Stacey and Lindsay weed around the cherry trees in Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard…but the spring has come and gone…where is the nutrient rich mulch?
Fruit Tree Mulching – Now or Never!
For some it feels like July is just the beginning of the gardening season, but for the volunteers at the Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard, we are months into our gardening year.
In March we pruned our fruit trees and since then we have been watering and weeding the trees and caring for the pollinator garden.
The problem is that the time to mulch your trees starts in the early spring and ends in mid July. That’s because if you feed your trees in late summer, it will spur growth into the winter and that tender new growth will likely die during the first frost. Not a good thing.
So, we know you need to feed fruit trees by mid-July…but this year we had a big problem. No money for nutrient-rich mulch!
Ooops…No Money For Mulch
In years past we had grants to pay for mulch. One year we had a generous donation of mulch from Gro-Bark and one year our wonderful city councillor Joe Mihevic rolled up his sleeved and helped us mulch with City of Toronto compost. This year we weren’t so lucky.
Not feeding our trees each year is simply not an option. Would you skip feeding your pet or your kids? Hopefully not as that can cause serious health problems.
The same is true for fruit trees. Once fruit trees consume all the nutrients in the soil they can become malnourished and vulnerable to pest and disease problems as I teach in my Beginner Fruit Tree Care Online Training at www.orchardpeople.com.
A Miracle In My Filing Cabinet
But this year, a miracle happened. I was sorting through old files relating to the orchard and look what I found:
Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard Donation Box, created by a volunteer in 2011 and lost for five years!
I found a donation box, created by Suzanne Hartmann, who was a wonderful orchard volunteer in 2011. She created the box from a container of “Wet Ones” and put it out during our harvest festival that year.
Festival goers were happy to put in some money to help us fund our activities and to help pay for the orchard’s needs. But the donation box was stashed in a filing drawer forgotten for 5 years.
Now, just at the end of our window of opportunity to feed our trees, I found the box and was able to use the $75 dollars inside to buy 26 bags of composted sheep manure for our trees! Thank you Suzanne!
Pawaan, a new volunteer, does a beautiful job in mulching one of our apricot trees in Ben Nobleman Park. He makes it look easy but with weeding, widening the mulch circle and working the soil it can take over an hour per tree.
This Week’s Work in the Park
And so, this week at Stewardship in Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard, Susan, Stacey, Lindsay, and Gail worked on mulching our fruit trees, Cliff purchased and delivered the mulch while Lynn and Marilyn worked away in the pollinator garden and Sherry came at the end of the day to check on our progress.
Lynn and Marilyn working in the Pollinator Garden in Ben Nobleman Park
So the great news is we mulched our trees our time. And the better news is that we hopefully won’t have the same problem of no money for mulch next year.
That’s because Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard is now partnering with The Toronto Parks and Trees Foundation so that we can collect online donations for our park and donors who give $10 or more will get a charitable receipt!
How To Support Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard
So if you are a park visitor and appreciate how beautiful the park is as a result of our work, if you enjoy the fruit on our trees or if you support our goal of building community while making our city more sustainable, you can donate to help us!
Click here to see our donation page on the Toronto Parks and Trees Foundation website. We so appreciate your support. Your donation will help us buy plants and herbs for our pollinator garden, replacement fruit trees for sick trees that we had to remove, high-nutrient mulch for next year, and volunteer T-shirts for our new volunteers.
Your donation will help pay for new plants, replacement trees for The Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard…It will also help to pay for volunteer T-shirts for our new volunteers!
Just 7% of your donation will go to the Toronto Parks and Trees Foundation to help pay them for managing our money. All the rest of your money will help us pay for the things we need. And of course you will receive a tax receipt for your donation.
Please share this blog with anyone you think might be willing to help us!
Enjoy July everyone!
Susan Poizner is the coordinator of the Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard. She is also the author of the award-winning fruit tree care book “Growing Urban Orchards” and the creator of the award-winning online fruit tree care training course at www.orchardpeople.com.