Blue Monday Update
TL;DR: The next meeting of the Blooming Valley Garden Club will be Saturday, March 21, 2026, from 10:00–12:30, at The Little Green Library in Huntingdon!
It’s Blue Monday! And somehow, despite being decidedly tired of the cold and the dicey conditions on the roads and sidewalks, and despite the desperate state of affairs in the big ole world out there, I’m not depressed! I think it might have something to do with how surrounded I’ve been feeling by good friends, how immersed I’ve been in good ideas, how busily I’ve been working at a few projects that mean a lot to me. Action and connection are great antidotes for despair.
It’s only been a little over two weeks since the last meeting of the Blooming Valley Garden Club, but to me, it feels like eons have passed since that glorious blue-sky day when we all got together to share seeds and stories and some really great sweets to boot (including a now-legendary sucre à la crème). It must be in part due to the distance in space, as I’ve been back in the city since the day after our gathering, but it’s also because of my recent deep dive into questions of water politics in Québec and beyond. Blue questions! These are questions that have transfixed me with their complexity, taken me down through the till and the bedrock and into the heart of the aquifer that lies beneath my beloved Valley, questions that have brought me to plumb the dry depths of the law, and you’ll surely be hearing more from me on all this soon, but today I must limit my scope to some exciting news for our club and some thoughts on the garden.
First, thank you to everyone who came out to Café la Ruche for our very first Seedy Saturday. It was a booming success grâce à vous! If I could go back in time and erase “first annual” from our promotional materials, I would - some of us simply didn’t have enough time to share everything we wanted to. Going forward, we’ll build seed sharing into every meeting, keeping some open time for exchanging seeds based on need, desire, and abundance. It will be up to each of us to communicate what we’re looking for and what we have to offer as we go. I’ll bring more of those handy empty seed packets so you can label them as needed.
We also learned that the simplest and most effective way to manage seed sharing is a kind of show-and-tell. Anyone offering seeds can take a turn showing what they’ve brought, and requests can be made on the spot.
Another lesson from our first three meetings: one hour just isn’t enough! From now on, we’ll have two and a half hours for each gathering. If we finish early, that’s fine - but at least we won’t feel rushed.
Our next meeting will also be held at an exciting new location. The Little Green Library has graciously offered us a space with a large table, chairs, and a coffee maker (I’ll bring the beans, milk and cream, and compostable cups!). We’re truly grateful for this space and hope our presence there will foster a symbiotic relationship—one that supports education, collaboration, and community around gardening and environmental stewardship.
In advance of our next meeting, I invite you to use the open Facebook page, Blooming Valley Garden Club Chatter, here, to suggest discussion topics, ask questions, let others know what seeds you’re offering, or share what you’re hoping to find.
Now, on to what this writer is conjuring up in terms of plans for her garden in 2026!
I’ve been subjecting myself and my family to huge helpings of salad on the daily so that we can shore up an abundant supply of plastic containers to use for a big winter sowing project. While I have my qualms about plastic, it’s hard to find organic winter greens that don’t come packaged this way. I figure the health benefits of eating our greens plus reusing the containers for winter sowing more or less balances things out. I save the containers, scrub off the stickers, and use a meat thermometer to poke holes in the bottoms (for drainage) and in the lids (so precipitation can water the mini greenhouses they become).
Soon I’ll head to Canadian Tire for a big bag of ProMix and sow all kinds of perennials - and some annuals, too - out on the back deck. One reason I’m keen to try winter sowing is that I want to grow a lot, and indoor space is limited. Sowing outdoors frees up room under the grow lights for more delicate, heat-loving plants like tomatoes and eggplants, which will get extra chouchoutement indoors. For anyone curious to try winter sowing, a really excellent resource can be found here.
Although I’ll soon spend a day with Excel deciding what gets sown how, when, and where, I won’t start indoor sowing until after March Break. I’ve learned that starting too early just produces plants that outgrow their containers - and I’d also rather not recruit a friend to water them while I’m away in Québec.
I’ll leave you with a very short poem by Wendell Berry that feels just right for this moment:
Like Snow
Suppose we did our work
like the snow, quietly, quietly,
leaving nothing out.
