Welcome to the Global Roots Garden: A United Nations of Food
This summer, our Wychwood Barns location has blossomed into full, verdant glory. The sheltered garden has grown lush and productive, the outdoor pizza oven is a roaring success. And throughout the open space of Barn 5 lie a cluster of abundant demonstration gardens filled with a dazzling array of vegetables and herbs—the Global Roots Garden.
The seven Global Roots plots are each devoted to particular ethnic communities with large populations in Toronto—Chinese, South Asian, Somalian, Italian, Latin American, Polish and Filipino—and each grows an immensely diverse range of vegetables and herbs, including okra, bitter melon, cardamom, chiles, eggplant and lemongrass. The gardens themselves are tended by twenty-five seniors and fourteen youth (mostly high school students), many of whom got involved through our partnership with CultureLink, a newcomer settlement group in Southwest Toronto. They meet once a week to tend the gardens, socialize and cook food together (seniors from the South Asian Women’s Centre have even made roti in our pizza oven).
Liz Curran, our YIMBY coordinator, has been supervising Global Roots. The idea behind it, she says, is multifold: “There are seniors from around the world here with a wealth of knowledge about growing food. Language barriers sometimes prevent that knowledge from getting out. So we wanted to draw it out in a very public space.” The gardens are designed to show visitors the remarkable variety of crops that can, given the right know-how and experience, thrive in our climate, particularly crops that would appeal to Toronto’s ethnically diverse population. “These are plants people have fond memories of but may not know they can grow here,” Curran says. As well, the relatively tiny plots—they are each about 20 x 13 feet—demonstrate how much food you can produce in a small space.
Bringing together seniors, many of whom were food producers in their native countries, with youth who don’t necessarily have any experience growing food, makes the exchange of knowledge even more explicit. Many of the beds are raised, allowing seniors to work without straining their backs, and most of the gardens are wheelchair-accessible. The senior gardeners have also been involved in the “New Crop Animation Project,” a collaboration between The Stop and the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre in the Niagara Region. In this project, the Global Roots gardeners have been taste-testing and providing horticultural assistance to Greenbelt farmers who are also raising crops—like callaloo and the ever-popular bitter melon—not traditionally grown in the province.
For more information about the Global Roots Garden, contact Liz at liz [at] thestop [dot] org or 416-651-7867 ext 27.
The Global Roots Garden was made possible thanks to support from Live Green Toronto.
Photographs courtesy Laura Berman/GreenFuse Photos
