City gardens keep sprouting up in Vancouver

Sara Mullin waters the vegetable garden she and her fellow tenants at a Quebec Street apartment building set up in the rear parking lot — despite the protestations of their landlord.
Photo by Jessica Barrett

Renters and condo dwellers also want to be city farmers

By Jessica Barrett
West Ender – WE
09/01/2010

Excerpts:

I can’t help but laugh watching Sara Mullin water her crop of just-planted winter vegetables — beets, parsnips, and kale — in the parking-lot-turned-garden behind her Quebec Street apartment building, Quebec Mansions. Garden hose in one hand, iPhone in the other, the ringletted, Western-shirt-wearing 27-year-old sprays her plants to an indie-rock soundtrack, only it isn’t a recorded accompaniment — the local band Bend Sinister is practicing in one of the building’s suites.

It’s this classic East Van hipster cliché that makes me laugh, but I have to admit: I’m envious.

…

But the exploding interest in urban agriculture is spurring change, says Levenston. City planners are starting to factor food security into Vancouver’s future, which will result, hopefully, in more public space eventually being put aside for gardens.

In the meantime, however, devotees of urban agriculture will have to get creative, like the Quebec Mansions crew, who defied their landlord’s disapproval to get their garden growing.

Levenston says renters should look at the available land on their properties and make the case to landlords that creating gardening spaces could help attract and retain a higher calibre of tenant, as well as benefit the wider community.

Read the complete article here.