Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ www.teachinggarden.org
Written by Alan Hickman

Looking back through the weather records, it is not surprising that work in the Brampton Fairgrounds gardens seems to have almost stopped. This has been the wettest October for years. The average October rainfall for 2002 - 2005 was around 44 mm. This year it was almost three times that - 120mm. No wonder mud has been sticking to our boots and one car had to be pulled out of a flooded ditch with a tractor.
As Peel Teaching Garden was only founded in early 2004, the warm drawn-out falls of the past two years were the norm and a lot of work got done between the close of the Brampton Fair and freeze-up. This year has brought a dose of reality to the operation. With hundreds of iris to plant in the nursery beds and more hundreds of spring bulbs to tuck in to the display beds, the weather in November had better be more cooperative or we’ll be making a lot of expensive compost over the winter.
No matter how November goes, 2006 will be a standout year for Peel Teaching Garden students and volunteers. Six totally new flower beds were planted and the preexisting beds were expanded. Although 17 flats of annuals were purchased to create a massed formal planting at the entrance to the property, the remaining beds at the fairgrounds were filled with perennial plants which had been fattened up in the nursery garden. Great use was made of tender perennials which had been carried through the winter and propagated by volunteers. More than a hundred tall yellow dahlias were used as a backdrop in one bed and hundreds of dwarf red dahlias were used to create bed edgings.
In one bed, 80 cannas did remarkably well. Although they were not planted until late in June, the tubers pushed up stalks almost as thick as a wrist which stood up defiantly against the almost constant wind. The rest of the empty space in the bed went to a couple of hundred assorted pelargoniums grown from cuttings planted under lights in March.
It was gratifying that many people stopped by to say how much better the display gardens were looking since PTG took over, but the really rewarding outcome was from the newly created vegetable section in the nursery garden. Few home gardens now are of sufficient size, have sufficient soil depth and have enough sun to grow vegetables so, for many volunteers, the vegetable patch was a new experience.
At first it was just a lot of work. A rush to get things planted and then an unrelenting effort to keep weeds under control and to keep the bugs at bay. By the time the weeds and bugs were giving up the fight, it was August and the beginning of harvest. Every two or three days thereafter, trays and baskets of produce went to the Knight’s Table kitchen. Altogether, the restaurant received about 1,200 pounds of fresh produce from the garden.
Twelve hundred pounds of food seems like a lot, but it is but a drop in a bathtub compared to the total needed to produce the thousand meals which the restaurant prepares in an average week.
The combined workforce of this year’s students and volunteers returning from the 2004 and 2005 classes, have accumulated almost 1,150 hours in the gardens - a participation record which organizations many times the size of PTG might envy.
While Peel Teaching Garden survives on the interest and commitment of its is volunteers, it also depends on the cooperation and generosity of other organizations. In exchange for having volunteers develop and maintain the public display gardens at the fairgrounds, Peel Agricultural Society provides the land for the nursery/vegetable garden. The society also supplies - at no cost - classroom space for the winter gardening course. Without this sort of symbiotic relationship, the expense of renting classroom space alone would make it impossible to offer the gardening classes for free.
PTG also took advantage of a generous offer from Renee Shepherd, founder of Renee’s Garden in California, (http://www.reneesgarden.com/) who donated almost all the vegetable seed needed to grow the produce for the Knights Table.
Work on next year’s free home gardening course is well under way. Based on input from previous year’s students, the classes will be a little longer in duration and will include time to look at problems encounter by individual students. The first class commences on Saturday 13th January 2007 and full details can be found at http://www.teachinggarden.org/index.shtml. Early registration is advised as space is quite limited.