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Benjamin Bouwman of Willoughby Church is looking for people in the Willoughby area that would like to be part of a Community Community Garden Organizing Committee.

Permission from the church has been granted to use their empty lot, so there is a blank state to work with. Exciting Opportunity!

Find his Inquiry Posting on our Community Garden Forum
http://www.arocha.ca/community-garden-forum/the-community-garden-network-forum-group1/starting-up-a-community-garden-forum1/willoughby-community-garden-thread24.0/

Let’s work together to grow food!

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Interested in starting a community garden this year? Learn about how your garden will address food insecurity in our city. Registration Form here.

Our ‘The Plot Thickens’ Community Gardening Workshop will give you a good start! It will be given by A Rocha Canada’s experienced gardening friends, partners and trained community organizers. Vancouver ‘Plot Thickens’ Poster, May 5th 2012

Our workshop covers: gathering your garden team, generating excitement about a community project, managing plots, gardening how-tos, facing challenges and more. Participants will receive a community gardening manual, monthly gardening emails, an online space to connect and a webpage for profiling your new community garden. Our goal is to partner with you and your Christian community as you develop a garden to support local food production and facilitate community outreach.

Organizational Partner:

City Gate Leadership Forum as the main Coordinator of the Christian Food Security Network in Metro Vancouver wants to help you connect your garden to local organizations who could benefit from sharing your produce harvests.

City Gate Leadership Forum exists to inform, equip, and coordinate organizations and leaders for the spiritual and social renewal of Metro Vancouver, envisioning a future where the church is a valued leader in fostering vibrant, sustainable cities.

Contact:  T 604 484 8629, office@cglf.ca

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- Sandy and Stacey from Peace Portal Alliance Church

For 2 years, a few of us dreamed about a vegetable garden on our church’s campus—after the 2-day seminar hosted at A Rocha called ‘The Plot Thickens,” we felt equipped and inspired to break ground.

Supplied with a generous donation of plants and seeds from local nursery West Coast Gardens, Shaun Gaynor, Stacy Dryfhout, Kim Martin, and Sandy Colero, together with a handful of other young adults at Peace Portal Alliance, built three experimental garden beds on June 1st in order to grow food for the local food bank.

The combination of tending the garden and working together has turned out to be a highlight of the summer for many of us—as the vegetables have grown and flourished, so have our friendships. Thus far, the Sources Food Bank in South Surrey has also been very ecstatic about our lettuce, spinach, onions, radishes, and cucumbers, treating these organic veggies like gold. And there’s so much more to come!

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A GROWING MISSION:  THE SAANICH COMMUNITY FOOD BANK GARDEN

Established in 2007, the Saanich Community Food Bank Garden is a practical project that provides fresh, nutritious food to the Mustard Seed Food Bank in Victoria BC.  The idea to plant a garden arose from a desire to be good stewards of the Saanich Community (Mennonite Brethern) Churchproperty, to create a place to learn about sustainable food production, and to provide people with a practical way to help others in need.

Each year about 20 types of vegetables, fruits, and herbs are harvested, including carrots, beans, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, asparagus, rhubarb, squashes, beets, turnips, oregano, parsley, chives, grapes and apples.

Relationships are nurtured as people labour together, caring for both people and plants.  The garden is tended entirely by volunteers who decide what, where, when and how to plant.  Volunteers come from our church and the broader community.  Consultant expertise comes from garden volunteers and ‘friends of the garden’.

Since its inception, the garden has produced thousands of pounds of produce that are delivered to the Mustard Seed Food Bank in Victoria weekly or biweekly from May to October.  Saanich Community Church is one of the few places that donates fresh produce to the food bank.  The nutritious produce goes into the hands of needy folks as soon as it is received at the food bank.

New volunteers are always welcome.  For more information, please contact the church office (250-479-0410) or email SaanichFoodBankGarden(at)gmail(dot)com.

