The Walleye Magazine

Growing Food, Growing Connections

Taking a Look at Life in a Community Garden

By Kim McGibbon and Marlene Wandel

There’s more to a garden than just dirt, and community gardens grow more than just food. They serve as a gathering space for plants and people alike. In 2021, 18 community gardens spread across the city, providing 340 individual beds. The Shelter House garden is a great example of a place where folks work together to grow food that can then be shared with the kitchen for daily meals.

Roots to Harvest, a notfor-profit in Thunder Bay, hosts two large community gardens at Volunteer Pool and Lillie Street. This year there are 104 garden plots, including 16 raised beds built by the carpenters’ union with funding from the Fort William Rotary Club for those with mobility challenges. With water on site and full sunshine, these gardens provide growing spaces for keen and new gardeners just waiting to get their hands dirty. Gardens such as these create spaces where people gather together and learn from one another.

"I love community gardening! It's so rewarding to spend time in the garden and collaborate with other community members over how to best tend to our veggies,” says Kelly Henderson, Volunteer Pool gardener. “I've learned so much—sometimes from people who are just out for a walk and have a garden at their house. I also love gardening as an act of resistance. With so many big crises in the world, it is wonderful to know I am doing one small thing that contributes to health and well-being.”

Like any community, the gardens are diverse. The patchwork of growing spaces reflects the diversity of the growers; flowers and vegetables share these spots gracefully, while weeds and potato bugs try to wade into the fray. Morning or night, there’s always someone around, whether another gardener making trips with the watering can and happy to swap stories, or the hum of the bees visiting the flowers. On weekdays, the Roots crew adds a social and productive buzz as they plant, weed, harvest, and sell the vegetables that emerge from the urban farm adjacent to the community garden. Community gardening is social; it’s not uncommon to make a friend over a shared love of beans, curiosity about an unfamiliar variety of tomato, or just shared experiences.

The garden space and experience are shared across generations—it’s not uncommon for families to share a garden space, be it parents and children, grandson and grandmother, or husbands and wives. One gardener has been growing food at the Volunteer Pool garden with her son since the very beginning.

“I have lived in the neighbourhood for 27 years, and when Roots was first interested in starting the garden, I thought it was such a positive thing for the neighbourhood and it has brought a lot of people together,” says J.S.,

a community gardener. “It is satisfying—not just the garden but the people, watching the youth, giving them this chance to work there. I really relate to the kids and their struggles after having my own challenge with depression. I also liked meeting the different gardeners from various cultures. It’s something we all know how to do—put seeds in the dirt.”

For many, community gardening goes beyond just the people. “The Roots community garden is an idyllic opportunity for my little girls and I to use our hands to work, create, and grow together out in the open fresh air and under the warm summer sun. They also love the bunnies. A lot,” says Jeannie Dubois, Volunteer Pool gardener.

The benefits of gardening are many, and not just the produce—learning about growing food and how to combat garden pests, the physical and mental health boosts of exercising in the sunshine, and finding connections to like-minded growers are all a bonus.

To find out more about Roots to Harvest visit rootstoharvest.org.

“I love community gardening! It's so rewarding to spend time in the garden and collaborate with other community members over how to best tend to our veggies.”

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2022-05-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-05-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

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