A growing movement in Ottawa

The Children’s Garden in Robert Leggett Park won a national urban design award last year. Photograph by: Wayne Cuddington, Ottawa Citizen

The popularity of community gardens hails back to the days when growing your own food was part of everyday life

By Phil Jenkins
Ottawa Citizen
July 5, 2010

Excerpt:

There are now almost 30 community gardens quilted across the city. The plots thicken, as it were, and each year the requests to City Hall propagate for startup training and financing. The gardens have been lined up in one row called the Community Garden Network, and that in turn is planted within the Just Food program (nice double entendre that), locatable on your computers and there they are listed and addressed, should you wish to visit a bed near you or contact them. In 2008, the city upped the money it had voted for community gardens from $5,000 to $80,000, seed money for new gardens, workshops, a co-ordinator and some maintenance.

Some of the gardens bear geographic names — Carlington, Rochester Heights, Nanny Goat Hill, West Barrhaven — while others lean towards the poetic; there’s a Friendship Garden on Donald, a Sweet Willow on Rochester and a Thyme-less on its way on Arrowsmith. Operation Come Home has one going, too, which is a terrific idea.

The notion of community gardens inside the city walls hails back to the days when growing your own food was part of everyday life. In the time before refrigeration, a city was dependent on the farmers around it to feed it and, indeed, that limited the size to which a city could grow. The mega-cities of today are only possible because refrigerated ships (since around 1910) bring food from all over to fill supermarket shelves with stuffs we can cart home to our own fridges to await consumption. In the process, the food became suspiciously processed, and, like a field of sunflowers turning towards the sun, there are many in the city now who want the taste of chemical-free food in their mouths and enjoy coming together to make it happen. There are plenty of spaces left around town where a garden could go; on the roof of the Rideau Centre would work, and maybe in those 12 surplus acres recently discovered at Lansdowne Park.

See the complete article here.