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The GCG is a joint project between the PG Christian Reformed Church, and the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC), and the Prince George Public Interest Research Group (PG PIRG). The vision of this project is to grow a strong community–a place where people depend upon each other and work together to build strong values, where all community members are appreciated and supported (particularly the poor and underprivileged), and where local environments are used carefully and thoughtfully to support long-term sustainability.

Strong communities are places where people depend upon each other and work together to build strong values, where all community members are appreciated and supported (particularly the poor and underprivileged, and where local environments are used carefully and thoughtfully to support long-term sustainability.  The Prince George “Growing Community” Gardens (GCG) seeks to promote the development of these community values through three primary outreaches:

The GCG seeks to bring together broad and diverse sectors of the Prince George community. Activities will be intentionally directed toward breaking down stereotypes among rich/poor, educated/less educated, aboriginal/non-aboriginal, faith based/non-faith based, young/old, and other cultural divides that hinder strong community from developing.  This outreach (through working, learning and celebrating together) will seek to create inter-dependencies through participation in the GCG based upon common interest of building strong community supporting sustainable local food production.

The GCG will be a place of community learning through research and education addressing questions of appropriate and sustainable food production, nutrition, and healthy living within a community context. Research will focus on “green”, low-tech, accessible gardening practices (for general application) and enhancing wellness through good nutrition, particularly for low-income and underprivileged residents.  Workshops and practical demonstrations can be conducted on nutrition, cold-climate gardening, composting, preparation of food, and preserving nutritious food.

The GCG will be a place of community outreach and support to low-income and underprivileged members of the Prince George community.  Harvests from the research / demonstration gardens will be donated to community food banks and local residents.  About 1⁄2 of the total garden plots will be given to community residents, with priority given to low-income and underprivileged residents.  GCG volunteers will come alongside low-income and underprivileged residents to help empower them to become more active and healthy members of the community through taking more control of their food supply.

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Kingfisher Farm’s Community Shared Agriculture program in South Surrey produces over 8,000 pounds of organically-grown vegetables annually, with a portion going to low income families. Local food production is not only essential in building balanced, sustainable communities, but is also crucial for ensuring local food security and helping to alleviate poverty.

 

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The garden at West Point was a fairly small project in terms of the people involved, and was basically managed by one lone gardener. However, many more people benefitted from the vegetables and fruits harvested. The church hopes to get more people participating this year, and, hopefully make it more of a church and community garden.

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For several years, Grandview Calvary Baptist Church in East Vancouver owned a small rental house adjacent to the church parking lot. The house had fallen into disrepair and was eventually demolished to make way for new social housing. Because the social housing project would take several years to develop, the church asked church member and gardener Ute Warkentin in the summer of 2006 to turn the lot into an interim garden. Along with a group of interns from a local ministry, Ute transformed the abandoned lot into a delightful garden. Soil was donated from the city and from a construction contractor. Railroad ties were scavenged from the renovation of a neighborhood park to make beds and terraces. A gardening non-profit donated a cedar tool shed. A rusty bed frame and abandoned door were turned into a picnic table. The initial vision was to grow food in this lot for Out of the Cold, the church’s Thursday night meal for homeless neighbors.

As the group of ministry interns ended their term, Ute invited other gardeners from the church to take over the care of the garden. The neighbors living nearest to the garden were the first to tend the plots, with interest rippling out beyond the immediate locale. Interested neighbors (both within and without the church community) were given a plot to grow food for their own households. The organization of the community garden evolved slowly and relationally: the only business meeting being an early spring seed-swap and workdays were voluntarily well attended. During the seed-swap in the spring of 2009, someone suggested a weekly garden picnic as a good form of involving more folks in the garden and of building community. Through the summer, we met in the garden on Wednesday evenings to share meals, often prepared with produce from our plots. Robert would bring a salad. Carina and Jess would often bake bread. Carsten would bring a few bottles of his home-brewed beer. Several of our homeless friends would occasionally stop by to join us for the meal.

