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Astrid Muschalla, the instructor of an Organic Master Gardener course, displays a prized cucumber. A popular Organic Master Gardening course that originated at Gaia College in B.C. and has been available in Toronto for the past few years is being offered in Ottawa for the first time this winter.
Urban gardening enthusiasts at all levels – including those from the organic and community – gardening hotbed of Centretown – will get the opportunity to cultivate essential skills during the three-weekend course that began in mid-February.
The course is being offered through an initiative of the Canadian Organic Growers, and according to course instructor Astrid Muschalla, it offers a wide variety of instruction.
“This is a gardening course and so much more,” she says.
“We’re not teaching what’s popular in the mainstream about how to garden because we’re actually offering other options for creating and maintaining healthy vibrant gardens without commercial inputs . . . it’s really the science behind what plants like and need.”
Jordan Bouchard, interim coordinator of the Community Gardening Network at Just Food, says the fact that this new course is now being offered in the city fits hand in hand with the general community interest.
“We’ve had city council supporting community gardening since 2009,” says Bouchard. “Since then, the amount of community gardens has doubled.”
For Bouchard, participation in these types of classes is more than just a good choice; it’s an important necessity.
“There was a time when more than half of the population was growing most of their own food. And now we’re reduced to something about five per cent of the population producing all the food and what they export,” he says. “Having those type of skills is now not a matter of just having them, you actually have to go and get them.”
Centretown’s urban community gardens are small, generally harvested from raised beds, but they thrive in easy grows like hand tomatoes, herbs and salad greens.
Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corporation, a landlord company that also provides spaces for community gardens and helps maintain them, is seeing this kitchen-friendly allure draw in more and more tenants and volunteers each year itching to getting involved in rooftop gardening. They also provide the space for the Centretown Community Garden at the corner of Lisgar and Lyon streets, and the Sweet Willow Community Garden on Rochester Street.
“We’re happy to see people increase their knowledge about gardening through whatever means, and COG is a great organization with good strong roots in the community. So it’s nice to see them adding to the expertise in the field,” says Meg McCallum, manager of the membership and communications department of the housing corporation.
Muschalla says she has seen a shift in thinking in terms of ecological gardening.
“Young people are saying, ‘Of course we want a garden like this, there’s no other way,’ but older gardeners have come through the last 50 years with a chemical dependency on growing healthy gardens (using industrial pesticides and fertilizers). We think that that the blue powder is food for the plants,” says Muschalla. Blue dyed artificial fertilizers are commonly used in residential areas, particularly for lawn care.
“Education is the key,” she adds. “When people do learn, they can’t go backwards, and they do things differently. And then they become the ambassadors, especially in their communities.”
After the three-weekend term, Muschalla says they are hoping to recruit qualified teachers to lead the course on a regular basis in the Ottawa area.
For students interested in taking their learning one step forward, but not so far as to become an instructor, successful completion of the course qualifies them to write the Organic Land Care Practitioner accreditation exam with the Society of Organic Urban Land Care.
Basic standards for community gardeners have been slow to be implemented across the country. But Muschalla says that she believes courses that prepare students for professional certification are helping to fill that void.
Corktown Common, an 18-acre park that opened in Toronto during the spring of 2013, is being presented to the world in conjunction with this year’s Pan Am games. It’s been ecologically designed and is being organically and holistically maintained.
According to Muschalla, a prerequisite for park staff to be able to work at that park is the organic master gardener course she teaches or the Humber College online organic horticulture specialist course.
Prerequisite or not, Muschalla says she believes being certified through any means is a great way to set yourself apart as a professional.
Unlike organic farming, in which land is certified and everything that grows from it is considered organic, landscaping in a city environment creates an interesting dynamic between a worker and land that they don’t generally own and can’t necessarily get certified.
This means that certifying yourself is the only practical way of demonstrating you work with a minimum standard of understanding organic land care.
For Muschalla, it’s an approach to better gardening that “just makes sense.”