Building a sky-high community garden

Construction cranes dot the skyline and trains whiz by below, but nine stories up from the foot of 8^th Street, adjacent to a SkyTrain station-cum-construction-zone in a downtown New Westminster, I’m walking on loose soil. Earlier this year, I would have been standing on an apartment tower's neglected gravel patch, but it’s now growing into a rooftop food garden.

“There are onions, tomatoes, more peas and carrots over there,” says resident and project organizer Pamela Findling, directing me around the space. Just a few months ago, she says, this was a very different rooftop.

“The area was just overgrown weeds. It had basically been abandoned. Now we have eight plots, all full, and a waiting list of four people. I can just take the elevator down and pull some lettuce for supper. It’s easy.”

Findling says it was just as easy to pitch and sell the idea to the strata council, which–to the envy of cash-strapped civic governments juggling service cuts and tax increases–had some money in the bank. A few phone calls and $1,700 later, a specialized landscaping company arrived with a blower truck full of soil (roughly 14 cubic yards, gardeners), which workers pumped through a hose up the side of the building, putting to rest nightmares of wheelbarrows and countless elevator rides.

Kathleen Somerville, a director at the New Westminster Community Gardening Society, applauds Findling’s venture, but says it’s not technically a community garden, since it’s behind locked doors, with access limited to residents of the building and no guidelines to donate portions of the harvest. Still, she says, private ownership might help the project avoid common urban gardening pitfalls.

“In our community gardens, participation is somewhat transient. People come and go; they don’t necessarily even water their own plots or plant their plots. But this is something they own. They’re empowering themselves and they can be a pilot project for other strata, other organizations that want to get together,” she says.

“Hopefully they’ll take it upon themselves to do seed-swapping with each other and have potlucks and workshops. Community also means opening it up.”

Off private rooftops, community food growing projects have seen their share of controversy. In Vancouver, despite city council’s push for greater food security, opponents crushed a would-be community garden in the city’s West End neighbourhood, arguing it would make an unsightly addition to the waterfront hillside. Earlier this year, mayoral hopeful and current city councilor Suzanne Anton lambasted Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson for spending public money on an urban grain growing project.

Back in New Westminster, awash in a slow July rain and the noise of buzzing saws and hammers striking steel, Findling says the garden will challenge her in different ways, starting with a steep learning curve.

“Over the years I’ve grown increasingly interested in buying more local stuff, eating more organic food and also just saving money,” she says. “But I don’t know anything about gardening. This year it’s an experiment, we’ll see what happens.”

While rooftop gardens are still a real estate novelty in Greater Vancouver, lessons abound abroad, from a 40,000 square-foot rooftop farm in New York City to Montreal’s Action Communiterre, which uses a mix of private and public spaces for what it calls collective gardens – food gardens with an educational and charity component.

For Findling, the first lesson has been in neighbourly relations.

“I have a six-year-old son, who loves it. And there are a couple other families with plots and it’s nice to see the whole family come out and do something outside together,” she says. “In an apartment, you don’t really know your neighbours, but we’ve gotten to know a few of ours.”