While the community garden is more directed towards small-scale produce for home consumption, we haven’t lost the initial vision to share the gifts of the land with others. Robert Lockridge spent many hours transforming garden areas surrounding the church parking lot into vegetable beds. As part of our Good Friday Stations of the Cross walk, the church community participated in a litany concerning our care for creation which culminated in our planting of potatoes in Robert’s vegetable patches. These potatoes were later harvested by children and adults, washed, roasted, and served for one of the Out of the Cold meals. Robert was also able to grow enough lettuce to provide the salad for the 150 meals served on Thursday nights, for 5 weeks in a row.

The garden has provided the groundwork for good relationships to be built with our neighbors. An older Italian couple who live next to the garden have participated in tending the land, contributing invaluable horticulture advice along with the occasional pan of lasagna. Of the 21 people who have plots in the garden, over 1/3 are not part of the church community and the gardeners range in age from 3 to 70 years old. Many pedestrians stop by to ask about the garden or just to admire the beauty of the transformed lot.

A Few Critical Reflections:

Structure: Our informal organizational structure is an asset in many ways, allowing for more enjoyment of the garden than business meetings. However, this relation-based organization often makes it difficult for new-comers to find out about the garden or how to get involved.

Money: It hasn’t cost us much money to run the community garden. Most of the initial start-up costs were negligible because of the high number of donations Ute was able to procur. We have received a small grants from the Frog Hollow Neighborhood House two years in a row ($500/yr.) which has allowed us to buy a new hose, build an entry trellis, and provide new tools. Our neighbors have donated access to water. Through sharing and searching for freebies, most gardeners can tend their plots for less than $20/yr.

Neighbors: It is important to maintain good relationships with the immediate neighbors of a community garden. Community gardens can attract extra traffic, pests, and debris which can be irritating for neighbors. Our garden has provide for some conflict, but also much goodness in our ongoing attempts to build relationships with our neighbors.

Faith: The Good Friday liturgy and potato planting was very meaningful. Many individuals also make use of the garden for quiet reflection and prayer. Gardening is part of our Christian faith for many reasons: stewardship of Creation, food security for the least, joining in Creation’s praise, living in a rhythm that is prophetically counter to the efficiency-driven pace of society, hospitality to neighbors, providing points of inter-generational connection, etc. I’ve been thinking lately about how growing a garden in the city might be evangelistic. We don’t have any Gospel tracts or church advertisements posted at the garden. I’ve noticed, nonetheless, that people walking by our garden are impressed by a sense of good news. I think they find good news in the fact that people are caring for and making beautiful the plot of land given them (be it ever so small a plot, and so small an effort). And, I think our neighbors find good news in watching a group of people work for the sheer joy of it.

I, at least, sure feel joy as I sit in the garden and sip a cup of coffee after an early morning of planting peas and carrots.

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We’ve got the 16 beds built and most filled with topsoil (ran out of topsoil for the last 2) and put wood chippings down between the plots as paths. I think everyone had a great time and we were all proud of our accomplishment. Do you know of anyone that would be able to come by on a Saturday morning to give a little talk/demo on growing vegetables? We have a number of novice gardeners who would appreciate some tips, I think.

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“We believe the universe and everything in it belongs to God the Creator. God has entrusted the care of the earth to all people, who are responsible for managing its resources. Good stewardship uses the earth’s abundance to meet human need, but resists the unjust exploitation of the earth and its peoples. All God’s gifts are to be received with thanksgiving and used responsibly.” -MB Confession of Faith, Article 15

At Sannich Community Church, we take Creation Care as part of our confession of faith seriously.  Through involvement with A Rocha, we arrange bird-watch hikes, plan nature walks, and work with the municipality in removing invasive weeds from parklands.

We also have a native plant garden at the front of our church property, and a vegetable/fruit garden at the back of our property that produces food from May – October which is donated to the local foodbank, for needy families in Victoria.

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