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

Tucked away in a corner inside the livestock building, volunteers staffing the Peel Teaching Garden booth at the Brampton Fall Fair were spared the worst of the weather which beset the fairgrounds last weekend.
Apart from needing a ski jacket to keep warm one evening, nature’s insults might even have worked in favour of the indoor exhibitors. When the wind blew half-a-gale and the rain fell in big cold globs, there was a steady stream of fair-goers entering the buildings who might otherwise have stayed in the open air to watch events in the outdoor arenas.
Even when there was a lull in the flow of humans, the animals kept the place alive. In rows of cages across the aisle from the PTG booth, clucking hens kept up an unceasing conversation broken every few minutes by a couple of cocks bent on announcing their presence. One rooster was satisfied with a regular cock-a-doodle-doo, but the other added an extra ooooo-errrr-uuurck on the end. It sounded like it’s neck was being wrung and, after three days of ‘ooooo-errrr-uuurck’, there were plenty of people ready to assist!
The doors were barely open on Thursday when the first person came up to the desk and demanded "OK. Who’s the ‘Eclectic Gardener’?" Those are the occasions when one has to make a split-second decision whether to duck and run or to smile and plead guilty!
"I’ve read your columns for years." he said, "and you’re usually right on." "Especially the watering." he continued, "I used to do it like everyone else and then one day I thought ‘Why am I doing this?’ and I took the nozzle off and watered just the ground over the plant roots. It took a fraction of the time and it didn’t waste the water." We laughed rather sadly about driving by on weekend afternoons, seeing people with hand-held squirters spraying water at their lawns and watching the breeze carry most of the moisture away before it even hit the grass. "Once" he said "I ran my finger through the soil after it had been ‘watered’ and the top quarter-inch was damp and below that it was still dust."
"There was something you wrote that I questioned though." and the visitor thought for a few moments "but I can’t remember what it was." Those are the readers I like best: The ones who recall what they agree with and can’t remember the rest!
With enough PTG volunteers to staff the booth throughout the fair, there was leisure time for me to spend with readers, to conduct an occasional tour of the nursery garden, and to share gardening experiences.The bluebird boxes which a volunteer is building and putting up in the nursery garden and in the valley land were a topic of conversation, and there is now talk of siting a few beehives in a seldom-visited corner of the property.
The display of vegetables grown by PTG volunteers proved to be of interest to a lot of visitors. It is surprising the number of people who have never seen a yellow or a golden cherry-tomato. And varieties like the dark, oxblood-red, ‘Black Krim’, the chartreuse-yellow, but fully ripe and sweet, ‘Green Zebra’ and vivid gold and red ‘Marvel Stripe’, were as alien as if they had been grown on Mars.
The gourmet potatoes were also a source of comment. While most people were unfamiliar with ‘French Fingerlings’, sought out by chefs in high end restaurants, one visitor told us that the purple-fleshed potato ‘Russian Blue’ was well known in the Maritimes where, he said, it is often served with cod.
Fall fairs are a celebration of agriculture, an industry which is very different from horticulture, so the PTG exhibit was quite the odd-man-out. One thing that gardeners and farmers do have in common though is the weather. Only a few farmers had time to stop for a brief chat but they all had the same take on this year’s heat and drought. It came as no surprise to them that PTG volunteers had planted double the area compared to last year only to harvest barely as much crop as last year.
This is the first time that PTG has had a presence at the Brampton Fall Fair and the objective was to attract students for the coming winter’s gardening course and possibly to find some associate teachers. How successful the effort was will become apparent in coming days; when we hear from people who took business cards, who visit the website - www.teachinggarden.org - and who sign up for the classes.

Day +23 sunny UV6 Winds S15km/h P.O.P.10%
Night+10 a few clouds Winds SW15km/h P.O.P.10%