About us

Campus Crops is a student run urban gardening initiative at McGill University's downtown campus. We want to grow food on campus, by students, for students. We have been running garden behind the School of Environment building at 3534 University since 2007. In 2009 we started a terrace garden behind the James Administration building. We're really excited to keep improving these two spaces, and need lots of helping hands for the summer ahead! Get in touch and get gardening!

Friday, August 23, 2013

Seed-saving workshop August 31

Join us at the garden for a 30-minute workshop on seed-saving on Saturday August 31 at 4:30pm. We will demonstrate, using plants we grow in the garden, how to save seeds from most of the crops you love.

Seed-saving, if done properly, is a cheap way to get quality seeds for the next year's garden with just a little bit of extra planning and work. With more experience, you can start selecting seeds from particular plants to get crops that will suit your preferences.

The workshop will be followed by the usual gardening tasks, namely watering and/or harvesting.
Find the Facebook event here.

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Garden update: harvest!


It's been a while since we posted anything about our crops. Hopefully your plants have been growing as well (or even better) than ours so far!

First of all, we have been uploading photos of our gardens regularly since early July. A slideshow showing the growth of our crops through time can be found on the right-hand side of the blog ("Watch the garden grow!").

And we also finally built our own spiral garden! We had to find bricks first, so we ended up making it quite late and our herb seedlings didn't really appreciate, but now it's up and the herbs are not doing that bad. Have a look!

Freshly made.

Freshly planted.

About a month later.

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We also started harvesting some of our crops and are waiting for others to fully ripen.

The rattlesnake beans.

The cherry tomatoes.

The peas.

The strawberry blite.

The spaghetti squash (so many!!).

The beets.

The ground cherries.

The pepper.

The sunflowers.

The tomatillos.

The tomatoes.
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Although our strawberry blite has started to die (we're not even sure if that's normal), a ton of strawberry blite seedlings have popped out of the grown to replace the dead plants.

Dying one by one.

Many strawberry blite seedlings replacing their parent plant. Obviously, the two bigger seedlings in the middle of the picture are strawberry blite, but so are all the tiny seedlings around them.

Basically a mat of seedlings. The pink-red berries of the strawberry blite can hold a good amount of seeds.

A close-up view of the seedling mat. Somewhat pleasant to look at.

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Quite a messy blog post, but we hope you enjoyed the photos. We'll close on a top view of the whole garden, taken this August 5, 2013. We'll be back with more news from the garden, some workshops and possibly other cool stuff for the school year!

We must admit it DOES look great!




















Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Seasonal availability of fruits and vegetables in Quebec


Here's a nice table we adapted from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries of Quebec (MAPAQ).

Note that the seasonal availability may change depending on the growing season, the region, the specific market, the producers, etc.

Also, corn, oats, rye, buckwheat, barley, spelt, kamut and soy DO grow in Quebec, contrarily to what some people think. SOBAYA noodles are a good example of a product made of locally-grown grains (made in Quebec from grains grown in Quebec).