Pollinate Aylmer and our Winter Happenings

Over the few months, a beautiful friendship has been cemented between Localeaf (our nursery), Pollinate Aylmer (our incredible group of local volunteers), and Partenaires du Secteur Aylmer (our mentors, enablers, and now partners in helping us bring back the butterflies, fireflies, pollinators and other wildlife in our community).

We’ve grown so much that we found our story profiled in our local newspaper, the Aylmer Bulletin. You can read the full article here.

The personal stuff is a bit embarrassing, but the article aptly catches the spirit of our movement, and our group’s realization that ‘holy shit this is growing, and working, at a pace we never expected, and we can work together to make so many ideas and actions and initiatives take root, with the support of our community’.

That support keeps growing, and enables us to keep going, and growing. And what a growth we’ve had! It’s winter, and while our Butterflyway Aylner stops are sleeping, our group is still going strong. Here’s a summary of some of our current, and upcoming projects.

Free Workshop – Intro to Gardening for Pollinators and Grow your Own Native Plants, from seed

We are excited to launch a new, bilingual workshop, in close partnership with Partenaires du Secteur Aylmer this winter.

On January 27th and 29th, new and experienced gardeners alike can learn a new way of thinking about gardening, with a focus on native pollinator needs. The workshop highlights our native pollinators, why they need our help, the native plants you can plant, and the actions you can take to provide for their needs in your own gardens.

We also explore the practice of winter sowing, and teach participants how to grow their own native plants from seed, and which plants are better for their garden settings. Participants will plant and take home their own starter native garden, and options to adopt additional specific species are provided free of charge to all participants.

We have piloted this workshop within our own Pollinate Aylmer group, as well as PSA’s staff and Acti-Leaders, and the feedback has been extremely positive. We can’t wait to share in our community, and we are currently working on adapting the content to allow us to deliver the workshop in schools later this winter. If you want to know more, get in touch.

Registration and details about the workshop will be available shortly. Watch our page, and follow the PSA for details.

Free Native Pollinator Garden Starter Seed Packs

Our volunteers have put together hundreds of packages of mixed native Wildflower seeds, packaged for four different types of garden conditions.

As we did last year, we will be making these seeds available free to anyone in Aylmer, in time for Christmas. More details on where and how you can pick up these seeds are coming shortly. The four seed packs available are named as follows, and hopefully self explanatory:

🌱 Mild Child
🌱 Wild Child
🌱 Throwing Shade (or SPF 50)
🌱 Rainy Day

Find more details about our free mixed seed packs, and learn how you can get your own here.

Seed Sitters Wanted!

On top of the mixed packs for easy start beginner gardens, Pollinate Aylmer volunteers have been coming together for the past month to package individual species of seeds collected from our expansive and growing demonstration and education gardens at the Localeaf nursery.

These seed packs are almost ready to be distributed free by Pollinate Aylmer across Aylmer, asking nothing in return except planting them, growing them, and sharing them forward.

At last count we’ve packed over 40 individual species of native wildflowers and native grasses, each seed grown and harvested right here in Aylmer.

Now that they are packaged, we need you!

🌱🧑‍🤝‍🧑 SEED SiTTERS Wanted!  👫🌱

What’s involved?

Adopt a native species, or two, or 20, and plant them outside over winter using the very reliable method of Winter Sowing. In the spring plant what you want, share with your neighbours, and bring the extra seedlings back to Pollinate Alymer, to distribute across our community and grow the #butterflywayaylmer

If it sounds intimidating, we can help. Come to our free upcoming workshop

“Intro to gardening for pollinators and how to grow your own native plants”

And learn everything you need to be successful (see above). Take home your own starter garden, and adopt some extra species as a Seed Sitter. More details and registration information coming soon.

Spare a Square for the Aylmer Food Bank

When we created the Butterflyway Aylmer stop at the Aylmer Food Bank earlier this fall, we had the idea of asking our community to knit sow or crochet flowers and colorful squares and circles that we can use and sew together to cover the fence around the garden at the food bank, in a show of support, appreciation and Community Spirit.

Even though it’s the middle of winter, the fence covering has begun, and our volunteers, along with volunteers from community groups, schools and even a retirement residence have begun, bringing and securing their beautiful work to the fence.

Yesterday, one of our group members, Chantel, dropped off and secured the incredible piece she has been slowly working on for months, and beamed with pride as she tied it on.

We hope Chantel’s work will continue to inspire other knitters, sewers and crocheting members of our community to come add a square, flower or other work to the fence, while dropping off a donation for the Food Bank.

We now have drop off locations at the public library, at the PSA or directly at the food bank where people can bring us additional squares that our volunteers will add to our community art project if help is needed. Or, feel free to tie your own work directly to the fence, like Chantel.

Don’t knit, or sew, or crochet? We can still use your help! If you know someone who does, download and share our posters below, or put them anywhere you think talented and willing aylmerites might see them.

If you want to learn how, meet Chantel and other members of Pollinate Alymer at the Aylmer library on Tuesday evenings as part of Aylmer’s knit and crochet group.

