Buzzing with ideas for the good
Guerrilla gardening projects for a greener city taking root in Montreal
During the warmer months, homeless housing organization Accueil Bonneau gets 50,000 new tenants.
Or, at least that’s the joke its director, Aubin Boudreau, likes to tell.
He’s referring to the bee colony on the shelter’s roof, and it’s no unwelcome guest — the bees were put there to help some of the men living at Accueil Bonneau develop a passion for bee- keeping.
“Taking care of bees, it’s taking care of life,” Boudreau says.
Alvéole, an organization dedicated to urban bee- keeping, put four hives on the Accueil Bonneau roof after the shelter received a generous donation by a local lawyer with a love for bees.
There are 12 additional hives at Accueil Bonneau’s Lanaudière retreat.
Last fall, the six men who tend to the bees helped harvest about 350 kilograms of honey. They hawked their Bonneau Honey product at the Montreal courthouse and sold out in three days.
“The guys had the impression they were giving back to the Accueil Bonneau,” Boudreau says. “We were very, very proud.”
Alexandre McLean is the man behind Alvéole. He and co- founders Declan Jardin and Étienne Lapierre began putting hives on Montreal roofs three years ago, first to see whether the bees could be healthy and produce honey in the city.
“The bees are dying at a very ( rapid) rate right now,” McLean says. It has become crucial to support and nurture bee populations to stem their precipitous drop in numbers.
But then it turned into a sort of social experiment. There’s a large gap between city life and nature, McLean says, particularly when it comes to understanding where food comes from and why bees are important.
He decided teaching people to take care of bees was key to developing that understanding and, he says, “The connection to nature that comes with bees.”
Boudreau can attest to the social impact bee- keeping can have. He says the Accueil Bonneau residents who tended the bees found it to be therapeutic and even experienced a boost of self- confidence.
“The guys were excited and happy to participate,” he says.
That social aspect resounded well with Je vois Montréal. Alvéole was among the 180 community projects chosen to advance to the next stage under the banner Je fais Montréal.
Being chosen doesn’t mean much in terms of money for most of the projects; McLean says the exercise didn’t result in any new investment.
However, he did he get a number of contacts to schools, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and other downtown real estate holders interested in housing bees.
“Je vois Montréal was the perfect platform to not only reach out to schools and universities, but also organizations,” McLean says.
Whereas Alvéole had three social projects last year, they now have at least a dozen more. McLean expects the organization will put between 200 and 250 hives on roofs this year.
Of course, it’s just one of many urban agriculture- oriented projects that are part of Je fais Montréal.
Mathieu Garceau- Tremblay ’s Montréal Houblonnière project aims to get people across the city growing hops.
Garceau- Tremblay is both an avid gardener and brewer. He’s also an investor in and head brewer at Brasserie Harricana in Little Italy.
Hops grows as a climbing vine and can look quite beautiful growing on a building facade. “Hops would help green the city,” he says.
He’s trying to recruit Montreal brew pubs and gardeners to form a mutually beneficial partnership — beer for hops. He also wants to use the hops to brew a special beer for Montreal’s 375th anniversary in 2017.
Interested gardeners can buy hops roots called rhizomes and other hops- growing equipment on the Montréal Houblonnière website.
If you haven’t got an inch of growing space to your name, you still might have options, thanks to Lande ( formerly Urburb), another new project under Je fais Montréal.
Inspired by guerrilla gardening efforts like the Champs des possibles in Mile End, co- founder Andréanne Maltais- Tremblay says the group behind Lande wants to help people transform empty lots into makeshift gardens and green space.
To accomplish that, Lande will handle all the bureaucratic borough, city and landlord wrangling necessary to get community gardeners digging.
“We found out that there were a lot of re- appropriation projects on vacant land that were facing hurdles,” Maltais- Tremblay says.
The group is working on a webbased tool to help identify empty lots and figure out whether the owners of those lots are willing to house a temporary or permanent green fixture. The online portal will be officially launched in late March.
“We really felt like people were waiting both for the tool, which is the interactive map, to be created to have a real portrait of what’s going on in Montreal in terms of vacant lots, and they were also waiting for non- profit organization to help citizens have access to vacant lots,” Maltais- Tremblay says.
“We will work on it while they do what they want to do.”
Check out the 180 Je fais Montréal projects at www.jefaismtl.com.