Backyard
Garden Club
Welcome to the first issue of the City of Brampton’s Backyard Garden Club
e-newsletter!
Each month, you will receive this email with gardening information, advice from experts and community partners, exclusive offers, and more.
Spring is just around the corner. In this issue, start preparing your backyard garden with tips from the Brampton Horticultural Society, a message from our garden sponsor Scotts, and learn all things tomato!
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Growing with the Brampton
Horticultural Society
Tips to start your garden:
- The location of your garden should receive 6 to 8 hours of sunlight.
- Improve your soil with organic material, such as compost, manure, decomposed leaves, and mulch.
- Prepare raised beds or containers and pots.
- Decide what you are going to grow. What will be from seeds, which need to be started indoors, and what will be grown from purchased plants.
- Start your seeds with seed-starting trays, egg cartons, small pots, and seed-starting mix.
- Plan the layout of your garden. Make sure to put tall plants at the back so they do not shade the shorter plants.
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Include some flowers to attract pollinators (click here to view a video)
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Be prepared to plant after the fear of frost has passed.
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Jump Start Your Gardening: Grow Your Plants Indoors |
The ground may still be frozen, but you can start growing your plants indoors using eggshells.
Get a jump start on your gardening by following these easy, step-by-step instructions.
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Create a Pizza Garden With Your Kids |
You can design your garden for specific purposes, like providing fresh toppings for pizza.
Garlic, spring onions, peppers, broccoli, spinach, herbs like basil and oregano (even tomatoes for the sauce), are easy to grow.
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Plant of the Month: Let's Talk Tomato!
- It’s the most popular plant in the world, and considered a fruit and an annual.
- It's one of the easiest plants to grow in the ground, container or pot (given good soil, a sunny location, and consistent watering).
- There are two variations:
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Determinate, which means “bush type”. This variety requires less room to grow and generally only produce one crop.
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Indeterminate or "vine type". This type is ever-bearing, but requires much more room to grow.
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Tomatoes come in many shapes, sizes, and colours, and new cultivars are developed every year. There are more than 10,000 varieties of tomatoes, most of which are hybrid.
- Heritage, heirloom tomatoes are passed down from season to season and are often open-pollinated, which means they are pollinated naturally, by birds, insects, wind, or human hands.
- Mainly self-pollinated today when grown in greenhouses. Historically they were cross pollinated.
- They're part of the Solanaceae family, which includes eggplant, potato, sweet pepper and hot pepper.
- Tomatoes contain Lycopine, which is considered to have many health benefits, particularly when eaten cooked.
Fun facts
- Tomato seedlings have been grown in space.
- The largest tomato grown weighed 7 pounds, 12 ounces, grown in Oklahoma.
- Known to be the oldest plant recorded, it is believed to have been domesticated in Mexico.
Contributed by Carole Spraggett, Brampton Horticultural Society
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