ADVENTURES IN
URBAN FOOD GROWING
For Michael Levenston, Canada’s unofficial minister of urban agriculture for more than thirty years
Copyright © 2010 by Lorraine Johnson
First U.S. edition 2011
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Greystone Books
An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver BC Canada V5T 4S7
Cataloging data available from Library and Archives Canada ISBN 978-1-55365-519-0 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-55365-628-9 (ebook)
Editing by Susan Folkins
Cover and text design by Naomi MacDougall
Cover city illustration © CSA Snapstock Illustration/Veer
Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens
Text printed on acid-free, FSC-certified paper that is forest friendly
(100% post-consumer recycled paper) and has been processed chlorine free
Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council
for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British
Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada
through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.
Contents
INTRODUCTION: Bringing Dinner Home
1 Sowing the City, Reaping the Benefits
2 Embracing a Food-growing Ethic
4 Harvesting Space
5 Rethinking Convention: Finding Soil and Sites
6 Lessons of Care: Food Gardens as Nurturing Hubs
7 People Power: Growing Together in Community Gardens
8 Rogues on a Mission: Guerrilla Gardening and Foraging
9 What the Cluck?: Backyard Chickens
10 The Edible City
EPILOGUE: Adventures in Possibility
RESOURCES A Selected List of Urban Farms and Edible Demonstration Gardens
A Selected List of Urban Agriculture and Food-related Organizations
A Selected List of Books
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MY NEPHEW CHRISTOPHER, ten at the time, had never seen a real live pea. Or even a recently alive pea. The weird podthing I had in my hand, shelling as we talked, completely mystified him. “What’s that?” he finally asked, with a bit of my-aunt-always-does-strange-stuff in his voice. “It’s a pea!” I exclaimed, not hiding my surprise. (As a non-parent, I didn’t get the memo about feigning nonchalance at questions that shock.) He chewed over my answer for a long time, and then said, full of satisfaction, “Ahh, peas in a pod—now I get it.”
The phrase may have finally made sense to him, but the lesson was incomplete without a taste. “Would you like to try one?” I offered. “Umm, I don’t like peas,” he mumbled, echoing ten-year-old boys everywhere. “Oh come on, just try it,” I said. And so he popped it in his mouth to humor his odd aunt, and as he munched, his face changed from anticipatory yuck to something approaching pleasure. “It’s sweet, not mushy,” he enthused, “not like canned peas.” I offered him another. Pretty soon we were shelling at a great rate, stuffing little peas in our faces, talking with our mouths full. It felt like a minor triumph, winning this pea convert through direct contact with something so recently attached to a stem.
Our day together had been full of such revelations. My nephew Christopher and niece Deanna were visiting me in Toronto, from their home in small-town Michigan. (“We live near Hell,” the kids love to say, delighting in the license to swear that the name of a neighboring town provides.) Their oak-wooded community, bordering a small lake, is much like middle-class small towns throughout North America. It has large but not ostentatious homes with long driveways (some containing boats or snowmobiles). And almost every home has an acre-sized lawn with an automatic sprinkler system, a flower bed tight to the wall, and shrubs and trees dotted along the property lines.
When they come to see me in Toronto, my niece and nephew must feel that they’ve come not just to another country but to another planet. Everything about the big city delights, dazzles, and intrigues them. I usually agonize over how to amuse my young relatives (in fear of being boring and too adult), then quickly calm down when I realize that just exploring the city is amusement enough for two curious and engaged kids. We can sit for an hour in the local Coffee Time and they’ll be happy with the parade of urban surprises; it was the first place they saw a man dressed as a woman.
For this visit, though, we decided to venture farther down the road with a streetcar ride (their first) to Kensington Market—a chaotic and historic outpost of multicultural urban liveliness in the center of the city, where ramshackle buildings house vegetable stands, fish shops, butchers, dry goods suppliers, and secondhand clothing stores. My niece and nephew’s eyes got wider and wider as we passed a derelict parked car—a Kensington Market landmark—that the group Streets Are For People had turned into a public art piece, planting the hood with herbs, the trunk with trees, and the open roof with lawn grass. The bumper sticker read “Parks not Parking” and the graffiti on the doors “Community Vehicular Reclamation Project.” I doubt that the kids had ever seen such a creative compost bin—the inside of a car.
We wove through sidewalks crowded with tattooed, pierced punks and old market shopkeepers barking directions at delivery truck drivers. We dodged stalls overflowing with produce. We ducked under dried fish hanging from rafters. We walked around jumbled café chairs with buskers holding court. And with each moment of