Turning a new leaf from an old lot
Advocates say downtown garden’s success shows viability of urban food growth
Every day as Patrick Moore rumbled past a vacant lot on Hastings Street on the bus, he would stare at the lot next to the Astoria Hotel and wonder if it could be put to better use.
The associate professor in anthropology at the University of B.C. often placed his urban ethnographies students at the nearby Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House, where they volunteered while writing ethnographic projects.
So he approached Rory Sutherland, executive director of the House, with the idea of starting an urban farm. It was a perfect fit.
“Food security for the community is one of our main concerns at the Neighbourhood House. We prepare hundreds of organic meals in our kitchen every month,” said Sutherland, who admits he had no idea what he was getting himself into.
But Moore, a member of the
Grandview-Woodland gardening club, knows his way around a garden bed.
“I grew up on a farm in Michigan, and the family garden was twice this size,” he said.
The local farmers, including his family, canned sweet corn and tomatoes, which they donated to local schools for lunch programs.
“Our families fed the kids,” he said.
The DTES site had been a garden leased to Sole Food, an urban farming group that had relocated. And Sutherland and Moore had no idea COVID-19 was around the corner when they began to negotiate taking over the lot.
The project couldn’t have come at a better time.
When the pandemic hit in March, local food and meal programs struggled to keep up. There was a sense of urgency: “When we began, people were hoarding food, no one knew how things would go — or whether there would be food available for those who needed it,” Moore said.
Neighbourhood House was feeding four times as many people during the pandemic as it did before. Moore said about 70 volunteers, including students, the COVID-19 unemployed and retirees, threw themselves into the project.
“All through the lockdown it was a great place to be. We could be outside, and be socially distanced,” he said.
As they tore apart the 138 old 12x4-foot beds, mulching the weeds and rotting boards under the soil — they had no budget for junk removal — Moore started hundreds of plants from seed in the basement of his Grandview-Woodland home. And then they had to deconstruct a few rat habitats, reconstruct the beds, sift all the soil and mulch in peat.
Now, as he stands back surveying the stunning array of productive, blight-resistant tomato plants, collard greens, swiss chard, purple broccoli, sugar-snap peas, fragrant basil, and carrots and squash, he couldn’t be more delighted.
“I’m pleased, very pleased,” he says modestly.
Now the garden is feeding 50 to 70 families a week with hampers and free-meal programs through Neighbourhood House — last week they delivered 200 pounds of potatoes (a mix of russet, reds and Yukon golds) to the nearby House — and there is a free market to give away extras on Fridays at 3:30 p.m. at the House.
There is also a traditional Indigenous garden featuring tobacco, calendula, fireweed and blueberries.
While Sutherland would like to make the space available to local families for education programs and recreation, Moore knows all too well that the garden’s success could be its downfall.
“We all have to continue to advocate for spaces like this, and affordable housing. A really successful green space looks like a park and the property starts to look more attractive and the next thing you know an application goes in for a 20-storey condo,” he said.
What Sutherland hopes is that the success of the garden will show its importance, and the necessity and the viability of organic food production in the urban landscape.
“Even if something (a condo development) goes up, we need to make sure we’re planning to include spaces like this,” he said.