Last fall we, (a couple of city folks) moved out to the country to change our lives. We wanted to live simply, sustain ourselves off of the land and approach life differently. After the most difficult winter we've ever been through and living in sometimes down to -45 in what turned out to be a 3 season cottage, not a 4 season home (surprise!) we have survived and have come out much stronger, more resilient and way more stubborn.

With backgrounds in fine dining, food, marketing and event planning, we spent our cold waterless winter dreaming about the spring and the beginning of our new life and business venture Lola D's Garden Co-op.

Our plan was to bring in all of the start up funds with a couple of pop up dinners that were planned to be held in the city of Winnipeg and were sold out. Unfortunately due to Covid-19, both of those dinners had to be cancelled. Once the unknowns due to Covid change, we will be offering pop up dinners using produce and herbs from the garden throughout the different seasons. 

Short Summary
Lola D's Garden Co-op is a small organic farm initiative providing our community and surrounding area with a community garden and gardening workshops. Lola D's will be offering weekly subscription based fresh artisanal baskets and providing small restaurants with produce in the city of Winnipeg.

Where will your donations go?
- Purchasing more seeds and soil to expand our garden and produce growing capabilities
- Providing two low-income families with fresh produce weekly
- Allowing us the ability to provide our community with gardening workshops and the building of a community garden
- Purchase and maintenance of 6-8 chickens to provide our community and subscribers with fresh eggs on top of their fresh produce and artisanal products

The Impact
With everything that is going on in the world, we want to offer our community and subscribers with the ability to have a positive focus. To be able to learn how to provide and grow food for their families and take that knowledge to grow their own gardens in the future. We want to provide our subscribers with fresh produce, recipes, fresh baked goods and eggs as well as pickled and jarred items.

- The ability to grow your own food makes you self sustainable and cuts down your costs on food
 - Fresh grown food tastes like nothing else
- If we are able to bring in some funds, we will be able to provide a couple of families with fresh food all summer long at   no cost to them. This gives them the ability to take care of their families throughout this difficult time where many have lost their jobs and may not be eligible for any funds through the government

Risks & Challenges
The more seeds we are able to plant, the greater the chance that our plants will grow and produce more fruit, vegetables and herbs and seeing as how it's our first year, the ability to grow the garden will only be greater every year. This means that we can provide more families with food and more workshops for our community.

We currently have 500+ plants started and need to expand this by 3 times to provide the most food for our subscribers, and our community

We will be creating boxes for our subscribers weekly once our first harvest comes in and offer something very different than regular subscription boxes as ours will include handmade sauces, jams, hot sauces, breads, baked goods, eggs as well as produce.

Other Ways You Can Help
If you have seeds to donate, soil or wood or even just the ability to build boxes for our community garden, that is a great help to us! We also need a little section of land to use for our community garden. As of next spring, we've been approved to move the community garden to RM land, but if we'd like to get started throughout summer of 2020, a small parcel of land that we can have access to for workshops and the community helps us immensely. It's very important to us that we are able to support our community and give back as a huge part of this business.

*Any money brought in beyond what we're asking will be used towards creating a greenhouse to be able to grow food throughout the winter to make us a year long garden*