Garlic City Market

Workshops / Presentations ($5ea - tickets at Main Info booth):

Share your pollinator stories and learn about the pollinators of the Aspen Parkland. Cynthia Pohl will be talking about how to make your outdoor spaces more biologically diverse and tips on what you can do to support the wellbeing of pollinators in veggie gardens, flower gardens, and in the overall landscape.

Cynthia Pohl, principal of Living Lands Landscape + Design, is a Journeyman Landscape Gardener and an Accredited Green Roof Professional. Her work has a focus on projects that promote biodiversity such as biodiverse green roofs, habitat restoration, sustainable food projects, community gardens, pollinator gardens, pollinator awareness programs, and school yard outdoor classroom biodiversity projects. She has worked alongside ReThink Red Deer for many years to help support their mission of promoting citizen-driven leadership through sustainable planning and living in the Red Deer region.

Learn how to save seeds in the fall for long-term storage and planting again next spring. And don't forget to check out the Red Deer Public Library's new Community Seed Bank initiative!

Dani Chappell is a professional horticulturalist and Olds College Instructor who has been growing vegetables in Alberta for over 10 years. After several years working with conventionally-designed greenhouses, Dani began investigating alternative greenhouse designs and now has a fully functioning deep winter greenhouse with product delivered on a year-round basis.

Garlic is one of the easiest plants to grow, but also one of the gardening world's best kept secrets! Mark will talk about the plant itself, how and when to plant, the importance of soil health and garlic scapes, harvesting, and curing for long term storage.

Mark Visscher was raised just east of Red Deer on a conventional farm. About 12 years ago, he moved back to the homestead. He has always liked to garden and eight years ago, Deep Roots Farm was born with 3500 cloves of garlic being planted. Last year, Mark and Brenda opened a farm store on their property and the garlic field has grown to about 30,000 cloves.

Grade 5 students share their stories of "Fridays in the Garden" at the Common Ground Garden Project including details on their recent grand prize win in National Geographic Canada's Queen's Jubilee Classroom Challenge!

Intro to Cider Making will start at the basics, keeping it simple. Ryan will discuss and display the process of turning apples into cider including Q&A. Please bring any apples you may have and we can juice them together - clean bottle and apple donations are welcome!

Ryan Stelmack's cider making journey began 6 years ago as he was wondering what to do with all the apples rotting on his lawn. His curiosity in brewing and fermenting led him to a yearly fall ritual of picking as many apple trees as possible and juicing / fermenting them into the delicious sweet nectar called cider. Fast forward 6 years later, he is a budding arborist learning to care for the very trees he harvests from and is working towards a locally-owned and -sourced cidery.

A great way to enhance health is to preserve food through fermentation. Fruit ferments into alcohol. Veggies ferment into acids or vinegary self-pickling products. In this demo Martin Scholz shows how anyone can easily turn cabbage into sauerkraut in 21 days.

Martin works full time with Action International Ministries as a Sustainability Coordinator. He lives in Red Deer and travels to various countries teaching food skills from field to table.