Jessica Kenny, Centretown News
Herbs and vegetables grow in the community garden on McLeod Street run by Brooke Towers residents.“I go for the kale,” says Bob Henry. “It’s rather expensive at the grocery stores, but here I just pick it off fresh and it’s very good.”
The Centretown man is referring to a pick-your-own, no-fee herb garden in the Golden Triangle that he and a group of other Ottawa Community Housing residents maintain in a small garden plot besides their building on McLeod St. – a subsidized housing unit for low-income residents.
The “help yourself” garden surrounds the building in the form of a front garden and a couple of wooden boxes besides the sidewalk. Small signs placed into the ground invite passersby to help themselves to many different types of homegrown herbs and vegetables from the garden.
“Since we started, there’s more cohesion, a sense of purpose and direction. The ‘help yourself’ signs signal that we’re reaching out to the community as well, not just the tenants,” says Henry. “We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback. People are coming out and saying this is great.”
Patrick Miller, another gardener and OCH resident, says with the peace, care and love from everybody in the neighborhood, this collective effort has helped the building fit into the community.
It started years ago when Miller looked out his window and felt displeased by what the garden was back then: a wasteland of dandelions. He decided to weed the patch and felt encouraged by how much better the front yard looked all of a sudden. Next, a few residents from the building’s tenants circle decided to apply for grants in order to slowly populate the garden with flowers over the years.
The turning point came in early 2014, when Awesome Ottawa – the Ottawa chapter of the Awesome Foundation, which distributes $1,000 every month to projects its members find meaningful – donated the monthly sum to help make an edible addition to the garden. By the fall, Miller and other residents were able to sell the plants they grew at Good Food Markets (non- profit pop-up markets selling affordable food to the community) with the proceeds going back towards the garden.
Avi Caplan, one of the organizers of Awesome Ottawa, says this year residents wanted to do the small garden on a bigger scale. Their idea of an edible garden “hit a bunch of notes, so we got behind it,” says Caplan.
“What you don’t necessarily see just by walking down the street is that this is really important to the tenants in the Ottawa Community Housing building, and it’s a really great way that they’re connecting with the community around them,” Caplan says.
Most people in the building do not hold down steady jobs, so the garden is a real help for them, says Henry. “It keeps them occupied, away from the drug scene and away from their own problems,” he says.
Henry says he thinks the unit’s residents are stigmatized.
“However, if the community around us sees the garden and that there are a lot of good people working on it who want to make a difference, maybe they’ll think twice about branding people negatively.”