ILLUSTRATION BY SANDI FALCONER
Shannon Moneo is a freelance journalist based on Vancouver Island.
When I got my small plot in 2013, the 2.5-acre community garden near Victoria was a funky, homey place where gardeners traded tips about growing corn or beans. I felt fulfilled as I worked in the fresh air, happily amazed that my beets were up, disappointed that slugs ate my cucumbers and feeling the burn from pulling weeds. The results were erratic, but as the season ended, my fellow gardeners and I were often awarded with harvests of multiple zucchinis, yummy fingerling potatoes and impossibly fresh tomatoes.
But during the pandemic, the garden started to change. A rush of new gardeners got plots, and they don’t seem to have the same priorities as us folks who’ve been here for a while. Showpiece gardens, often focused on aesthetics, began to surface. I often wonder what my Grandma Mary, who fed her family with produce from her substantial garden, would have thought of it all.
My grandma grew for practical reasons and her growing space was many times larger than most plots at the community garden, so you’d figure the community gardeners would want to maximize their planting. Instead, there are plots with patio tables and chairs, tiki lights, wide paths that take up 50 per cent of the space, greenhouses used to store gardening items. The garden has a covered seating area with a fire pit and cob oven, so there’s already lots of room for socializing. One gardener installed a small pond with a solar-powered motor. Hot peppers, asparagus, fig trees, artichokes, tayberries, black currants and kohlrabi are grown on a small scale. Being located in Canada’s longest growing region, with about 250 frost-free days, allows for privileged experimentation.
So yes, in the middle of summer, the garden is undeniably beautiful, with towering sunflowers, trailing deep purple clematis, stately pink lupines. The designer gardens, often photographed for social-media consumption, feature perfect, weedless rows. Red, yellow and pink-stalked Swiss chard, purple-blossomed giant chives, aromatic basil bushes, and succulent-looking, chocolate-coloured heritage tomatoes punctuate the space. It all makes you want to toss a salad.
I have nothing against the production of beauty and, indeed, some of the plots are impressive displays of creativity and skill. But I can’t help but wonder if these gardeners have lost touch with the meaning of growing food. Influenced by Instagram, TikTok and HGTV, they seem more concerned with how their plots look than what they can produce. It’s keeping up with the Joneses, not connecting with the Earth. My community garden is growing into a curated, gentrified showpiece meant to impress.
Many of the new plots have raised beds, with fences erected around them. Sure, there have been infrequent visits by rabbits from time to time, but the fencing seems unnecessarily territorial. I’ve never had a fence and my worst predator all these years has been slugs. An unfortunate aspect of the creeping fencing is that as more plots are fenced, when hungry varmints invade, they’ll inevitably head to easily accessed unfenced areas.
In these inflationary times, I believe a better focus for community gardens should be producing food, which in most cases was the reason for their creation. In my case, I pay $70 a year for my roughly 18-square-metre plot. Tools, water, compost, wood chips and manure are all supplied. My return on investment is great, given that my organic garlic crop alone would be worth over $200. If I have to spend $200 or more on fencing material, the garden’s appeal diminishes.
The organizers of my garden acknowledge that food production is important, as they brought in a rule recently stating that by the end of May, 70 per cent of each plot must be growing food, with no weeds going to seed. I’m not sure how that’s measured, but I’d guess that at least 30 per cent to 40 per cent of the plots are failing to reach these goals. From previous discussions with past council members, I know it’s difficult to enforce the rules, and board members are often reticent to take on the role of green space dictator. On the flip side, there is food waste. A lot of produce is not picked: Strawberries rot on the vine, lettuce and kale go to seed, tomatoes drop and mould, lovely rhubarb goes unharvested.
Everything was harvested at my Grandma Mary Ogibowski’s garden in Elphinstone, Man. She cultivated laissez faire, not bourgeois, crops. One plot had hearty perennials, such as poppies, yarrow, phlox and daisies. Alongside them, a roughly 5-by-7 metre area grew enough raspberries and strawberries to fill dozens of pint-sized jars of preserved fruit and jam.
Her vegetable garden was, to my preteen eyes, immense, probably about 15-by-10-metres, all watered by hand from rain barrels. She had no running water or bathroom facilities in her house, and sometimes I would have to walk down a hill, about one kilometre to the community water pump, to fill buckets, which I carried back to her small house.
True to her Polish roots, Grandma Mary grew potatoes, onions, carrots, garlic, beets – crops that would keep in her dirt basement. There were also lesser amounts of cucumbers, cabbage, tomatoes and lettuce. It was a garden of sustaining peasant food, not Epicurean delights.
Grandma Mary tended her piece of earth into her 80s. Not able to read or write, she based her gardening on experience, moon cycles, weather – not iPhone apps, influencers or books. Her gardening attire was practical Fortrel pants, which she sewed, and well-worn men’s workboots, not designer outdoorwear.
There are few photographs of her garden, which today no longer exists. Her house was torn down, her gardens, plowed under. Meanwhile, my community garden is thriving. There’s a long waiting list for plots and a second community garden is being considered.
If Grandma Mary saw my community garden today, I’m pretty sure she would shake her head over the triumph of aesthetics over practicality. Why haven’t they used all the space to grow food, she would ask? Why do they need so many things to grow vegetables? Why does everything have to be so perfect?
But she gardened in a time when eating exotic foods wasn’t a thought, when memories of the Depression were a forever imprint and when feeding social media was unknown.
I will never be as skilled a gardener as my Grandma Mary, nor will I be as showy as some of my garden neighbours, but my maximized garlic harvest will keep me in garlic for a year, and if I’m lucky, my zucchini plants will yield enough that I can share them with not only friends, but the community.