The 250 Retired Gardeners Keeping a Community Garden Alive | Ageless Gardens

We all feel so much better and more alive if we're out in the gardens. It's a real network of a single interest that draws us together. And we've come to enjoy the gardening and the social life. It's essential to good health. The plants are going to look after themselves. We're simply guiding nature. Gardens and growing food seem to be so universally connected to that sense of neighborhood. It is a community of gardeners. And if you do something together, you'll tend to do it more than on your own. It's magical. I look to see the beets push out of the ground so I can tell whether I've got a sizable one or not. We're growing three varieties here, so they're all a little different. I've been at the Government House Vegetable Garden now for, gosh, going on eight years. Government House is the official residence of the Lieutenant Governor. Its surrounding shared public gardens are maintained by a group of happy, healthy volunteers. The gardens are both organic vegetable and flower gardens. When people come to the garden, everybody stops and kind of inhales the energy because it's alive. And you can feel it in walking through the rows. That affinity for really good food, it's apparent in just the energy rising off the plants. They're picked within a couple of hours of the people actually having them in their hands. Freshness is everything. Nutrition starts to go right away. I equate healthy food with flavor, and that's nature's intention. You're not going to eat things that don't taste good. We're so fortunate. This is, I think, one of the best volunteer organizations in Victoria or even in British Columbia because there are at least 250 gardeners, and we garden two days a week. The gardens that you see are the direct result of our work. It's miraculous how much we get done. Hello, hello. How are you? Good. Well, I really appreciate you helping us out here. The volunteers also pick and arrange flowers to display in the government house public tea room. They just come later because it's more shade. And we'll harvest it and use it next week. Yeah. So that's good. Okay, five more minutes, my ladies. I'm very fortunate. They work really well together, both as gardeners and floral designers. The nice thing about working here is it's then shared by the public. Can you handle that one? No, this one right here. That one right here. Basically, we're just taking the love of flowers from the garden inside. Christina, do you know Patricia? Patricia? Okay, and Patricia's a gardener first. When you're doing an arrangement, you want to choose what is going to be your focal point, which is going to be the bride. I found it. Perfect. Then you would put some bridesmaids together, and usually they're in a complementary color. And then you have the uninvited guest. An uninvited guest is used as a contrast, so it makes it a more interesting visual. I think I'm almost there. I may go back to that one. Helps if you get them in the water. This was land that was forgotten. It's full of bricks, it's full of rebar, but we wanted to show the community that we can restore land. After two years of remediation efforts, these volunteers are ready to plant their first harvestable garden. Fruit and vegetables produced here will be available to passers-by who are often people in need. It will also help to stock the local food bank. Food banks tend not to have operational funding, so it's really left to the communities that we reside in to come up with funding, to come up with food, so it can be highly challenging. We found once we started doing the garden, it was a unifying type of project. It brought people to the table that weren't there before. There are no fences here. A lot of people are walking back and forth on a day-to-day basis. Why not have corridors of fruit trees that people can freely pick? We just really try to spread the wealth. People come here to work, to make their lives better. People don't come here to wind up on the street, but a lot of them end up there. They're trying to better their lives, trying to find work, and just hitting roadblocks. A lot of us know the food bank's a band-aid. Any overflow, we haul over to the food bank. Food security is not what divides us, but what makes us all the same. We all have to eat, and the garden's an investment in the community. It's an investment in the future. Everyone's yard has the bees in them. It is one of the things that connects the whole neighbourhood. Everyone's got a story about seeing the bees here, seeing the bees there. You think about it, one of the worker bees goes over to one neighbour's place and pollinates a flower, collects some nectar, and then comes back and makes honey. And you start thinking about how all these pieces go together. Like they're big, and like turn that darker yellow, like it's ready. Backyard beekeeping encourages pollination of plants both in Etienne's garden and in his neighbour's. Everyone in the neighbourhood gets to share in the sweet results of the busy bees. Half the fun of growing stuff is giving the produce away. People seem happy when they're sharing with each other, when they're outside, working in their garden. We save the wax, burn it down, and it gets used for other stuff. Candle making, that kind of thing. The bees put a cover of wax over some of the honey. So some of the honeycomb is open and some of it's covered. We're scratching the wax covering off of the honey. Then we can load it into the extractor. Gardens and growing food seem to be so universally connected to that sense of neighbourhood. Our bees help pollinate their flowers. But without their flowers, our bees wouldn't have anything to