Kilbourn Organic Greenhouse Plant Sale this weekend

The Kilbourn Park Organic Greenhouse—which generously provides Ginkgo with greenhouse space, abundant rainwater, organic soil, and pest control assistance from a swarm of ladybugs—will be holding its annual plant sale this weekend (May 19 and 20, 2012).

Sunday will feature a number of events specifically for children: yoga; running around screaming with glee; getting faces covered in dirt and popsicle remnants; etc. (The last two are not officially scheduled activities, but I'm pretty sure that they will happen.)

I have been out to the greenhouse a few times in the last couple of weeks and have seen the seedlings on offer, and each time I have been glad to have been in a hurry and not to have had large amounts of cash burning a hole in my pockets. Even today, as I loaded around 150 tomato seedlings onto a truck to transport from the greenhouse to the garden, I considered tossing in a flat of Green Zebras.

If you go to the sale, you may catch the greenhouse cat dozing up on a shelf somewhere.

Kilbourn Park is at the corner of Addison and Kilbourn, in the Old Irving Park neighborhood.

Summer's false dawn?

Visiting Ginkgo on Saturday, April 25, it was hard to believe there is still three weeks until we are free of the threat of frost. Temperatures rose into the upper 70s and a strong wind blew across occasional thunder showers, flinging down large warm raindrops. The only direct sown crop to have germinated so far is the radishes, but we removed all the row cover from the bed to allow it to benefit from the next few days of forecast rain and warmth.

After last season's loss of the tomato and pepper seedlings, however, we know better than to assume summer has arrived, which explains why one of today's tasks was to build a cold frame out of three reused windowpanes, three disassembled straw bales and an ingenious arrangement of bricks and twine. This will provide a staging area for us to use as we bring seedlings from the Kilbourn Park greenhouse to Ginkgo over the next few weeks, and let them get used to the cooler, drier environment outdoors.

Other preparatory work included setting up guide wires for the raspberries; adding a downspout to direct water from the new gutter into the rain barrel; clearing the compost pile from the back gate; levelling the planned patio area; and rabbit-proofing the front gate.

If any blog readers are looking for organic vegetable or fruit plants for their gardens, or for straw bales or manageable quantities of Organimix compost, then Ginkgo highly recommends Kilbourn Park's annual organic plant sale on May 17-18, 10am-2pm.