Local Colour

Community gardens help to cultivate healthy and vibrant neighbourhoods

Breathing new life into an overlooked landscape, community gardens are repurposing many of our city's wasted urban spaces. Maintained by dedicated gardeners from a variety of backgrounds, these veggie and flower patches can be spotted around the city between houses, beside railway tracks and hydro lines, and in empty lots.

Community gardens often operate through organizations like schools, the City, places of worship, neighbourhood associations and horticultural societies. Among other things, they help build strong communities from all income groups, increase learning about food for all ages, save on municipal spending by composting waste instead of sending it to landfills and shorten food's travel distance from field to plate—and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with that.

Community Benefits
Darlene Karp is involved with the Millennium Gardens on Henderson Highway, near the junction with the Chief Peguis Bridge, through speaking, fundraising, organizing activities and seasonal clean ups. She began gardening about 15 years ago, when she moved to a home on an acre lot.At the time, it just seemed fashionable, said Karp. I joined the East Kildonan Garden Club in 2000, and also helped to plan a new community garden in River East.

Seniors living in the high-rise apartments on Henderson Highway and the Senior Health Resource Team (which works for the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority) proposed the idea for the Millennium Gardens at community meetings.

Many seniors live on a limited income so growing their own produce is beneficial. Karp says they also have junior gardeners (school age children) growing vegetables at the gardens and donating them to Winnipeg Harvest.

As society becomes more automated, community gardening keeps us in touch with Mother Earth, says Karp. It's a way to be involved, have freshly grown vegetables, develop community pride, and encourage intercultural and intergenerational involvement.  It's especially valuable as concrete jungles and industrial waste increasingly encroach on our lives.

Audrey Logan is an avid gardener who volunteers in community gardens in the West Broadway and Spence neighbourhoods.

Logan, who says she's been environmentally conscious since the days that green was just a colour, says, community gardening is a great way for people to get a chance to learn important skills and to become self-empowered.

Particularly for some of the poorer and young people in the city, Logan says starting a garden is a great way to be spending time. 
We're growing gardeners, not gangsters, she says.  It's about living a healthy life in a healthy way, without getting fanatical about it.  All it takes is putting a seed into the ground and watching it grow.

Karl Thordarson of the City of Winnipeg's parks and open space department says community gardening has people taking ownership of their plots and converting vacant space into productive lands. Some groups use the gardens to encourage horticultural therapy or teach traditional and innovative growing methods, he says.

How they work
Anne Lindsey, environmental chair of the Manitoba EcoNetwork gardens at Riverview Community Gardens, has been involved at Riverview for 16 years. 

The Riverview Garden Society runs the garden as a co-op, paying rent to the City. According to Lindsey, the space was once owned by the former Winnipeg Municipal Hospital that grew food there and in greenhouses for its polio-stricken patients. Now the garden feeds a variety of people, Because we have people of all ethnicities living around the Riverview area, we get everything you can imagine, from chickpeas to green peas, grown there, she explains.

There are some basic rules for Riverview gardeners, like having everything out of the garden by September 30 (as it is tilled each year), and not planting any squash or pumpkin (as they are too intruding). Lindsey said the committee is also working on some new guidelines and introducing educational components on the use of pesticides and growing organics.  The majority of the gardeners are already in line with this anyway, but it would be great to make it policy.

Lindsey said these gardens are great for any apartment or heavily treed area dwellers – an oasis in the middle of the city.

What's Involved
The cost to join a community garden depends on each group's policy, says Logan. Some don't charge anything but expect equity and volunteering, while others charge an annual fee.

Membership costs vary for those that require one. Thordarson says, Typically, there is a $10 membership plus yearly rental costs of $10 or $15. For City of Winnipeg allotments, we charge $25 for an unserviced plot, and $35 for a serviced plot (serviced meaning tilled annually).The participant's fee at Millennium Gardens, for example, is $10 per year, plus some volunteer time. According to Thordarson, in return for their efforts, involved gardeners share in the harvest. They also make considerable donations to charitable organizations. On city allotments, gardeners are encouraged to make donations to food banks. Otherwise, the amount of work gardeners put in is directly related to the harvest they pull out.

Thordarson said vandalism on community garden plots is a concern, but that the City is addressing it by way of plots dedicated for public picking or perimeter landscaping by some of our gardening groups.

He is working with an interdepartmental group that has so far assessed the city-wide inventory, set a list of needs, developed attainable goals, and is now establishing new plots for people on waiting lists.

Through community gardening, we need to continue considering our dependence on the global food market and the benefits of eating locally, says Thordarson.

To get involved, contact the City of Winnipeg at 986-2665 or the Winnipeg Community Gardening Network at 783-2834