HOME-GROWN GOODNESS
Rise of the urban garden
In the late 20th century, community gardens started popping up in Calgary, mostly next to community centres and schoolyards. They created an enhanced sense of community as you got to meet people who lived not just next door, but neighbours who lived blocks away. For schools, it was also a great way to teach urban kids where food came from and how it grows.
The modern community garden movement was also a catalyst for people to create back and front yard gardens, a practice that had pretty much been abandoned in the late 20th century as Canadians became more urbanized and moved away from their rural roots.
Because the COVID-19 virus has resulted in some food shortages and restricted access to grocery stores, futurists are now speculating even more people will convert their lawns into vegetable gardens.
URBAN FARMING
In 2013, a group of Calgary volunteers created Canada’s largest urban agricultural farm on an 11-acre parcel of provincially owned land (transportation utility corridor) just west of Canada Olympic Park. The produce grown was given to local agencies including Alpha House, Calgary’s Women’s Emergency Shelter,
Inn From the Cold and Calgary Drop-in & Rehab Centre. Unfortunately, the expansion of the Stoney Trail/trans-canada Highway interchange as part of the ring road meant the closure of the farm and negotiation for a new parcel of land at 61st Avenue and Stoney Trail S.E. has been unsuccessful.
The upside, though, is the model for a volunteer-based urban farm to help feed our less fortunate citizens is in place. Every city has huge tracts of land under major power lines, above pipelines and other services that are ideal sites for urban farms. In Calgary, 50th Avenue S.W. from Elbow Drive to Stanley Road is a great example of such a tract of land.
FLASHBACK
Victory Gardens were commonplace across Canada during the First and Second World
Wars. The idea was the more produce grown by Canadians in their front and backyards, vacant lots, public flower gardens and parks, the more food that could be shipped to soldiers overseas. At its peak in 1944, there were an estimated 209,200 Victory Gardens in cities across Canada producing a total of 57,000 tonnes of vegetables.
The downside (there is always a downside) was the vast majority of Victory Gardens were on the private property of homeowners’ land — only three per cent were available to those without a yard.
Wander the back alleys of Calgary’s older communities on a summer day today and look for the small, older cottage houses and chances are you may find large backyard gardens with potatoes, zucchini, beans, carrots, peas, rhubarb, tomatoes, strawberries, raspberries and other plants flourishing. And really, it’s not that long ago that instead of every house having a two-car garage, they would have a big garden with fruit trees covering about the same amount of space to supply produce for a family of six or more all winter.
THE FUTURE
■ Will the demand for suburban
single family homes with big yards for gardens rise? Will those tiny front yards with a lonely ornamental tree next to protruding garages become vegetable gardens? Or will the lonely front yard tree be replaced by a mini orchard?
■ Will suburban developers start converting public spaces, boulevards and entrances into community vegetable gardens?
■ Will suburban developers start promoting single-family homes with cold storage rooms in the basement versus wine cellars to store root vegetables from your garden?
■ Will school sites that sit empty all summer (i.e. the growing season) become large community garden sites?
■ Will highrise condo developers be looking at how they can convert more of their outdoor common area to vegetable gardens, rather than just decorative ones? Maybe we will see more condo proposals like Orchards, Lamb Development’s aborted project that included 66 apple trees in the street level space between the two towers.
■ Will new developers market
their new multi-family projects as having balconies large enough for vertical gardening?
■ Will master-planned urban villages make the community garden a more prominent feature of their plan and marketing? East Village already has an amazing community garden.
■ Will we see a more infill homes with flat roofs that are vegetable gardens?
■ Will the City of Calgary and Province of Alberta look at vacant land, boulevards, roadsides, interchanges and offer them up as urban vegetable gardens?
LAST WORD
Some have said the fight against the killer COVID-19 virus is the Third World War. In many ways, it has had the same effect on society — creating stronger national bonds, teaching us the difference between needs and wants, a better appreciation of family and friends, and a better understanding of how fragile our global economy supply chain is.
One lasting legacy of the pandemic may well be a return to Victory-like gardens.