Backyard farming in the Greater Toronto Area

Erica Lemieux turns the soil in a garden she is creating in a neighbour’s backyard. The garden is one of eight she has obtained access to by handing out flyers in her neighbourhood (High Park and Parkdale). Photo by Tara Walton, Toronto Star.

“I want to show urban farming can be a for-profit business.”

By Catherine Porter
Toronto Star
Apr 6, 2011

Excerpt:

Erica Lemieux’s farm is in a High Park backyard. Eight of them, to be precise. Cobbled together, that makes for a quarter-acre.

“The backyards here are just asking to be farmed,” she says, leading me around to the back of a giant house on High Park Ave. and down its long yard, where she is double-digging beds for her first crop of vegetables.

That’s right, crop. Lemieux isn’t a gardener, she’s an urban farmer. Starting next month, she’ll be delivering her Easter egg radishes and sugar snap peas to west end restaurants and the Sorauren Farmers’ Market near Dundas W. and Lansdowne Ave.

In fact, she’ll be one of three Toronto farmers selling vegetables at the Monday afternoon market this season. Add to that two Brampton farmers and the group from Woodbridge, and almost half the produce will come from the Greater Toronto Area.

“We were thinking about having a grown-in-Toronto table,” says market manager Ayal Dinner. “Now, it’s going to be more of a grown-in-Toronto section.”

Read the complete article here.