All product prices are listed in CAD.

If you order a garden (aka Doug) before the commencement of a growing season, Doug will arrive during the month of May. You will be notified by email of your delivery date closer to Doug’s arrival. The best time to put in a garden is during spring and fall. However, you can order a garden any time during the growing season. If you order Doug during the growing season you will find him waiting for you at your door before you know it. No matter when you decide to order, we recommend unboxing and installing Doug into his permanent home soon after delivery has been made.

Doug needs to live on top of a grass or dirt plot. The plot needs to be a level surface. Doug will need at least 6-8 hours of sunlight a day. Morning sun is perferable if you are lucky enough to have such a spot. No morning sun? No problem. Any plot with at least 6-8 hours of sunlight will work!

Doug can be assembled by one person. Doug requires no tilling or digging and no tools for setup. Doug can be assembled in 20 minutes or less by one person. Doug comes with simple and easy-to-follow instructions. All of Doug’s contents come in managable bags requiring no wheelbarrow or shovel. If you do require assistance setting up Doug, please reach out at doug@growdoug.ca and we can arrange for someone to help you install your garden for a small fee.

Give away your landscape fabrics! Don’t add a plastic layer into your garden. The cardboard box that Doug arrives in is laid down as the first layer of the garden. Should you remove the tape? No need. The tape we use to seal our packages is paper based and will biodegrade easily. The cardboard at the base of your garden will suppress and kill the grass and weeds underneath Doug’s bed. The cardboard also acts as another organic layer that will invite and allow those micro-organisms from the depths into your soil ecosystem.

The short answer is no. While composting is generally a good thing, the compost we grow our vegetables in should be of the highest quality. The only way to guarantee that your compost is of a high quality is to control the inputs that make up the compost. For example, if you feed a cow herbicide laden hay, that herbicide will bio-accumulate in the cows gut and will be just as potent on the other side as it was going in. Properly composted manure will “cook” the herbicide out, but the operative word is PROPERLY. Not all compost is composted properly. We strive to supply only the best compost and as such, our suppliers control the inputs so that you can enjoy the best outputs!

Protecting your soil by mulching it each season is a critical step in growing your soil ecosystem. We need to protect our soil’s surface. At Doug, we use our custom soil conditioning pellet mulch to protect our gardens surface. Our soil conditioning pellet is made up of 5 ingredients that add organic matter and nutrients to feed and protect your soil. Mulching with our pellets is also a pest deterent as slugs and other pests do not like to cross it. Mulching helps to retain water in your soil and protects your soil surface from baking in the heat of the summer sun. Another common mulch that is used is wood mulch. We do not use wood mulch as it takes a long time to be broken down by the soil microbes and it attracts pests. Most wood mulch is made from retired pallets and we just can not be sure what might have been sprayed or what might have spilt on the pallets during their lifetime.

Once you have planted your seeds it is time to set your timer on your hose bib. We recommend that you water Doug early in the morning for 60 minutes twice a week. As your plants begin to grow and the summer days get hotter we recommend changing the schedule to every other day. Check your soil moisture by getting your hands a little dirty. Your soil underneath your mulch layer should feel moist but not drenched or dry. Adjust your watering schedule according to your garden’s needs. During wet weather, simply pause your irrigation schedule and let Mother Nature do Her thing.

A Doug garden does not come with seeds however, a Doug subscription delivers organic heirloom seeds in the winter. Doug provides you with the best possible growing mediums and keeps your soil ecosystem at its most ideal with Doug’s Soil Nourishing Subscription. At Doug we are focused on helping you grow your soil so your soil can grow seeds.

We do not believe in synthetic fertilizer to feed your plants. We know that if we feed our soil ecosystems on a continuous basis, as Mother Nature does Herself, our plants will get all the nutrients they need from the soil. As the growing season runs its course, your plants will take the nutrients from your soil ecosystem. Enter in Doug’s Soil Health Subscription! Doug’s Soil Health Subscription is designed to feed and protect your soil ecosystem during each season. In the fall your amendments will arrive to spread over Doug’s surface to feed Doug throughout the fall and winter months. In the spring more amendments and more straw pellet mulch to feed and protect your soil for another growing season. Feeding your soil on a continuous basis removes the need for any synthetic fertilizers.

Doug at it’s core is about building and maintaining our soil ecosystems. Gardeners should not be tilling and digging in a way that causes major soil disturbances in their garden beds. Every time we cause major soil disturbances we are destroying the soil ecosystem and also killing the micro-organisms creating that soil ecosystem. This is not a new concept. In fact, tilling is a new concept comparatively, and we wish it would go away. No one goes into the forest with a rototiller at the end or beginning of the growing season. We have been fighting Mother Nature for over a century and it is time we start working with Her instead of against Her.

Everything curated at Doug has been done with great care. We are working on a hoop house that can be added to an order in the future - stay tuned! To keep out unwanted visitors and to protect your garden in extreme weather we recommend purchasing a hoop house. There are some available that will do the trick while we finish perfecting ours. Reach out to us at doug@growdoug.ca and we can send you some links.

At Doug Gardens, we believe we should all be doing more than what is sustainable. We believe and strive to have net positive impacts in everything we do. Meaning, each piece of our packaging has a net positive benefit in some way. Hence, the cardboard box Doug arrives in being the first layer of your garden. We searched high and low to find a plastic alternative for shipping our materials. After an exhaustive search, our vision of a biodegradable bag simply does not exist for our application, YET. When a biodegradable option becomes available we will be one of the first adopters. We know our world needs a whole lot less plastic and a whole lot more worm food. In the meantime, we have chosen a bag size larger than you would normally find in the garden centres resulting in less bags and thus less plastics. Furthermore, all of our bags are acceptable for the recycling bin as long as they are rinsed of any content residue and are dry. We recommend pulling the bags inside out, hosing them off and allowing them to dry. The bags are then acceptable to be put in your recycling bin. Stay tuned as we continue on our quest in making as much of our packaging as possible, net positive.

At Doug, we grow our soil so our soil can grow our food. We grow our soil by feeding it bi-annually and protecting it annually. With Doug’s Soil Nourishing Subscription we are doing all the heavy lifting and planning for you. Every fall we deliver a soil amendment, every spring we deliver optimal soil to start your seeds in and in early summer we deliver mulch to protect your soil’s surface. If you keep up with this maintainance schedule, your soil will be continuously fed so that your vegetables will have all the nutrients they need to grow season after season. As an added bonus you will receive a heirloom organic seed pack before gardening season begins so your soil has something to grow.

We are here to help you grow. Email us at doug@growdoug.ca and we will answer your question promptly.