2019 is a special year for the volunteers of The Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard. It is our orchard’s 10th anniversary and we have lots of reasons to celebrate.
Over the years we have harvested cherries, apricots, apples and plums, which is wonderful. But we have also gained so many more benefits from our orchard:
Gail, Janina and Alex plant our two new hazelnut shrubs in Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard
This weekend, the volunteers of Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard planted two new shrubs. Adam Koziok of Earthgen Tree Nursery in Ontario generously donated these hazelnut shrubs to our orchard park when he came to the studio to chat with me about growing hazelnuts on my monthly radio show and podcast.
The shrubs came to us at the perfect time. They’re replacing two trees that we had to remove due to disease problems. They are Theta and Yamhill cultivars. Yamhill is known for producing high quality nuts. Theta produces smaller nuts but its main purpose is to act as a pollination partner for Yamhill.
Ben Nobleman Community Orchard volunteers gather for a day of scrubbing the harvest table, made from century old salvaged wood that was once part of Toronto’s first docklands.
It’s a piece of history. The harvest table in Ben Nobleman Park Community Orchard, is made out of salvaged wood that was part of Toronto’s first docklands in the early 1800s. By 1850, industrialization was in full force and the docklands and the area around them needed to be expanded. So developers dumped landfill on the old docks and expanded the lakeshore 900 meters to the south. Continue reading