The Growing Connection completed its third year of innovative gardening presentations at Canada’s largest and most prestigious garden show, Canada Blooms in March of 2019. This year’s theme, “A Family Affair”, inspired us to create a balcony setup showcasing a variety of organic vegetables and herbs representing “Heath & Taste” for three family generations.
Our Balcony Garden Display
For the kids, we grew alpine strawberries, cherry tomatoes, and basil in two of our Caja planters. The strawberries were placed in our Caja Green Metal Stand with Wheels for easy harvesting, and easy movement.
For the parents, mojito mint, crunchy kale, and medium-sized “Black Sea Man” tomatoes were planted. Many of the gardens we plant for adults feature ingredients for cocktails as well as ingredients for healthy salads. We love helping people grow a variety of delicious, produce that can be used in a variety of ways. We put two of the parents’ boxes in the Caja Wooden Stand for elevation and to create a cascading 3-tier effect.
For the grandparents, we planted our favourite hot pepper variety called Super Chili in a black metal stand. This pepper variety features peppers that mature to a variety of colours from green to yellow to orange and red. We paired this with some pea microgreens, showing that plants can be grown as both a full-sized mature plant, and as a young/tender baby microgreen. The peppers will take a few months from seed to harvest, while the microgreens will take 5-15 days depending on variety and harvest size. The peppers and mojito mint from the parent’s garden were individually lit with our LED light kit.
Our Pop-Up Kiosk Display
In addition to our balcony garden, TGC built a kiosk-style display of our Caja containers and accessories demonstrating how to grow the tastiest food-crops in a minimum space, with no weeding and 80% less water. We introduced our flexible low-cost LED lighting system this year.
Canada Blooms Challenges
One of the big challenges of a show like Canada Blooms is the length of time the plants will go without natural sunlight. Garden construction and plant delivery begins a week before the show opens to the public. Factoring in prep, transportation, setup, and planting, many of the plants get stressed and go over a week without sun before the first visitor even gets to see the plants.
For many trees, shrubs and bulbs that have been “forced” and brought out of dormancy for this show, they have the size, energy reserves, and ability to weather this sudden change in growing environment (and potentially stressful transit in sub-zero temperatures) with aplomb. However, for many annuals, small flowers, and of plants like our vegetables and herbs, this change in environment and sudden lack of sunlight can be a real shock and challenge, especially for the entire duration of the 10-day show.
This year, we focused on plans that could best fit the garden theme, as well as stand up to almost 2 weeks of virtually no sunshine. We also brought in and featured LED growing lights, that provided the plants with much needed energy to stay lush, healthy, and green throughout the show and we’re happy to report that our plants stayed green, lush, and healthy right to the end of the show (and beyond!).
For our move-in, the weather proved to be an additional challenge as temperatures dropped to -10C the morning of our move in. We had to take extra precautions to protect the plants as much as possible during transit from the greenhouse environment they were in, to the moving truck, and finally onto the show floor. While some of our plants suffered a touch of frost/cold damage during transit, but it was only a small minority of plants, and only a small part of their leaves where the damage was noticeable.
Canada Blooms Success
Canada Blooms is a great opportunity to get out of the cold and come in for a breath of fresh air! We love the networking, conversations, and inspiration we get from being in whole building focused on plants and gardening and this year was no exception. We had countless conversations with people from all backgrounds and from across Canada who were interested in learning about growing with the Caja planter.
Another great benefit from attending (and participating ) in the show are all the presentations and workshops that run throughout the show. This year, TGC had the opportunity and privilege of running a “Pizza Garden Planting Workshop”, as well as giving a number of talks on “Growing Food in Caja Planters” and “Living with Health and Taste”. It is these opportunities that we cherish in connecting with fellow gardeners, sharing from our many years of experience knowledge, and inspiring the next generation. This year, we also partnered with our friends at Action Against Hunger to share some of the work we’re doing with school gardens and bringing food and nutrition to students all across Canada.
If you missed it, you can look forward to next year’s Canada Blooms which runs during March break. Thanks to all the folks who helped put on Canada Blooms and we look forward to next year’s show!
Read more about our other case studies featuring unique and inspiring gardens.