Want to join us yet?

If you’re in Aylmer, and our projects sound exciting, and you want to meet a community of like-minded and passionate people, there are so many ways we can use your help. Join our Pollinate Aylmer group to learn more about any one of our upcoming projects, or contact us directly for more info.

No experience required, we are all somewhere on the same journey, and many of us are just starting. Just wanting to learn is enough.

The First Annual 🌱SEEDY SATURDAY AYLMER 🌱

On February 28th, in partnership with Partnaires du Secteur Aylmer, Pollinate Aylmer and Localeaf are hosting Aylmer’s first ever Seedy Saturday,  with support from Seeds of Diversity Canada. That’s a lot of links. Bare with me.

Seedy Saturday is a Canadian phenomenon of grassroots events springing up in cities and towns all across the country, where people come together and help share and preserve ancestral and heirloom seeds within their Community.

Our vision for the Aylmer version of the event is simple. 100% free. For Aylmer, by Aylmer.

The event will be hosted in the large hall of the beautiful marina pavilion building. There will be plenty of free seeds available for anyone to take home, and we are hoping for donations of saved heirloom, non GMO seed donations from our community to help make our first ever Seedy Saturday Aylmer a success. Look for a FB event coming soon, and in the meantime, additional details about Seedy Saturday Aylmer can be found here.

How can you help?

Easy. Save us your seeds. Bring us your Nona’s tomato seeds, packaged up in little individual bags or envelopes, just enough in each one for one person to plant.

Help us share seeds locally, with our neighbours, and community, and work together to preserve ancestral, non-GMO seeds.

Pollinate Aylmer will be holding additional seed packing sessions at the Aylmer House in the new year. You can drop off your seeds ahead of the event for our volunteers to pack, or come join us one evening or afternoon, grab a cup of tea, a bag of donated seeds, and help make the first Aylmer Seedy Saturday a success.

Nursery Updates

We’ve been growing! Literally ☺️

Quietly, slowly, in between everything else, we’ve started growing next year’s seedlings. One day I will find time to sit and think about all the lessons of the past year, but for now, those lessons flow through me, jumbled somewhere in my brain, and hopefully drive some improvements to my winter tasks.

For now, I do the one thing that relaxes me, grounds me, and I keep getting better and better at. I grow things, from seed. I grow more and more things, new to me things, and hope that they thrive.

This year, I am focusing, among other things, on growing native and near-native trees from local and near-sourced seed.  Driven by our family’s experience creating a mini-forest, with so many of the trees we planted grown by me from seed as well, I decided to take the leap and invest in some quality tree seeds.

Those seeds have now all been processed, as per their individual needs of being sometimes scarred, sometimes filed, sometimes smashed with a meat tenderizing hammer, at other times having scalding hot water boiled on them, sometimes soaking in a luxurious seed bath for days on end.

It’s been incredible learning so much more about the diversity of conditions and needs of each tree seed I have planted. Someday soon maybe I will catalog my seeds. For now, my focus is on having them all labeled and tucked away nicely in the special ‘all mine’ fridge that C bought me, so I stop taking over our family’s fridge.

It’s nothing fancy. A cheap little mini little fridge that makes so much noise it’s plugged in in our furnace room right next to our cat litter boxes. I’ve been filling it up over the past 6 weeks or so, one species at a time, for all the seeds that require cold, moist stratification.

A whole other batch of tree seeds are extremely high maintenance and have a need for a double dormancy process, which means I needed to tuck them into their moist medium, then find them a warm space for a month or two. I’ve built a very low-tech contraption right on top of my heating vent under my desk, and here they will stay waiting out the warm period of their stratification, until they are ready to graduate to the noisy mini fridge next to our cat litter boxes.

Now that the tree seeds are tucked away, I can start thinking and planning for winter sowing many of my other native seeds. I learned a lot of lessons last year and will apply those when sowing the species I am trying to grow, but I do hope to be able to germinate some species new to me this year.

I’m not actively attempting to grow medicinal, or dye plants, or any excess of vegetable seeds beyond what my family and my garden can home this year.  That’s where I think I went too far and that is likely in part what contributed to my decision to avoid opening the nursery last year. I wanted to grow and share all of the things that I enjoy growing, but it was just too much.

In hindsight, not opening the nursery publicly was probably my most brilliant decision of the year, as it gave me and the kids an opportunity to learn so much about how NOT to run a nursery. I’ve been writing down some of these lessons and I really hope to be able to remember to remember them when and if the time comes for me to test myself again, but in the meantime, I shall hibernate this winter and grow.

Brain Updates

My health seems stable, and I largely live in this padded bubble in the country, exploring and continuously trying to push past the limits of my brain and my disease, and playing with seeds, and plants, when that fails.

Some day I will find time to art, but for now, mom-ing (to the best of my reduced ability), seeding, and forcing myself to write, in little spurts, is more than enough.

Thanks for reading my ramblings, Merry Christmas & Happy New Year.

RANIC Family