Park n’ Play n’ Stay

The Community garden has teamed up with The City of Calgary to provide a space for those growing minds to learn about gardening!

A team of community members got together and created booklets identifying different fruits and vegetables, insects, and weeds found in the community garden.

Alberta Environment donated trees for every child to take home and plant in their home backyard! The kids were very excited to get home to plant their new trees. Hopefully we’ll see them popping up within the next couple of years.

GreenGate donated some vegetables for the children to take care of throughout the week that they are at the garden. This was a big hit! All the kids were willing to get in there and plant their veggies, water them, and make sure there aren’t any weeds cropping up close by!

Overall, the children learnt a lot at the community garden and we hope to continue with our community involvement at a larger scale next summer.

Benefits of the Community Garden

I may be a bit biased when it comes to the benefits of a community garden but I would like to share some of the ones I’ve learnt along the way as well:

Although we had a very short growing season most of the gardeners ended up with lots of goodies to take home to eat. In my little garden plot I ended up with over 150 potatoes to eat throughout the year! Growing veggies closer to home decreases the ‘food miles’ that they will travel in order to get to the grocery store. For example some fruits can come as far as New Zealand (almost 14000 kms). That’s a lot of food miles! Not only are we reducing food miles we are helping to reduce the carbon footprint of our food production.

Since the community garden is organic only there was a reduction in the amount of pesticides on the food there and therefore will be a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.

Many ‘fresh’ fruits and vegetables are grown in monocrops which deplete the earth from their natural resources (vitamins and minerals from the soil). Most people grew at least 5 different types of vegetables within their 4 by 8 plot. This helps keep the soil balanced in the soil.

The community garden also provide a natural environment that was also socially sustainable. It became a place where garden members could connect with their environment, other members, and ensure a safe place for children to learn about growing crops from seeds.