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Ask a Master Gardener: Weekly Gathering

For practical gardening advice, join us for a weekly Ask a Master Gardener call. During this time of limited outings, gardening is more important than ever. A garden is a place to find solace, joy, wonder. A garden gifts us offering delicious things to eat. A garden provides sanctuary to birds, pollinators, bees and more.

To plant a garden is to bring into being a more beautiful future.

We’re featuring Q&A conversations, mini-workshops and virtual tours with Kingston & Thousand Islands master gardeners & friends. 

Come prepared with any & all gardening questions!

What to look forward to

April 9th 1:00-1:30: Whether you’re starting a vegetable garden, pollinator garden or planning to wildscape your yard Joyce Hostyn shares a few tips on how to start a new garden bed. 

Organic gardener Janette Haase, author of From Seed to Table: A Practical Guide to Eating and Growing Green will answer questions about what’s up in your vegetable garden on the first Thursday of the month. You can get Janette’s book from Novel Idea.

Delve into wildscaping as the future of sustainable landscaping on the fourth Thursday of the month.

The details

When: Every Thursday afternoon from 1-1:30 pm starting Thursday, April 9th. 

Where: Virtually via Zoom. Zoom is easy to use. You don’t even have to download the Zoom app, but it’s better if you do: zoom.us

Registration: Register in advance for Ask a Master Gardener (you only need to register once and can then join in any week you’d like)

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/uJ0tf-mrpjgrUVBXXWgfV-jLoFg3sCRpKw

After registering, you’ll receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the call.

kingstonhortsoc

Advocacy for Community Gardens – Please Help!

Hello again Community Garden Network and allies,

We at Loving Spoonful and the Kingston Community Gardens Network believe that community gardens should be considered an essential food service, and allowed to continue operating (with clear health & safety protocols) throughout the COVID-19 crisis. In times like this, it is more important than ever to ensure that we have a robust local food system. Hundreds of individuals and families across Kingston depend on community gardens to supply themselves with healthy food, and Loving Spoonful’s partner agencies depend on donations from community gardens to provide nutritious food to the most vulnerable in our community.

Please join the advocacy efforts to get Kingston’s community gardens re-opened. Because closures have been mandated at BOTH the municipal and provincial levels, we need make to demands at both of those levels as follows:


1) The government of Ontario needs to add community gardens to the list of essential food services, and community gardens must be exempted from the recently announced closure of outdoor recreational spaces.

What you can do:

a) Sign the Open Letter from Sustain Ontario

b) Email, call or tweet MPP Ian Arthur

Below is a template letter (“Community Gardens letter – Provincial”) that you can adapt and use. When adapting the letter, please include personal anecdotes about why community gardening is important to you and your family/community.

2) The City of Kingston needs to remove community gardens from their list of closed recreational facilities.

What you can do:

a)Email, call or tweet Mayor Bryan Paterson

b) Email, call or tweet your city councillor

Attached below is a second template letter for municipal contacts (“Community Gardens letter – Municipal”). Again, please adapt to include personal stories. 

Community health and safety remains the #1 priority for myself, Loving Spoonful, and the Community Gardens Network. I want to assure you that I will be working with KFL&A Public Health over the coming days to develop clear, approved guidelines for safe community gardening in Kingston. 

Please feel free to forward this email to your gardeners and any other allies who will be willing to make calls or send emails! If anyone has other ideas for advocacy that you’d like to get out to the Network, I’d be happy to pass them along.

I also want to express gratitude for all the work that everyone in this network does to make Kingston a more climate-friendly and food-secure place. The current crisis is challenging in so many ways, but like all crises it is also an opportunity to identify and push for the changes that we need to build a more inclusive and fair society. We need to organize, support and care for each other, and grow more food!
In solidarity,
Ayla Fenton

Kingston Community Gardens Network Coordinator

559 Bagot St.Kingston, ON  K7K 3E1

Office: 613-507-8848

ayla@lovingspoonful.org

www.lovingspoonful.org

community-gardens-letter-provincialDownload
community-gardens-letter-municipalDownload
kingstonhortsoc

PLANTchoir Product Launch: Thursday, November 21

This event is on THURSDAY NOVEMBER 21, 2019, at Fractal Workspace. Doors open at 4:00 pm and the presentation is at 4:30 pm.  

What is PLANTChoir??? PLANTChoir is a Bluetooth device that captures the biorhythmic feedback of plant life and through our app translates the plant energy into musical instruments – in short –  We gave Nature a voice with #plantmusic that is Created by Plants and is Composed by You!   
For those who wish to attend, they should register for this FREE event at Eventbrite page by clicking here. For more information:

PLANTChoir.com