THE 100-METRE DIET
Think about spring now and turn your weedy lawn into foodie heaven, writes Megan Gillis.
It was more than a decade ago that newly minted locavores started buzzing about the 100-mile diet and its benefits for both our health and the earth.
But a growing number of Ottawans like Conrad Melanson are going one better, turning lawns into vegetable gardens for bountiful harvests, and then year-round meals, right outside their front or back doors. They’ve turned DIY into GIY (Grow It Yourself ).
“This is like the 100-metre diet — not even,” Melanson joked.
He and his wife, Anne-Marie Gervais, had a scruffy lawn that was more weeds than grass when they decided to grow a few herbs.
Now their south-facing 66- by 40-foot Alta Vista backyard also produces beans, peas, lettuce, carrots, tomatoes big and small, sweet and three kinds of hot peppers, chard, kale, garlic, radishes, cucumbers, zucchini and beets. What they can’t eat right away they freeze, pickle and can for winter.
New this year are onions and blueberries. Gervais wants to tackle asparagus next.
The effect from their deck is far from utilitarian, with neat beds full of eye-catching produce, like purple pole beans with vivid blossoms, and gleaming black cherry tomatoes.
“Why would I have a perfect green lawn when I could harvest a ton of stuff and help the planet?” Melanson said.
“Every year I’ve added one or two (raised beds) so I can get a bigger crop — it’s addictive.
“We’re foodies. We really love food and friends and company. There’s nothing better than sitting down with a meal and a bottle of wine with friends and it all came from your own garden.”
Anyone with a bit of soil can do it, Melanson insists, and now is the time to start planning for a 2018 harvest instead of missing a chance to plant garlic this fall or peas when the snow melts.
“Start thinking about spring,” Melanson said. “Can you get your boxes ready or map the area? What do you want to grow?
“It’s easy. It’s not complicated. It’s simple.”
Growing your own food is a burgeoning trend, according to Jordan Bouchard, the coordinator of the Community Gardening Network of Ottawa.
The network is part of non-profit Just Food, which spreads gardening know-how to home and community gardeners from a farm near Blackburn Hamlet while growing produce for food banks and promoting small local growers. The aim is food security for all.
“The last few years have been rocket growth,” said Bouchard of local community gardens, whose number has grown from 39 to 94 in three years and attract about 7,000 people from Vars to Carp.
Amid the growing local interest in getting our hands dirty, front and back yard food gardens and even urban farms are popping up on neighbourhood streets.
Bouchard points to B.C. urban farmer Curtis Stone’s estimate that there are more than 40 million acres of lawn space on our continent, the equivalent of more than two-thirds of the farmland in Saskatchewan.
“There’s a ridiculous amount of lawn space in North America that could be productive food areas,” Bouchard said.
“We can get fresh produce into anyone’s kitchens. The supply chains are shorter. It’s creating food for people in areas that are close to populations. It makes sense.”
Want to try it yourself? Fall is a great time to get started.
“You don’t want to do it all in the spring,” Bouchard said. “If you wait until the snow melts, you’ll get a massive amount of stuff to do all at once.
“Start now with your planning and execute the steps to open up new land or to refurbish your existing flower beds. It’s easier to spread out the labour and start doing it now.”
Once those new beds are dug on pleasantly cool fall days, there’s a pungent reward for all the hard work: garlic, which should be planted in October.
“That will be the first thing to greet you when the snow melts away in the spring,” Bouchard said.
“It’s a really fun crop and it’s a really rewarding crop because it is one of the first things to ripen.”
Dave Janveau turned his sunny front lawn into a vegetable garden a decade ago when he got tired of mowing it.
Now more and more of his Experimental Farm-area neighbours are doing the same and he has yet to hear a complaint about going lawnless — although he jokes that he may have bribed naysayers with veggies. Janveau — who focuses on things that are pricey at the grocery store — grows herbs including dill, jalapeno and sweet peppers, two kinds of both peas and kale, chard and yellow and green beans.
His kids, aged seven and 11, graze around the garden and their bounty becomes everything from pesto to chow chow for winter.
“Anyone can do it — take a shovel, make space and put a tomato plant in,” Janveau said. “That takes that many tomatoes off of a truck from Mexico.
“What’s better than eating it fresh? Or in the middle of January pulling out a jar of something you grew and made. It’s like bottling the summer.”