January Hours: Monday – Friday 9 am to 4 pm, Saturday and Sunday 10 am to 4pm.
Van Luyk Greenhouses and Garden Centre is not just a commercial operation. We are committed to promoting a healthy lifestyle through community gardening and investment in research to optimize and improve environmentally friendly farming methods.
Current Community outreach activities and research projects
- Garden Project: Promote community gardening and healthy lifestyle among children, youth and seniors; give our garden design guide a look
- Employment: Improve the employment futures in the greenhouse industry for youth with Autism
- Ventures: Introduce unique novel plants that have high medicinal value or cultural attachments
- Environment: Composting and Co-composting to increase efficiency and expedite the process
- Research: Soil microbiome study, Citizen Science
Garden Project In the Summer of 2019, Van Luyk’s and Springbank Garden Centre partnered with two local schools and jointly clinched school community garden projects. The outcomes were excellent, with great enthusiasm from teachers and students.
- Through this project students:
- Learnt a lot about gardening
- Enjoyed cooking and eating vegetables with their friends
- The garden plots were a great place to get rid of stress and calm down
- Developed interest in career options in agriculture
Please click the links below to learn more about the school garden projects and to get involved:
- 2018-2019 Woodland Heights Garden School`s Feedbacks On The Project
- Contact us to get involved in the project in Fall 2019 or Summer 2020.
Citizen Science and Vegetable Plots We are pleased to have launched our new `Vegetable Garden Project` on the 20th of July, 2019. At Van Luyk`s, we have been undertaking an environmentally-friendly and science-backed experiment to test monoculture vs polyculture conditions for vegetable gardens in partnership with Dr. Yuan, Ze-Chun (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Agricom Ontario, Metagenom Bio Agriculture, Western University) and Dr Trevor C. Charles (University of Waterloo). We now have test plots to demonstrate En-Stim (Metagenom Bio Agriculture, Waterloo, ON), a beneficial microbe product that is available currently for Canadian home gardeners and commercial farmers. En-Stim is naturally occurring, and reduces the negative effects of the plant stress response and produces plant hormones that promote growth.
A series of select crops (Canadian Tomatoes, Japanese tomatoes, peppers, beans, and cucumbers) were planted on the plots. These plots hold one or a mixed number of these plants. We aimed to
- Demonstrate and model a garden setup for home gardens
- Test Polyculture vs Monoculture in Vegetable Gardening
- Demonstrate the beneficial effects of En-Stim
- Select indigenous beneficial microbes for vegetable gardens
- Provide necessary materials and know-how to our customers
Visit our garden centre to rate these demonstration plots and become a part of this environmentally-friendly science project! Project Partners
Sneak into our demo plots:
