2023

2023 was a memorable year for SOG. Thanks to Ivan, we launched our brand new website. We continued to benefit from Rita’s hard work with our many clients. Rob, our Garden Coach, gave 13 workshops in the winter and spring months. In the late spring he gave five back-to-back workshops on Seedling Saturday in May at the Just Foods farm. In the fall he gave several in-person and online workshops on growing garlic. He has revamped our Resources page, edited his previous articles, and added new ones.  He has become a master user of WordPress. We welcomed Wael Itani as the new coordinator of our annual Seed Sale at Pantry Plus. We are grateful to Wael for his hard work and look forward to another successful year. We thank Anouk Mackenzie for preparing the SOG Symposium which will take place in early 2024.

Margaret Tourond-Townson was the coordinator of the 2023 Seed Sale and we thank her for her amazing fundraising. Margaret organized a joint SOG/RTO visit to Dunning-Foubert Elementary School to allow us to encourage the students and GUO (Growing Up Organic) in their three-year project on growing food and food sustainability. She continued to advise and maintain her guiding presence for SOG.

We are deeply grateful for the grant funding we received from NHS and RTOERO in the winter of 2023. The funds have allowed us to serve a wide variety of groups in growing food, learning, connecting, and sharing. We all benefitted from our activities. In the 2023 growing season we were able to provide compost, growing tables, tools, seeds, seedlings, gloves, and fertilizer to seven different community gardeners and three dozen individual gardeners. We thank Catherine at Northern Seeds and Mathew from Slow Roots Farm for the many organic seedlings they grew. You can see some of the harvest in our Success Stories and Latest News. In the fall we purchased a large number of garlic bulbs and thanks to Rita’s deliveries and Rob’s expertise, our gardeners learned how to grow garlic.

We are extremely proud of our efforts to provide learning opportunities and meaningful connections as the winter began. Most of our activities take place in early 2024, but many of those began in late 2023. We held our SOG Book Club’s first 2023/2024 session in December and discussed the book The Seed Underground by Janisse Ray. Betty and Rita prepared ninety Horticultural Therapy Bags. Thirty seniors will receive three deliveries. There was a delivery in November and another in December. Among the items were bulbs for forcing, gardening calendars, gloves, soil, and pots, with more to come in January. We welcomed Hiromi McPhail who presented an online session on posture and movement.