Produce City

Printer-friendly versionThis was a title that caught my eye in a recent Georgia Straight magazine. The writer, Angela Murrills, describes the joy of tasting your own ripe tomatoes, even if they are just grown in a pot on your balcony. She suggests that even in cities, food can be grown locally, on front lawns and in the back, on containers on window sills or balconies, or on rooftop gardens.

    All that seems to be sprouting in Yaletown these days are concrete condos far from the earthy reality of food-growing. ... Developers typically want to provide what they call ‘instant green’. Having even a small area that isn’t green doesn’t look attractive to potential buyers. And to be fair, not everyone wants to spend their free time raising cauliflowers.

The author writes about examples of developers that incorporated areas around the building where people could work 10×10 plots and where a common composting area was created. My own gardening skills are very limited. So it is always a pleasure to walk through the little community gardens in West Vancouver (recently I have discovered the ones by the railway tracks around 4th in Vancouver) and enjoy looking at the fruits (and flowers) of other people’s labour.