By Jasmine Shi

November 23 was the last official work party of the season!

To begin the work party, we had a walk around the garden in a group and Alex pointed out some interesting winter plants — those that still have colour this time of year when there are no more leaves or fruit left. These are the blueberry bushes, the black raspberry canes and cornus “Midwinter Fire.”

The branches of these plants give off a beautiful reddish hue during this season and florists use them for decoration! They are a great way to add colour to the garden during the winter months.

Angela went around and collected calendula flowers, our last harvest of them this year. She’s going to make a salve out of them!

We continued to mulch the vegetable beds and raised beds with straw, using fallen leaves when we ran out of straw. Thanks to a big tree, we have plenty of fallen leaves beside the garden.

We tried to mulch every part of the beds exposed to air — even the sides of the mound beds! And in the beds with plants left, we stuffed the mulch around the plants.

Last but not least, Kathleen, our wonderful data analysis volunteer, has been carefully recording data about harvest yield throughout the year.

Whenever we harvest during a work party, we record the name and weight of each variety. This way, we have an idea of what vegetables and varieties tend to do well in our garden and can make informed decisions about what to plant next year.

The data for this year is officially out! For the 2022 season, the total weight of produce harvested is approximately 314 kilograms.

The harvests are divided into six groups: five groups of veggies and one of fruits. Here is a comparison of each group’s yield by weight: 

Some notes on reading the results:

• Cucurbits include cucumbers, squash, melons and pumpkins.

• Solanums include tomatoes, peppers and eggplants.

• Fruits include berries, notably blueberries which had a huge yield this year!

• Legumes include all types of beans.

• It is interesting that we ended up with the most leafy greens by weight, even though we know they don’t weigh that much compared to other fleshier harvests.

• Of course, it’s possible that we planted way more leafy greens than other types of vegetables, as the data doesn’t take into account how much of each group was planted.

Feel free to comment if you notice other interesting things from the results!

Thank you Kathleen for your dedication and work 😊