eat. Sharing the food between generations, between neighbours, it's really special. It's such a different group of people here on the coast. It's like they all know they live in paradise. And so you can't help but smile when you're here. In a remote community, it really does require all of us to get involved and work together. It really takes a community. Seedy Saturday is such a great idea because you get an opportunity to find seeds that have been climatized to your region. When I came here 19 years ago, I looked at all these beautiful forests and saw how much rain we received and the amount of fog. And I thought, there's no way you can garden here. How could anybody garden here? And then I slowly started to meet pockets of people who have little gardens here and there. Exactly. I know it's so different. And even within the town, there's like little hot pockets and cooler zones and stuff. It's kind of the first time people get together after the cold, long winters, just before the growing season. There was a group of us that thought, how many other people don't know that you can garden here? And how can we change that? Growing food in Tofino is difficult due to its terrain and extremely wet climate. Most produce must be trucked in via a windy, treacherous mountain road. Seedy Saturday brings the community together to share seeds and encourage people to grow more food locally. How can we bring all these people together so we can showcase what is happening here on the coast? This is an opportunity for you to share seeds that have grown here for years that'll be successful here. We work together to put on these kinds of events. Tofino Seedy Saturday ends with a community celebration, highlighted by a meal prepared with food grown and donated by the community. Lovely compost in here. We have had salad all winter, which is really nice. Arugula. The community food initiative has a very special weekend going on. They're having a foraged and wild dinner tonight. So I guess I'm foraging. Foraging in my garden. It's great to be able to share that experience. And I'm doing a layer of arugula. So I'm just giving the chef the option to do whatever he'd like. This is spinach that we're harvesting for the forage feast dinner tonight. And then also pulling out landcress, it's called, which is a weed. Double duty, weeding the garden and feeding the people at the same time. These cute little things. This is Komatsuma, a Japanese green. It's a great community. So I'm very happy to donate. We have to connect by having potluck dinners, and sharing food, and sharing the love of gardening. A lot of them say, oh, I only have a bag of lettuce, or I only have a few herbs. But it's OK, because if everybody brings in just their little bits, it's really special. I really, truly feel lucky to be here. And I know that most people that live here feel the same way. The problem with Tofino is there's not a lot of land. And so we really, really need to share. You do get to know each other really well. It's those relationships that we build with each other that help to fill us up. But it's a food security initiative as well. And that the more we grow, the more we share. It's us to feel good in our hearts that we're working together, and enjoying each other's company. There's also something about sitting down at the table, and every single green you knew is growing right here. And it just tastes so much better, and it feels so much better. And I think we're nurturing our bodies. There's a story behind the food. Oh, we've harvested this from the school. We harvested this from our friend's and neighbor's garden. And I think that really connects people as well. Going around and sharing the honey, and sharing the produce, it's kind of the connection between everyone. The taste of the honey, it's very floral. Tastes like the neighborhood. Well, hello. How are you? So we extracted our first bit of honey last week. So I wanted to bring some over. Have you been seeing bees on the apple tree at all? Well, you're welcome. So it's our spring honey. So it's the lighter one. In the fall when I bring some, it'll be the darker honey. But this is the stuff I think kind of tastes a little bit like clover honey. In its third year of remediation, the shared garden in Prince Albert has begun supplying food to community members in need. There was too much magnesium in the soil. One thing that loves the magnesium is tomatoes. Over the years now, it's pulling that magnesium out. It's restoring the land. And if you look behind me, I mean, it's a forest. Like, the tomatoes really like this land. A lot of our nutrients have bounced back. The organic content in here is good now. So there's definitely a lot of healing that goes on. It's a day-by-day process. As our elders say, faith and patience. And we live by that. But you notice we don't talk a great deal when we're assembling. Everybody's concentrating. We gardeners are a nurturing family. We nurture plants. We now nurture one another a great deal. I've always considered it an honor. When I come into the gardens, it's suddenly, it's a place of refuge. There's 17 gardens here. There's 450 volunteers. I mean, that's immense. Connections with the gardens. Interpersonal connections between the people. The intergenerational connections between kids and older folks. And the knowledge about all these things. Going around and sharing the honey and sharing the produce. Kind of the connection between everyone. Fundamentally, to be happy, we have to be connected with the things around us. Our kids being connected with the elders and the older folks in the community. The garden, the bees, it's the food. The people in our neighborhood. That's what makes me happy.