Guest post by Emily
This past summer my roommates and I took advantage of the large balcony off of my room in a house on Lansdowne Ave. and decided to experiment with a pretty significant potted garden. I put a hold on a copy of Gayla Trail’s You Grow, Girl at the library and patiently waited a long time for it to come in (Gayla Trail, resident gardening blogger extraordinaire is,
not surprisingly, extremely popular amongst other Toronto Public Library users). I read the book back to front - because it was a good book – but also because I was terrified of screwing up the garden somehow. I don’t have much gardening experience under my belt and not being able to coax bright orange flowers to come out of the wrinkly nasturtium seeds I had bought at the Dufferin Grove Market seemed entirely possible. Fortunately, everything I planted eventually sprouted and lasted through the whole season bearing as they should, except for a few herbs and strawberry plants we picked up from the grocery store instead of growing from seed. In fact, bringing the balcony garden to life was so easy – and exciting – that it just made me lament. Oh, the things I would’ve planted if only I’d known!
not surprisingly, extremely popular amongst other Toronto Public Library users). I read the book back to front - because it was a good book – but also because I was terrified of screwing up the garden somehow. I don’t have much gardening experience under my belt and not being able to coax bright orange flowers to come out of the wrinkly nasturtium seeds I had bought at the Dufferin Grove Market seemed entirely possible. Fortunately, everything I planted eventually sprouted and lasted through the whole season bearing as they should, except for a few herbs and strawberry plants we picked up from the grocery store instead of growing from seed. In fact, bringing the balcony garden to life was so easy – and exciting – that it just made me lament. Oh, the things I would’ve planted if only I’d known!
Come mid-summer I was jonesing for some plants that required a little more of my attention so I decided to see if there were any WWOOFing-like volunteer opportunities available in Toronto where I could get my hands dirty and learn more about urban gardening. And that’s how I found out about FoodCycles! FoodCycles is a not-for-profit city farm on the outskirts of Downsview Park, at the corner of Sheppard and Keele. Their mission is to create a space where Torontonians can come together to grow, learn about and get excited about food.
Successful initiatives with similar sounding intentions have been established in Toronto before; The Stop Community Food Centre started out as one of Canada’s first food banks and has grown into a large non-profit with a slew of interesting programs aimed at engaging the community around food, including an 8000 square-foot community garden at Earlscourt Park and a greenhouse at The Green Barn in the Artscape Wychwood Barns, not to mention the extensive network of community gardens connected through the TCGN. But FoodCycles is a little different. It was started by a group of community gardeners in 2007 unsatisfied with the newly implemented Green Bin program in GTA. It didn’t seem able to adequately provide compost necessary to maintain rich, healthy soil needed to support gardens in the city. So, they started out as a simple soil co-operative where people would have access to healthy, virile black soil. They were later inspired by Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s Growing Power at a conference in 2008 and expanded their vision to play a larger role in the urban growers movement. They started out by building three greenhouses at the corner of Keele and Sheppard, setting up one as the ‘worm bank’, a large vermi-composting centre where food waste gets turned into healthy black soil chock full of worm castings, one of nature’s best fertilizers. This past summer in front of the greenhouses they planted a one-acre garden full of all varieties of fruits, herbs and vegetables. With this space, FoodCycles wants to ‘reach and teach’ people in the city about growing good chemical free food and to provide employable skills and hands on training to youth in their community, not to mention nurturing urban agriculture in Toronto by improving access to healthy soil.
When I found them on the internet FoodCycles was right in the middle of harvest and eager for volunteers. Board member and project manager Sunny Lam enthusiastically greeted me by name as I rather cautiously (I was a little nervous, I have to admit) came in the back entrance of one of their greenhouses that first time. He introduced me to the garden coordinator Ashlee Cooper who set me up with a spade and some gloves and had me weeding some kind of chard within minutes of arriving. Because it was their first season with the garden, there were huge amounts of fresh produce that needed homes, so us volunteers got sent home with a healthy amount of whatever we had been harvesting – for me that ended up being two kinds of radishes, dinosaur kale, huge and delicious heads of bok choy, cucumbers, basil, yum yum yum!
I managed to make it back to the farm three or four times before my harvest season ended a little early, something I was sad to see happen because I was having an AWESOME time with FoodCycles. Though the journey was a little long, it’s not hard to get there – the Keele bus leaves from Keele station frequently and will take you all the way to the corner of the park with not too much delay. I’m not entirely sure what they’ve got on the agenda for the coming growing season, though they’ve been keeping active during the winter having recently organized the Toronto screening of DIRT! the movie and running a composting seminar alongside Green Thumbs Growing Kids coming up on February 27.
Judging from their website it looks like they’ve been busy though; they’ll be officially set up as a city CSA this summer and fall - can you get more local than that?! Given what I saw this year, I expect it will be diverse and delicious, full of varieties of tomatoes, radishes, brassicas and edible nightshades. But even more exciting is that they are getting the ball rolling to be able to diversify the project by beginning to raise bees with a unique Toronto flavour thanks to the diversity in plants around the city and tilapia raised on plants grown at the farm, with all fish waste going back to the earth so nothing is wasted (!!). Last summer they were able to supply to great Toronto eateries, Calico and Hot Yam, with produce and I bet they’ll be adding more in the coming year.
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