Early on a Saturday morning, the buzz of the crowd at the St-Thomas Anglican Church outdoor bazaar barely registers at the back of the building, behind the berry hedges.
On a sun-filled patch of land, a half-dozen people are spread out among the vegetable beds, some with children or grandchildren in tow, more arriving every few minutes for their gardening session. One mother of two has brought bags of vegetable scraps and is filling up compost bins. Another gardener shows her grandson how to pull out the weakest of the carrot seedlings in order to improve the eventual harvest.
The beds of this Action Communiterre collective garden in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce are already yielding lettuce, Swiss chard, peas, nasturtiums and a variety of herbs, along with raspberries from the bushes that form a pollinating garden around the edges of the space. The runner beans are climbing above the carrots, marigolds grow alongside eggplant, and peppers and tomatoes are being tied to strings attached to the wood frames that support them.
Ralph Pettofrezza, who has been participating since the garden started five years ago, helped build those frames, along with many of the raised beds and trellises. He began gardening here because he felt that his Italian father was using too many chemicals on his own garden. “I was interested in organic food. Plus I like fixing stuff, and all the variety,” he says.
Arpie Boudakian waters tomato plants at Action Communiterre’s St-Thomas collective garden in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. Agricultural initiatives are on the rise across the city.
Like the majority of Montreal’s urban gardens, the produce from these collective gardens are grown without use of chemical pesticides or fertilizers. The object is to give city dwellers access to good, healthy food, says Action Communiterre director Julia Girard.
The garden holds two weekly sessions, always with a gardening animator who explains the chores for the day, and produces about two tonnes of food annually — “and we’re not counting all the food that is eaten as we garden!” Girard says. The harvest is shared by the gardeners, with a portion donated to the N.D.G. Food Depot.
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Scenes likes these are growing increasingly common all over the city, as Montrealers embrace the idea of sustainable living. Community gardens are thriving, and boroughs have proven enthusiastic supporters of initiatives such as the collective gardens in N.D.G. and sidewalk vegetable boxes in Villeray.
But as it expands, urban agriculture must walk a fine line. In densely populated neighbourhoods, there are many factors to consider.
In N.D.G., for example, a sidewalk gardening project was scuttled after a condo owner claimed that the vegetable beds deterred renters from the ground floor space he owns. A proposal to house chickens in community gardens in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve has started this month, but the SPCA is worried that these animals will be neglected or abandoned in their urban setting. A plan to have sheep mow public parks in Rosemont-Petite-Patrie, proposed as an educational and sustainable project, got the green light from the borough — but the group promoting Biquette à Montréal couldn’t secure the funding from the Union des producteurs agricoles and other partners, so the project has been postponed.
According to Agriculture Montreal — a partnership that includes UQAM’s Urban Agriculture Laboratory (AU/LAB) — there are 128 hectares of Montreal land being used for urban agriculture initiatives, with the participation of 42 per cent of Montrealers. These projects vary from growing hops for the beer that will mark the city’s 375th anniversary to fruit picking from backyard fruit trees, community gardens where everyone has their own plot, collective gardens like St-Thomas where labour and produce are shared by many, or sidewalk gardens where produce can be taken freely by passersby.
Quebec City boasts an expansive and impressive series of gardens in front of the National Assembly, including an alley of herbs, kitchen gardens, gardens of fruit bushes, medicinal plants and masses of edible flowers. This three-year-old venture, an urban agriculture initiative meant to focus on crops typically grown in this province, was designed in collaboration with Laval University and les Urbainculteurs, who are also responsible for Quebec City’s recent “urban honey” project, installing rooftop hives.
Urban gardening has made a comeback, says Jean-Philippe Vermette, co-founder of the AU/LAB and its urban agriculture summer school. “(Montreal was) in the ’70s a pioneer in urban agriculture with our community gardens. We had the largest in North America; other cities were looking at our program.”
Interest in urban agriculture then plateaued for 30 years, Vermette said, but has swelled in the last decade. “Many see it as a social and political movement, thinking about how we develop and take care of food assets.”
