URBAN GROWTH
WHEN GARDENERS GET THEIR GARDEN
The $160 fee - for the year was a pretty good price for a vacation property.
Just minutes from Ben’s downtown Guelph apartment was 1,000 square feet of fertile soil with direct access to water.
Well, irrigation access, that is. Pitching his fiancée, Sam, on an allotment garden was a surprisingly easy sell. Their first allotment garden experience.
This is a story about frustrated gardeners. If you are a gardener without a garden, it could be about you.
Ben and Sam took possession of the oversized allotment on the rainy long weekend this past May.
They and the other “allotmenteers” waddled down a slope to their gardens in rubber boots and rain jackets with buckets, seeds, seedlings, shovels and plot maps in tow. It was a lot to carry and the plot map, a carefully drawn vision from their February fantasies, was ruined by the rain before they even reached their destination halfway down the field.
A numbered marker identified their slice of the vast, sloppy mud pie of potential.
The rules at Ignatius Farm, where the allotments are located, dictate that all gardeners abide by a 100 per cent organic manifesto, which made weed control a constant battle.
There was lots of travel to and from the allotment this season.
The irony of being employed in the gardening business is that work demands are highest during garden season and Sam works in an agricultural sector that sends her far and wide.
So spring maintenance was a challenge.
They joked that someday they would show up and the farm administrators would have tilled their garden into the soil on the assumption that they had given up the fight.
Sam’s mom came to the rescue more than once, putting in an afternoon of tearing through weeds and helping save face in the allotment community.
It’s a debt to Ben’s future motherin-law which he will carry into the marriage.
“Community” is the operative word - no two gardens are alike, and neither are two gardeners. At various times, Ben and Sam (The Kids, as Mark calls them) depended on neighbour gardeners who became friends.
Some were small groups who shared responsibilities for a single plot (smart), including a family new to Canada that managed to wrangle three generations of help when garden demands were highest.
With a growing number of people living in condos and apartments, it should be no surprise that demands for allotment gardens is growing, too.
In Guelph, the Ignatius Jesuit Centre provides a 600-acre site on a former Jesuit college property. It offers garden plots among walking trails, an organic farm and Jesuit retreat, among other things.
In Toronto, community gardens are overseen predominantly by the city and waiting lists vary.
If you are considering your own plot for next year, it would be wise to look up gardens in your area and get in touch with your local supervisor of community gardens.
The same site outlines the process for motivated community members to establish new gardens in their neighbourhoods on unused space; it’s something we should all be fighting for.
For Ben and Sam, the plot occupies a special place in their lives between a tiny apartment in town, their first place together, and the mature country properties outside the city they aspire to.
Many times, Ben has walked back up the slippery slope to look back, over what they have accomplished.
The block of mixed cut-flowers that wooed us all summer with new bursts of colour, the Atlantic Giant pumpkin plant that Ben insisted upon and the neighbours have politely trained back to his side of the garden, and a spent cucumber plant that has since been pickled as favours for wedding guests.
Further up the slope, you can look back again and see their plot stitched in among all the others.
It’s a perfect patchwork of paradise, and The Kids have fallen in love with their piece of it.