Community Gardens Featured in the Toronto Star
Posted: June 25, 2013
Categories: Food in the News / GoodFoodBites
On Friday, the Toronto Star published the first of a series of articles on Toronto community gardens, titled “A Garden Grows”
Below is the first article, written by Nancy White:
Behind a Vaughan fire hall community garden grows for the needy
June 21, 2013
By: Nancy White
Tucked behind a Vaughan fire hall, lavender is blooming, strawberry and raspberry patches are thriving and green garlic shoots are sprightly rising. Volunteers on their knees plant tomatoes, beans and clumps of fragrant basil in the community garden’s 17 beds of rich dark earth.
It’s this year’s opening day for the Growing to Give garden, and volunteers erect a wooden post of hand-painted signs, some pointing the way to pickles or heritage tomatoes, others imparting folksy wisdom. One reads: “Many things grow in the garden that were never sown there.”
That doesn’t mean just weeds. Over the summer, this community garden will be tended by 30 volunteers, young and old, many hailing from far-flung lands, all drawn for their own reasons to dig in the dirt. From now until the final harvest, the Star will present some of their stories.
Over the summer, this stretch of land, approximately 50 feet by 150 feet, will yield close to 140 kilograms of produce, the vast majority going to needy people across York Region. The land was formerly used — occasionally — by firefighters to toss a ball or Frisbee.
If all goes well this summer, the garden, thought up by a fireman and nurtured by the non-profit Seeds for Change, will fully mature: The community will take control.
“This is the transition year,” explains Lynne Koss, co-founder of Seeds for Change, which managed the garden for two years. “We pull back and a steering committee of volunteers takes over.”
It’s the part of a community garden’s growth that tests the strength of its roots. But Koss is confident. She started Seeds for Change in 2010 to grow nutritious produce for the needy. She did that and got a bonus, a social bumper crop.
“I’d heard about a garden’s community-building benefits,” explains Koss, 59. “But I didn’t appreciate it until I saw the joy on people’s faces.”
Community gardens — people sharing the land and chores and often donating part of the harvest — are spreading as rapidly as mint and popping up in the oddest places.
In Toronto, which has at least 280 community gardens, according to the advocacy group FoodShare, there’s one behind the Lillian Smith library on Huron St., on the roof of Eastdale Collegiate and in a Little Portugal Green P parking lot. Yes, a bit of unpaved paradise. Joni Mitchell would be proud.
The City of Toronto has 80 requests outstanding for new community gardens in parks. That’s double the number of requests compared to four years ago.
The gung-ho gardening doesn’t stop at Steeles Ave. The York Region Food Network, a nonprofit charity, started its first garden in 1993 and now operates 231 individual plots with increasing requests for more, says executive director Joan Stonehocker. The gardens are run in allotment style: a person is assigned a plot to grow produce for himself. But people often share seeds and crops and donate excess produce to food banks, she says.
The push for local and healthier food fuels this grow-it-yourself drive, as does a primitive desire to get your hands in the dirt.
“Food is such a fundamental human need that a connection to it — the growing, cooking, eating — excites us,” says Debbie Field, executive director of FoodShare Toronto. “It seems to be deep in our DNA.”
Enter an eco-minded firefighter, Jacob Dabit, who in 2010 worked at the Vaughan fire hall on Clark Ave. W. near Bathurst St. He was the guy always urging recycling and turning firehouse lights off.
A close friend had begun talking about the benefits of community gardens. While not a gardener himself, Dabit, 36, fondly recalls his parents, originally from the Middle East, growing zucchini, cucumbers and lots of grape leaves in their North York yard.
So when the City of Vaughan asked for suggestions on how to be greener, a light went on: what about the rarely used stretch of grass behind the fire hall? He took his idea to the city.
A few days later, Koss, who had just started Seeds for Change, approached the city about community gardens.
“The stars aligned,” says Koss.
The city provided $1,500 in start-up money and access to the land. Details were ironed out with the fire hall.
“A few guys were skeptical, but it wasn’t a tough sell,” says Dabit.
Fire-hall land makes for good gardening — easy access to water and built-in security by a station manned around the clock. Dabit and Koss are looking at a couple of other Vaughan fire halls for potential gardens.
To raise funds, Dabit organized a firefighters’ car wash that’s become an annual event. This year, it brought in $1,636.
Koss and her daughter and Seeds cofounder, Marissa Wiltshire, drummed up support from local businesses — Home Depot donated a pergola and path, and Beaver Valley Stone gave large rocks and picnic tables. Seeds for Change recruited volunteers and held workshops. The garden officially opened in June 2011, with the York Region Food Network advising along the way.
As a two-year pilot project, the garden yielded almost 160 kilograms of produce, most donated to the needy. York Region’s eight food banks feed more than 52,000 people a year.
“York Region has deepening pockets of poverty and a social service infrastructure that’s slim and stretched,” says Daniele Zanotti, CEO of United Way York Region. “We’re seeing an informal network of care stepping up. This garden is an example.”
At this season’s launch on June 8, volunteer co-ordinator Nicole Doray, 18, gave a knowledgeable tour of the plots — a butterfly garden on the west flank to attract pollinators; a patch for sunflowers, beans and squash, which grow well together; a garlic bed with eight varieties from around the world.
Doray’s friend, Kristin Rizkalla, 17, a volunteer this year, is grateful to the garden. Her father suffered a heart attack last summer, and Doray brought the family greens straight from the ground, including okra.
“It’s part of my culture,” laughs Rizkalla, whose parents are from Cairo. “We prepared the fresh okra the way it’s done in Egypt. My dad loved it.”
Margaret McCleary, 65, a retired children’s aid society worker, sits on a big rock, pointing with her cane to where her plot will be. Despite her arthritis, she’s going to grow a variety of vegetables for several seniors’ homes. “It doesn’t matter if you’re handicapped. There’s always something you can do to benefit others,” she says.
The most energetic volunteer is retired teacher Nira Yarkoni — “a senior,” she responds when asked her age. An apartment dweller, she’s delighted for the opportunity to garden. She’s everywhere, fussing in the herb plot, planting climbing beans and marvelling at the first plump red strawberry.
“See what we’ve accomplished,” she says, gesturing around the garden. “And we’re not finished yet.”