If everyone grew vegetables their garden, do you know how much food that would be?
Take Jamie Klinger’s Grass to Gardens Project in the Plateau, started this year with a grant from the Centre d’écologie urbaine de Montréal. “I’ve been working on a project called JoatU, or Jack of all Trades Universe, a trade/barter exchange system, an alternative economic system that gets people to do things for the community and rewards them for community activities,” says Klinger, who has degrees in marketing and philosophy. He went door to door asking neighbours if he could use their front yards to grow vegetables for them and to share with others.
He and others built borders out of pallets in a six-by-three-foot space and used self-watering containers in other spaces, now filled with about 110 plants including squash, lettuce, peppers, broccoli and tomatoes.
“Those people who weren’t interested wished me luck,” say Klinger, who enlisted the advice of a horticulturalist. “And we have volunteers who help out.”
People help maintain the plants on their property by picking out the weeds, and take something for their efforts, says Klinger.
“The goal is to inspire other people to do the same thing,” he says. “It’s beautiful and really simple and not incredibly costly. If everyone grew vegetables their garden, do you know how much food that would be?”
Now in its second year, a Villeray street garden started by a group of volunteers has solved the problem of how to interest passersby. This mini-project was started by a group of avid gardeners when the borough wanted to enlarge the sidewalks at the intersection of de Castelnau and Drolet Sts. for the security of pedestrians. “So instead of making it asphalt, we asked if we could put some plants the grow food,” says organizer Sophie Paradis.
Sophie Paradis, a volunteer with Mange-Trottoir, in the vegetable garden that the community group built on a Villeray street corner.
The result is Le Mange-Trottoir, container gardens built on three street corners, full of cucumbers, herbs, eggplant and many, many tomatoes. “We have identification for each plant, indicating how to cook it and how to harvest it,” says Paradis. “We really need it this year with our bok choy — nobody knows how to harvest a bok choy!”
The neighbourhood response has been terrific, she says, and organizers are now talking to the city about using this as a model for other projects, working with the borough’s sustainable development office and director of public works. “It has changed the dynamic, there’s now a real human scale to the street. People are so proud of it; they stop and thank us.”
And while theft of plants was an initial worry, residents and business owners have been keeping an eye out.
“People are just so happy to have that beautiful garden open for them,” Paradis says. “They’re really respectful.”
A more expansive yet very specialized urban garden initiative started as a pilot in 2011, a project of longtime community leader Santropol Roulant. Through a team of volunteers, the collective Les Fruits Défendus — meaning “forbidden fruit” — harvests unused fruit from backyards in the Plateau, Mile-End, Rosemont, Villeray and N.D.G.
Volunteers gathered 266 pounds of fruit in 2011, says Nazmus Syed, a recent Concordia graduate in environmental science and sustainability, and by 2013 had picked 5,600 pounds. “Even in 2014, not a good year due to weather, we got around 3,000 pounds,” he says. “And this year is shaping up; we’ve started picking Saskatoon berries and cherries. At this point, we’re picking 100 trees from about 90 homeowners: pears, apples, sour apples, grapes, plums.”
The fruit is usually found, he says, when a homeowner calls to say, “I have a cherry tree, would you like to pick it?” Team members head out on bikes, folding ladder stashed in their homemade bicycle trailer.
Caroline Baab is a volunteer with Les Fruits Défendus, which harvests unused fruit from Montrealers’ backyards.
“The homeowner gets one-third, one-third goes to the volunteer and the final third to either the Food Depot or Santropol Roulant’s Meals on Wheels,” Syed says. “Depending on the fruit, they can be transformed into jams and sauces.”
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But as the number of agricultural initiatives in this city grows, so can the obstacles.
At the new Westhaven Communiterre garden, in an area on the western edge of N.D.G., vegetables have been taken, whole plants pulled from the earth.
Perhaps people don’t understand that anyone can join a collective garden, Girard says, plus it’s hard to find good food that’s affordable.
“In the St-Thomas garden,” she said, “the church keeps us safe, though at other places we have more struggles, besides losing our plants.”
