managed at least once to tip over a wheelbarrow or to stab a tulip bulb with a fork or to fall backwards off a garden stool, nobody felt particularly inept, embarrassed or vulnerable.
For half a dozen of the seminar attendees, a couple of hours here and three or four hours there soon added up and the original eight-hour commitment became a distant memory. With the enthusiasm of the 2004 volunteers, the nursery garden was more than doubled in area, going from a neglected patch of shoulder-high weeds to over three thousand square feet of cultivated bulb and perennial beds. Existing baked-up display beds in the public area of the fairgrounds were re-worked and more than two-thousand spring-flowering bulbs were planted. Even large misplaced shrubs were given legs and relocated to where they could grow and be useful.
By the end of November 2004, when the gardening season finally came to a close, the gardens had benefitted from more than five hundred volunteer hours.
2005
During the winter, the four basic two hour seminars were held and two optional seminars were offered. The first optional, dealing with butterflies, was presented by Tom Tomson of Humber Nurseries Limited. Ken Ewan, one of the Teaching Garden volunteers, introduced his techniques for overwintering pelargoniums as the second optional seminar.
In April, gardening for real got off to a good start. Students got hands on experience pruning some long neglected and abused shrubs and several more large shrubs were dug out and replanted in more useful locations. Most gratifying, was the appearance of members of the 2004 intake who, as volunteers, returned to work in the gardens and share their experience with the new students.
With the combined force of students and volunteers, the nursery garden area was again increased. A small vegetable section was included as an experimental project and, late in the year, six new display beds were laid out and prepared for spring planting.
2006
In conversation, there was general agreement among existing students and volunteers that one seminar each month during the winter was not enough. There was also agreement that, in return for increasing the number of seminars, students would be quite willing to spend more time planting and maintaining the fairgrounds gardens through the summer.
Starting in 2006, the number of seminars was increased to seven and, in return, each attendee committed to contribute 14 hours in the gardens. This expansion proved popular and some of the 2004 and 2005 students returned to sit in on the upgraded program.
When activity in the gardens began in April, it was quickly apparent that the combined efforts of the 2006 class and of those returning from the two preceding years would greatly exceed anything that had been previously possible. All the display beds were expanded and/or rebuilt. The cultivated area of the nursery garden increased to over 8,000 square feet, half of which was devoted to growing vegetables for volunteer use and for donation to the needy.
By year’s end, students and returning volunteers had invested more than 1,100 hours into the gardens and some 1,350 pounds of fresh produce had been delivered to the Knights Table, a local restaurant run by volunteers and feeding those who might otherwise go hungry.
2007/2008
In 2007 the program was again expanded with the length of each class being increased by half an hour to two and a half hours. This increase allowed for more relaxed pacing and left time for questions at the end. Although the total classroom time increased to 17½ hours, the commitment for summer garden work was kept at 14 hours.With the combined force of the current year's students and volunteers returning from previous cohorts, two extensive shrub beds were added to the wedding garden. The nursery garden was augmented with an additional 3,600 square feet under cultivation and the area available for vegetables was doubled. 2008 classes followed the pattern of the previous year. Activity in the gardens started late and, although the display beds were largely able to make up for lost preparation time, the delay and the unusually wet weather resulted in deliveries of fresh vegetables to the food bank being reduced to a rather disappointing thousand pounds.
2009
To accommodate continuing requests for more classes, in 2009, an eighth class, on the fourth Saturday of April, was added. Also, on the third Saturday in April, a full group working session outdoors in the nursery garden, was scheduled.
The outdoor group session proved to be very successful, with many returning volunteers joining the 2009 students to get the spring gardening season off to a good start. Despite a cooler than average growing season which exacerbated fungal diseases, the gardens raised a record 2,280 pounds of produce to be shared with a local restaurant and food bank.2010
Both a repeat of the successful course structure from 2009, including a group working session, and an unusually early and warm spring should have augured well. Unfortunately, a computer glitch resulted in the inability of prospective students to register for the program and, before the problem was discovered and resolved, the class size had been greatly reduced.
Despite a stirling effort on the part of some of the students who were able to register, only about half of the gardens were planted and a proportionate amount of produce and decorative displays were realized.Some highlights of the year included the planting and harvesting of PTG’s first crop of sweet potatoes. Ipomoea batatas slips were purchased and test-planted under glass in May. By mid September six of the seven varieties had produced enough tubers to grow slips for a full planting, in 2011, plus a few samples for consumption. In addition to the usual crop of unnamed garlic, five specialty varieties of garlic were purchased and grown to provide seed stock for further growing on in 2011. 2012 should see the first full crops of specialty garlic going to the food bank. Additions to the decorative collections included five Canna cultivars and the reintroduction of the Dahlia ‘Kelvin Floodlight’.
With fewer available volunteers, much greater stress through the summer was put on in-garden coaching. By focusing on using correct tools, learning new skills and with constant practice, there was a very noticeable reduction in wasted time and effort, and some volunteers achieved quite spectacular results well in excess of what they thought they could do.
2011
As the result of persisting student requests for more classes, a total of 11 sessions were planned for the 2011 series; nine indoor classes, beginning in January, plus two introductory outdoor sessions interleaved in April. The indoor classes went off on schedule and were enthusiastically attended. However, due to the cold and wet weather which devastated Ontario agriculture, the first outdoor session was cancelled. The second was also cancelled but a few people showed up anyway when the rain stopped, literally at the 11th hour.
The unseasonable weather through May prevented much of the soil preparation needed for crop planting and, by the latter part of June, parts of the nursery garden were still too wet even to cut the grass to gain access. Spring refurbishment of the display gardens of the Fairgrounds began more than a month late but, using the techniques promoted by PTG, students and volunteers managed to bring the flower beds up to a state that drew complements from visitors.
Towards the end of May, an apiary was established at PTG when three hives of bees were set up in a sheltered site in the valley below the nursery garden.
Because Peel Teaching Garden is about knowledge as apposed to production, bad years are not a loss for students. Bad years offer as many or more opportunities for learning as good years.
2012
Gardening Program The 2012 winter indoor classes will be held on the second and fourth Saturdays of January, February, March and April. (Some adjustments might have to be made to accommodate holidays, prior bookings etc.) The first class is will begin at 2:00 pm. on Saturday, 7th January 2012 at the Region of Peel Agricultural Society’s headquarters building, at the Brampton Fairgrounds. (S.W. corner of Heart Lake Road and Old School Road in Caledon). To register for the 2012 program please go to (home page).
To register for the 2012 program please go to (home page).