Hope grows for community gardens as advocates meet with province
British Columbia did it.
So did Red Deer, Alta. With a meeting planned with Premier Doug Ford’s office Monday, community garden advocates in Ontario were hopeful they convinced this province to follow suit and declare the shared food growing plots an essential service amid fears of produce shortages as the COVID-19 pandemic plays out.
The province originally deemed community gardens non-essential when it imposed a state of emergency on March 17. Advocates are hopeful that stance will change before May 12 when the current state of emergency ends.
“Community gardens have always been important and even after the crisis they will continue to be important but this year is an intense year,” said Rhonda Teitel-Payne, co-ordinator of Toronto Urban Growers, which is a member of the Ontario Community Growing Network meeting with provincial policymakers.
“The gardens will be needed even more so.”
Concerns over food security — access to safe, fresh and affordable food — at the local, provincial and national levels are mounting as the growing season edges closer. Canadian farmers worry they won’t have the same resources to produce food, particularly in horticulture — fruit and vegetable farming — where manual labour is essential to maintaining and harvesting crops.
Seasonal agriculture workers from Mexico and the Caribbean come every year to help those industries, which dominate farming in Niagara. But the pandemic means workers have to self-isolate for 14 days upon arrival and maintain safe physical distancing while working in fields, orchards and vineyards afterwards to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Some countries, including Grenada, aren’t allowing citizens to leave this year to participate in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program.
As a result, some predict Ontario’s asparagus harvest, set to begin in a few weeks, will be halved. Other commercial fruit and vegetable crops are expected to be affected as the growing season progresses.
That means a prospect of less fresh food on store shelves and higher prices to buy it.
People who do use community gardens have started seedlings in anticipation of the growing season, Teitel-Payne said. Now they worry they won’t get their own crops planted in time to harvest if Ontario doesn’t pivot and declare the allotments an essential service.
“People are worried they won’t have the same amount of food this year,” Teitel-Payne said.
“On the one hand, you’re not going to feed an entire city with urban gardens but the food they grow is so important for the people who grow it because it provides nutrition they might not otherwise get and it’s culturally important, too.”
Six hundred families and individuals use Niagara’s 70 community gardens.
I’m one of them. I’m privileged that I’ve never experienced food insecurity. But I am grateful for my freezer full of tomatoes, kale, zucchini, herbs and winter squash that I grew in the summer to supplement my groceries in December when my writing jobs slow to a grind, and with it my income. Community gardens have typically been seen as a sign of gentrification in urban environments, but Erin Riseing, program co-ordinator for the Niagara Community Garden Network, noted many of Niagara’s community gardens are run by social organizations, including food banks and women’s shelters, to bolster access to fresh healthy food for the region’s most vulnerable residents.
“It’s a broad mix of people but most of the people running gardens try to offer space to more marginalized, low-income families so they’re quite integrated that way,” Riseing said.
The stress release community gardens provide can’t be understated, either. Community gardens help many people cope with the physical toll caused by the daily worries over having enough to eat, Teitel-Payne said.
“Virus or no virus, if you don’t know how you’re going to pay your bills, you don’t know how you’re going to send your kids to school with food, that stress takes a serious toll on your body,” she said.
“It’s a bit of a hard sell with how we think of mental health but it is important for people to get out of the house and four walls, and get into their gardens.”
When garden groups made their case with the province Monday, they were armed with proposed safety protocols to help contain the spread of COVID-19, including closing gardens to the public and only allowing access by registered users.
Set schedules to stagger times that gardeners can work in their plots, enforcing physical distancing, encouraging the use of masks and other personal protective equipment, and providing hand washing and sanitizing stations are also among the recommendations.
Gardeners would be required to sign agreements abiding by the COVID-19 rules before gaining access to their plots.
Some gardens may not be able to afford those measures, and in those cases won’t be opened regardless of the province’s decision. But advocates will encourage operators of those gardens to find a way to keep the land in production for food banks instead.
There’s also a push for people with backyard gardens to grow extra food or share the space with others who need it, particularly if the province doesn’t change its mind.
“We need growing space more than ever. We need to (increase) space to grow food,” Riseing said, while tempering that with a gardener’s usual optimism.
“We’re going to see shortages in the produce department so we’re going to need to supplement more than ever. We’re really lucky here in Niagara to have this amazing, long growing season. I think if we pull together, it will be amazing what we accomplish.”