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Community vegetable gardening</span>
Community gardening, a co-operatively organized form of allotment gardening, has become a worldwide movement, providing countless gardeners with space to meet, socialize and grow vegetables for themselves and their families.
Not so long ago 99 per cent of home gardens in prairie towns and cities came with sizable vegetable plots, rectangles carved from the back lawn and planted in neat rows with root vegetables, potatoes, onions, peas, beans, and sometimes corn and tomatoes. The vegetable or kitchen garden was a tradition inherited from our pioneer forebears who depended on them for food. As the need for home-grown vegetables diminished with the rise of the well-stocked supermarket, gardeners replaced their vegetable plots with large decks, water features and showy displays of annuals and perennials.
<span style="font-weight: bold">Yet there are signs the kitchen garden may be making a comeback, though in perhaps altered forms. Community gardening, a co-operatively organized form of allotment gardening, has become a worldwide movement, providing countless gardeners with space to meet, socialize and grow vegetables for themselves and their families, while the emerging profile of the 100-mile-diet is giving home vegetable production an impetus from another direction.</span>
Across Canada community gardens are flourishing. Locally grown vegetables, fruits and herbs are featured on the menus of the best restaurants in every city. Farmers’ markets are multiplying. The 100-mile-diet challenge – the challenge to live only on foods grown and produced within a 100- mile radius of home – is being taken up by citizens in every province. “Eat local” is the mantra of urban epicures and environmentalists everywhere. Demand for organically grown vegetables is increasing.
Farther afield, websites such as www.kitchengardeners.org report, for example, that “a rustic urge has been catching on in Japan.” Railway stations in Tokyo, it says, have become sites for allotment gardens which are sought out by those who want healthy exercise and pesticide-free produce. According to a recent article in the Guardian, <span style="font-weight: bold">Britain, too, is experiencing a surge in vegetable gardening such as has not been seen since the Second World War. Only this time, the reasons have less to do with economics than they do with politics - the desire of urbanites to reject industrial food production and reclaim control over their own food supply.</span>
What is a gardener to do, especially one who believes in thrift, good living and a sustainable future, but restore vegetables to the garden?
Not that it’s necessary to return to the rectangle carved out of the back lawn.
Denise and Fred Radford have lived and gardened organically in Edmonton for decades. They live modestly by consumer standards but luxuriate in the beauty and bounty they create in the garden. They enjoy its physical demands and they know the vegetables they eat are fresh, full of vitamins and free of chemicals. And further, it gives them pleasure to know that they are doing their bit toward creating a sustainable future.
The Radfords have always had a magnificent and productive vegetable garden. It began as a rectangle in the back lawn. In the past few years, however, inspired partly by their visits to Paris where they enjoy the thriving street markets, gardens and art galleries of the city, Denise decided to embark on a major expansion program. The creative force in this shared enterprise, she also decided to liberate the vegetable garden from its backyard confines.
Mini-plots of kale, chard and beets create texture and colour in the front garden. The deep green foliage of Jerusalem artichoke contrasts with purple barberry and blue spruce behind it and with the blue and deep red-green varieties of kale beside it. Wispy carrot greens shelter apple-green rosettes of buttercrunch lettuce for a wonderful contrast of shape and texture. Borders everywhere blend small fruits and vegetables with an impressive variety of flowering perennials.
Who would suspect when looking at this garden that it keeps Fred, Denise and their guests in fruit and vegetables from spring through to Christmas? Radicchio, which thrives in the dark, is often dug up in the fall, transferred to the basement and maintained throughout the winter. Parsnips, carrots and leeks can generally be dug out from under the snow through December. The fall harvest of tree fruit, especially the apples, are preserved for use throughout the winter.
If the wheel has come full circle and vegetable gardens are coming back into fashion, the R<span style="font-weight: bold">adford garden is a living reminder that gardeners do not have to choose between the decorative and the productive garden. This garden makes beauty and bounty inseparable.</span>