Inside The Community Garden Bringing Retired Gardeners Together | Ageless Gardens

I think that gardening is an antidote for many things. What gardening does is it builds community for us again. It affects how we think. It affects our physical health. It brings out the best in us. We need one another. That is a biological imperative. Occasionally we have to cut them back because they run out of space to spread into. Rainy Hopewell has a Ph.D. in applied eco-psychology. She and her partner had a brilliant idea that involved building community in their neighborhood through boulevard gardening. They fought for and won the legal right to garden on Victoria's Boulevards. Half of the socializing that happens in this neighborhood happens out there in the garden. I have a much broader sense of community by virtue of being in my garden and speaking with everyone who passes by. To grow vegetables on public land on a boulevard seemed to be an absolutely extraordinary event. It was all the buzz, and we were on television, and we were on the radio. People wrote to their counselor to tell them how much they liked this notion that launched the whole movement to make boulevard gardening legal. Gardening is an antidote for many things, particularly gardening in a shared way with others. We are not as healthy, we are not as happy when we are in isolated situations. At the Horticulture Center of the Pacific on Vancouver Island, over 200 volunteers of all ages gather to socialize and to learn about gardening. Working together, they ensure that the gardens grow and the community too. You really learn to care about all these people. We have one member who's not coming anymore, and we try to go and visit him still because he's become important to everyone. When you're working, you've got a lot of that contact with other people, but when you're home, you can easily become isolated, especially for people who are single. So I always had the interest in gardening since I was a little girl because I have a small garden, and I love growing vegetables. So my interest was coming here and learning. I want to get the roots in the right place. Looks like you got it dead on. Hope so. But then the social aspect is what keeps you coming. Here at the center, alleviating social isolation by engaging with the gardening community is one of the healthiest activities for the body, the mind, and the spirit. My first garden was in 1970. The first time I put my shovel in the ground, I pushed, and I knew in that moment something shifted inside me, and I thought, oh. And I had this tremendous sense of coming home, and I have been gardening ever since. Our biological imperative is to connect with one another. That is how we survived. We would not be here if we had been solitary beasts. And a good morning to you on this lovely Saturday morning. It's sunny so far. No, it's all clearing up. It's going to be beautiful blue skies for the rest of the day. I realized after 18 years in gardening retail, talking to the individual, answering the individual's question, finishing with them, turning around, it'd be the same question. So then sometimes I'd say, okay, anybody here got earwig problems? All right, let's cover earwigs and try and get 4 or 5 people out of the way at once, just save my voice if nothing else. Thanks so much for joining us here on The Garden Show from Zuma Radio, AM 740, 96.7 FM. No longer in retail, Charlie Dauben's radio show reaches a much larger virtual audience across southern Ontario and even the United States. ...the newest leaves than there are on the older leaves. Charlie, I called you last year to complain about my year old chromatis. This year, it blooms its head off. There, you see? What did I say? Gorgeous. Perfect. So right away, get yourself a garbage bag... I really like it. I just find it really fun. I like to share my knowledge. No more fertilizing of any of our garden plants after the end of July, except vegetables and annual flowers. And I recognize I don't know everything, so I'm learning too, and I encourage people to call on the radio show. You don't have to have a question. Call and tell us something that really works in your garden. Alrighty. On we go to Brampton this time around. There's Mary. Good morning, Mary. There's always that going on. People love to share. I remember the spots actually expanding in size. I'm not a person doctor. I'm a plant doctor. But part of my job as a plant doctor is helping people be successful and, you know, be healthier and more well as a result of being in their gardens. Coming up now to our final break, and Charlie shall return with more sage advice. How about that? Knowing your community is good. That's part of what keeps us young and healthy and alive is knowing the people around us and not feeling isolated and strange and alone. In 1948, an exiled Russian prince and his Canadian wife built Abkhazi Garden. Following their passing, the garden was to be leveled for condos. Abkhazi was saved at the 11th hour by the efforts of a much larger community of people. Today the garden grows because of these volunteers, and so too does their community. I think a large part of the delight of the garden is the fact that it's just, you're meeting people. Like-minded ones. After you've been working, the kids are all gone and everything else, it's kind of nice to have something that's regular. I look for places where I can have a social network, and this is definitely one of those places. I've made really close friendships here. The garden is a great bond. Helping immigrants