On a warm and sunny October afternoon, a couple of volunteers and I walked across campus carrying buckets full of cherry tomatoes, a few carrots, and a handful of pole beans. Our knees were green from kneeling in tomato patches, and our hands were stained from the rich living soil that we had built in the past year.
We arrived at Carleton’s Food Centre and we were received with the beaming smile of the service centre co-ordinator who was excited to give out the fresh, organic, local, and sustainably produced produce for people requiring food bank baskets.
Few things in life are as pure and just as growing food and sharing it with your community. Maybe it is this profoundly simple idea that appears so incomprehensible to those who think that pushing hastily built, overpriced, and for-profit concrete boxes on top of a community-built garden is the best use of campus space.
At the Kitigànensag Graduate Students’ Association (GSA) Carleton Community Garden we have managed to accomplish a great deal since our beginning in the spring of 2012.
We designed and implemented the garden in 10 months using cutting edge techniques of ecological agriculture, and hundreds of hours of volunteer labour.
A large portion of the garden was built using recycled materials found on campus such as wood pallets, and wood chips from felled trees. We converted hard-packed dead dirt into rich living soil—probably the richest, healthiest soil on campus now.
Our garden is mostly watered from rain collected from our shed roof, despite a minor drought in July. Forty people used the 25 allotment plots to grow their own food. We were able to supplement the Food Centre’s food bank baskets with fresh and healthy produce.
Monthly workshops on different aspects of organic gardening were held. We planted an edible forest garden that will be producing apples, elderberries, serviceberries, blueberries, raspberries, rhubarb, and many herbs—if the garden is not destroyed.
Volunteers constructed a 100 foot-long wood-composting berm that host fungus capable of breaking down the oil and gas that leaches off parking lot six into the Ottawa watershed. On top of this berm we will be planting a pollinator garden that will attract native bee species and honey bees to help prevent the hive collapse epidemic that is sweeping North America.
A garden was created for First Nations students on campus to practice, honour, and teach traditional agricultural practices.
At our naming ceremony earlier this month we had elders come and lead us through a harvest ceremony in order to honour and recognize that the garden is on stolen Algonquin land.
Realistically, we are not going to feed everyone on campus, and maybe then we are “just a small garden.” But what we are successful in doing is even more important than our size.
Our garden has introduced hundreds of people to the idea of producing their own food, and provided them the skills necessary to do it.
Simultaneously, we are healing the environmental destruction caused by our university, and testing the agricultural techniques that will allow us to mitigate and endure the environmental changes of the future.
Though we may not own much, you will never find people who are more generous than gardeners. There will always be space at our table—and we will do our very best to feed you—even if you don’t see the value of the garden.
Respecting nature and the efforts of the community are the first steps to showing leadership at Carleton. Unfortunately, these are lessons that are still needed at the top.
