As interest in community gardening expands, there is a growing thirst for knowledge for all things gardening and growing. In 2015, we delivered 42 workshops and talks on topics such as planting, harvesting, seed saving, and canning to over 2200 community members.
Last year, we also worked directly with several local community gardens to measure the amount of produce being grown in local gardens. One garden in particular, the Calvary Community Garden, did some meticulous documentation and helped us see how much produce we could grow. With help from some Sustainable Agriculture students at Trent, we calculated the value of the produce that was harvested, we multiplied the amount produced in one garden by the number of existing community gardens (41). We know that this is by no means a scientific process, but we were elated to discover that our community gardens have the potential to grow well over $358,240 worth of produce in one season. We look forward to continuing this process in 2016 and seeing how much we can grow!
In 2014, we launched our Peterborough Seed Savers Collective. This group of urban and rural growers are committed to working together to increase the quantity and quality of locally adapted seeds available in our community. We work together to share labour, knowledge, and resources and to purchase shared equipment. Thanks to support from Bauta Family Initiative on Canadian Seed Security, Carrot Cache and Fiskar's Project Orange Thumb, we had a very successful growing season in 2015. We were able to reap almost 83,000 seeds from planting just over 9000 seeds. These seeds were stored for re-planting, swapped amongst the Collective, donated to our Community Seed Library and eaten in Nourish cooking workshops.
We wouldn't have been able to accomplish any of these wonderful achievements without the involvement of the broader Peterborough community. We would also like to thank our funders and collaborative partners for supporting these projects.
For a visual representation of all these impacts, check out the infographic below.