and refugees get settled in Victoria is the job of an NGO known as VRCS. When newcomers come, a lot come with backgrounds in farming, but also producing food for their households. So what the project wanted to do was to start to match up newcomers with people in the community, and basically there's a common interest in being able to produce food in your household garden. There's also bringing people out of isolation. Newcomers can be shy, or they don't know what to grow compared to what they had, and that's where the sharing comes in. And it can actually help them get a greater sense of belonging. It's bitter lettuce. It means it's bitter lettuce. It's also about sharing the food. How do you cook with it? And they're really, really excited about getting involved in doing that. I see gardening and growing food as an art. It's something that was passed down to me through my family. Doing activities together that are culturally significant does build community. The garden helps keep that community healthy and well. The city is full of more strangers than folks who know us. As a species, we do best in smaller groups. We begin to feel a sense of alienation or isolation. We are not as happy when we are in prolonged, isolated situations. We need one another, but sometimes our urban lives make connecting a challenge. Projects like Boulevard Gardens are one way to connect to other people. Sometimes it will be a whole weekend of gardening, and sometimes it will be 20 minutes here and 20 minutes there. And sometimes we imagine that we can hear things screaming at us, like, harvest me, water me, prune me. We found there's kind of a steep learning curve about artichokes because people have seen them in the stores, but they don't know what to do with them or they don't recognize them on the plant. They're a bit shy to take them. With the artichokes, especially at the beginning of the season, we find we have to pick them and hand them out to people. I think what gardening in the city does is it creates the village for us again. It reaches out and pulls that thread and weaves us all into a smaller tapestry that's one where we can feel that we're there and we're telling our part of the story or holding our piece. Maybe it's just a little corner that I'm holding, but I'm rainy and I'm part of the garden. North Central is a low-income Regina neighbourhood with poor access to affordable food and produce. The philosophy of the North Central Community Gardens is help yourself. We want to have the people come out and work together and get to know their neighbours and all around feel it to be a safer community. People who live in North Central, we're a working-class group of people. There's not a lot of wealth. The backyard gardening that I enjoyed as a child has kind of skipped a generation. It's enjoying a resurgence. Just about half of the community is an Indigenous population. They were very happy as youngsters to work alongside their mushums and kookums. There is a high incidence of diabetes in the community. Certainly a healthy diet is one of the big parts of maintaining good health. Every year we do a barbecue in the garden. It's an awesome opportunity. It gives people something very hands-on that they can come and do together. Mostly people are walking by and say, you can tell them today is our 10th anniversary of the community gardens. It's always nice to see people who haven't met come to the garden, chit-chat, work together and be able to take some produce home together. All around it's a way to knit people together. My dream would be a greenhouse run by the neighbourhood and ultimately a market that we could use for selling at a very reasonable price the produce that grows in the North Central Community Gardens. People can come together from different walks of life and come and do something together and bring a sense of community. It's just a continuum. We enjoy that harvest. We give away everything. It's that good feeling at day's end when you have done something and you can see the success of it. It brought a vibrancy to the neighbourhood. Back in Victoria, Rainy has found a new community to connect with. These insect creatures need gardens too. And when the pollinator community thrives, we do as well. This is a garden designed specifically to attract pollinators. If we were walking along here mid-morning to early afternoon, this whole place would be absolutely humming with pollinators. I think it's probably the busiest place on the street all day long. It used to be a common garden for humans. It's now a common garden for pollinators. A pollination garden should have a wide variety of things blooming across three seasons of the year, so from early spring to late fall. So we chose some of the plants based on the bloom pattern. Many of them were quite small when we put them in and they're actually growing already. So if you give them nutrients and you give them water and you give them sunlight, they will grow passionately. You cannot buy that in a food store. Look at this beautiful Swiss charm. We need one another. If we want to be happy and healthy and whole, we need that connection. Gardening brings out the best in us. Some of my best interactions with neighbors have been, here, I have some extra of this. Or we stand and talk about the garden and then that leads into talking about the children or talking about age issues or whatever. It brings out the kindness. It brings out our human capacity to be kind to one another. It is this capacity that is good for us as we age in the garden.