By Joe Mancini
Published in June 2018
In The Pleasure of Eating, Wendell Berry reminds us of the importance of being involved in the work of producing food. He urged readers to:
“participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay and around again.”
Why have we limited our imagination when it comes to questions about food? Berry challenges us to create new ways of working that will regenerate the landscapes around us. He suggests quite literally that we have to recreate the paved-over paradise of our urban environments to return to agriculture that sustains community and the soul.
Urban agriculture will flourish when we are committed to producing and consuming locally grown food. How do we learn to incorporate more local foods into our daily diet, year round? This means stretching our imagination and our ability to grow and consume as many local greens, vegetables, tubers and fruits as we can. In her article, Caterina Lindman shows all the benefits plus the affordability.
Gene Logsdon, in his final book, Letter to A Young Farmer, How to Live Richly without Wealth on the New Garden Farm, captured this spirit which he called, “the rise of decentralized agriculture based on the home economy, “
“I mean to celebrate the rise of the smaller-scale, bio-intensive, environmentally friendly garden farm, a place where food quantity and food quality merge to bring about food sufficiency.”
In the chapter The Economic Decentralization of Nearly Everything, Logsdon was enthused by the growing number of people, in small and large ways, who are engaging the growing of food through back yard gardens, one and two acre market gardens often using the CSA (Community Shared Agriculture) model, to artisan food producers for restaurants and farmers markets.
Nurturing vegetables is slow work. As they grow you have to keep the weeds at bay, feed the plants nutrients and water and watch over them for bugs and airborne disease. At the point when the vegetables are ready for harvesting, that is when the work starts to double as it takes patience and knowledge to harvest at the right time and to do it carefully to preserve the yield.
All this work is time consuming and that is why some people have the wrong idea that growing food is uneconomical. It is not economics that is attracting increasing numbers of people to spend time helping plants root in the soil. It is the work itself that is enlivening, by tilling the soil, breathing the fresh air, digging out compost or harvesting the produce.
The Hacienda Sarria Market Garden is an excellent example of how to turn three acres of vacant land into a thriving and productive greenspace. Over the last six years we have markedly improved the topsoil and increased the ecological diversity. This has been possible because of Ron Doyle the owner, and his daughter Nadine Day, who is President of the Hacienda Sarria, both of whom have welcomed us to their land with the goal of making it better. Together we have created an oasis of urban agriculture only three kilometers from the Kitchener downtown.
Each season the Hacienda Sarria Market Garden hosts over 150 volunteers, as well as 4 or 5 interns who participate in an intensive community-based market gardening program. These volunteers and interns make up the backbone of the Hacienda Market Garden team.
In order to facilitate learning from the garden, we have developed an integrated model of weekly workshops led by members of the gardening community. This learning compliments the daily work of preparing beds, planting, weeding, and harvesting.
The Sustainable Gardening Workshop Series will take place on Friday afternoons from 2:30-3:30 beginning in May. This year, the garden received a community environmental improvement grant from the City of Kitchener to develop their workshop curriculum, which will cover topics such as Soil Building, Water Management, Fruit Trees, Seeds and Seedlings, Composting, Pollinators and Insects, Sustainable Food Systems and more. The public is welcome to join these sessions at the Hacienda each Friday afternoon through the summer.
The Hacienda Sarria Market Garden is an example of the kind of imagination that is necessary to stretch the idea of growing and consuming more local vegetables. Look around and see other projects and initiatives that are taking root throughout Waterloo Region. Join in the work of expanding urban agriculture in its many forms.
