Hi everyone! We are inviting all our neighbours to join us for Starbucks coffee and cookies from our local treat company Butterbox this Sunday at 11 am!

Come and join us and bring along friends and family. We look forward to seeing you in the park! It’s located just across the road from the Eglinton West subway station on Eglinton Avenue West between Everden Road and Strathearn.

See you on Sunday!

PS. Bring your own coffee mug if you can, so we can reduce the use of disposable cups.☕☕☕

Welcoming Beneficial Insects to Our Orchard

It’s mid June and the volunteers of the Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard are preparing for a slew of new orchard guests. These guests are beneficial insects and we want lots of them!

Beneficial insects do a lot of work in our garden. Some are pollinators and they play an essential role in fruit production. Others are predators that prey on insect pests that damage trees and crops including aphids, coddling moth and plum curculio.

So we are transforming our pollinator garden. We want it to include carefully chosen native plants that offer habitat and food for beneficial insects. In recent weeks, volunteers have been busy weeding the garden, thinning out unwanted plants, and laying down compost.

This has been an amazing year for the Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard. We got so much work done as a result of a number of new young volunteers. And while COVID 19 has been a challenge, we worked safely in small groups, keeping social distancing practices. And the best part? We all learned lots and had a great time.

But there was one problem. Because of the pandemic we did not have any opportunity to raise new funds for our orchard. We spent about $500 this year on spring mulch and for soil testing and new tools. That left just $500 for us to use next year. We had no money available to cover the cost of fall mulch which insulates the delicate roots of our fruit trees during the cold winter months. It costs $250.