At another Communiterre garden at St-Raymond School, Girard said, “they built a parking lot over one of over gardens; I would say school administrators don’t understand, even though we offer workshops to schools.”
In N. D. G, a garden in front of a condo building that had seemed so promising to community groups and residents has been destroyed in a dispute.
Lisa Charbel, who founded Jardins sans frontières/Gardens without borders with her husband Joey Khoury three years ago, helped design the garden, on Sherbrooke St. near Draper Ave. She specializes in community gardening projects and offering homesteading workshops for backyard spaces, as well as creating entrepreneurship conferences focusing on social economy.
“We collaborate with a lot of people, here and all over the world,” says Charbel.
The destruction of the garden was an even more devastating blow those who planted it, members of Incredible Edibles, an offshoot of Transition N.D.G., a volunteer group that advocates for social change through community initiatives. “We’re financed through volunteers, people donating seeds and plants,” organizer Jane Barr says.
Last year, Incredible Edibles offered to transform three unused tracts of land in front of the condo building, with the “wholehearted support” of the condo board. “They paid for the soil and the wooden perimeter for those three garden spaces,” Barr says. “They’re not gardeners themselves, so they were thrilled that we came along.”
After workshops with Gardens without Borders, volunteers designed an urban garden on permaculture principles — a sustainable agriculture practice based on patterns in nature — planting vegetables on different levels using different types of soil: lettuces under tomatoes under sunflowers.
Garden animator Vera Martynkiw helps Aisha Alvarez measure some of the edible flowers she picked at the St-Thomas collective garden in N.D.G., which organizes kid-friendly activities.
Volunteers helped plant three themed gardens: a vegetable garden with kale, bush beans, tomatoes and herbs; a children’s garden, planted by children last June with strawberries, baby cucumbers and cherry tomatoes, and a teepee in which they could sit, surrounded by pole beans. In the third one, they made a pollinator garden full of perennial flowers and herbs to make herbal teas: anise hyssop, lemon balm, mint some medicinal herbs, nettle, borage, lovage, sorrel plants.
“I’d go to water that garden of an evening, people would stop, ask what we’re doing and say how beautiful it looks,” Barr says. “The daycare across the road would bring the little children to walk along the paths. People would eat from the garden.”
Despite last summer’s success, things changed this spring when one of the condo owners informed the condo board that he considered the gardens illegal and proceeded to destroy plantings and turn off the water. He said the gardens are detrimental to the ground floor space he owns, empty since the building was constructed. The police declared it a civil matter.
Reached for comment, condo owner Fred Jarrah said there is a bylaw that states you can’t grow vegetables on the sidewalk within 24 to 30 feet of a building. “My customers are not interested in seeing this (garden) in front of my place,” he said. “I have a big garden on my roof where I grow a lot of vegetables.”
Lawyer Michael Simkin, who is advising the condo association, says, his clients are “trying to evaluate how we’re going to bring (Jarrah) back to the table. But we want to bring back the garden; we want to repair the damage that was done and heal the situation.”
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Despite some setbacks, the future looks bright for Montreal urban agriculture movement.
Urban gardens continue to grow with many hundreds of community garden plots, gardens in schools and on university campuses. Even small players like Gardens Without Borders are growing, offering “conscious travelling” events taking Quebecers of all age groups to plant gardens and practise permaculture in Senegal, Lebanon and Ecuador.
And Incredible Edibles has had success with other projects like stand-alone planters, working with merchants who agree to have them placed outside their stores with edibles growing in them, says Barr.
“The city of Montreal actually lent us nine of their large cement planters on Somerled starting at Cavendish so we could plant edibles this year. All of this is free food for anyone passing by who wishes to snip a herb, pluck a tomato.”
Keep in mind that you’ll never be able to feed a whole city with urban gardening, Barr says. “But this is about doing something. What are we going to do when we can’t import food, or have another ice storm or climate-related event? We’re going to be on our own, so let’s get together and take care of ourselves.
“And it’s not gloom and doom; it’s like the Victory Gardens during the war. It gives you a good feeling that you can feed yourself, a new kind of homesteading movement that can happen in your own backyard.”