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Our Urban Eden Community Garden, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada I'm a little biased, but the urban gardening scene in my northern Canadian home town of Edmonton always impresses me. Maybe it's the fact that you really can't plant much other than seeds before the third week of May -- because the chance of a killing frost are almost certain, no matter how "springlike" it has been for weeks. Maybe because it's so far north (53 degrees North / 113 degrees West on the globe), and depending which part of the city you are in, there are really only 115 to 125 frost-free growing days. But when the explosion of spring growth happens each year, it's a fantastic thing to behold. And with 17 hours-plus of sunlight per day in June and into early July, gardens start producing just a few weeks after seeds and plant plugs go in the ground. |
 (Our Urban Eden, Edmonton: All but one of the gardeners at this community garden live in high-rises)
As part of the research for my book -- which I'm now in the thick of writing for the next several months -- I'll be diligently searching out the vanguard of the urban agriculture movement, that is food production in urban areas, in Canada, the US, Europe and beyond if I can figure out a way to get to a few other hot spots around the world. But I decided that it would be foolish to ignore what is happening in my own hometown. (I've included a quick-and-dirty history of urban gardening in Edmonton at the end of the post if you're interested in that sort of detail.) On June 29, I visited two community gardens in Edmonton. The first was Our Urban Eden, located just south of the heart of downtown. It's a fairly typical community garden in Edmonton. City-owned parkland is available to the community garden rent-free, plus the city builds the beds and provides water and a garden shed. In exchange, it turns over the adminstration and maintenance of the area to the community garden. (Win-win: the city benefits by not having to pay to maintain this parkland; the gardeners benefit from having premium real estate locations to grow food in high-density areas.) Wannabe gardeners sign up for a plot, usually the season before, and plots are distributed on a first-come first-serve basis every spring. Once you have a plot, you will continue to work that plot as long as you pay your annual dues ($35) and do basic communal site maintenance and maintain a nice garden plot. Then it's yours to do with what you want -- as long as you actually make use of your garden. What I love is how different each rectangular space is within each community garden. Some gardeners plant neat, straight, complete rows. Others plant more "organically." And then some gardeners add decorations, statues, and sculpture to their space.  Lettuce greens are the most "grown" food in community gardens in Edmonton. These lettuces are being grown for the Edmonton Food Bank by the Our Urban Eden gardeners
 Broccoli, this big, on June 29, 2010! And it was a cool, wet spring even. Plants grow faster in urban centers because of the extra heat created by and trapped in a large city like Edmonton.
 Why not? Stop having a boring garden.
 An overview of the garden. It's hard to imagine that it faces onto a major road leading to the downtown core.
 Purple cauliflower! A fortune at a specialty grocer.
 Yes, this garden is in Edmonton. Hockey-town.
A Brief History of Community Gardens in Edmonton Edmonton has a century-old history of urban food production. The early settlers to Edmonton had ridiculously productive gardens right on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River that winds through what is now metropolitain Edmonton. These gardens on the "river flats" produced epic heads of cabbage, potatoes, carrots, choy and other staples that were sold at the City Centre farmers' market. And the Canadian National Railway station, where new immigrants would arrive, had demonstration gardens right at the stops, so that people had a visual dictionary of what types of food they could grow. (This was a very clever system because it didn't rely on literacy skills, and it eliminated the need for multiple translations.) "Vacant Lot" gardening arose during the First World War. It even had a catchy slogan: Conscript the Garden. This patriotic-tinged gardening movement carried through the Second World War where Victory Gardens were the trend. But then Edmonton "modernized" in the 1950s and urban food production steadily declined until just a few urban community gardens were left in the early 1990s. That said, neighbourhoods like the one I grew up in had usually a few fantastic, manicured, backyard veggie patches and orchards. These pockets of resistence however, were often met with racial prejudice, because it was seen as an act of desperation, backwardness and economic necessity to "have" to grow one's own food rather than get it from the modern marvel of the supermarket. Oh how things have changed. In the early 1990s, the city turned a corner. Interest in community gardens re-emerged, and luckily the combination of skilled food growers and forward-thinking municipal programs, made starting a community garden relatively easy. There are now 66 community gardens in Edmonton, and five more in the surrounding area according to the Edmonton Community Gardens Network. (The Edmonton Community Garden site has some interesting statistical information about the gender mix, the crop mix and other information.) Edmonton has the second most community gardens in Canada, after Montreal. But other cities are coming on strong, so this fact might change year-to-year. You're right. This was just Part 1. I'll blog about my visit to another downtown community garden in Edmonton, plus the best kept stash for free herbs and such in downtown Edmonton, a private garden and boulevard garden that a homeowner plants specifically for passers-by! To check out other urban ag stories from my travels, stop by my foodgirl.ca website and say 'hi.' |
