From Spacing Montreal, a “new initiative to increase downtown gardening space.”
A campus group has formed at McGill to give the city’s many university students — many of whom are apartment dwellers — access to more gardening space.
Campus Crops formed this winter with the goal of identifying underused spaces on the McGill campus and turning them into productive agricultural land. They currently have space behind the McGill School of Environment where they have germinated their first crops, and have plans to work with Santropol Roulant and the Edible Campus Project in gardening and holding workshops for urban gardeners this summer. The two groups both have gardens on the McGill campus, and plan to hold workshops on balcony and fire-escape gardening, among others, this summer.
Campus Crops has also submitted a proposal to the City of Montreal to turn the sloping area on the corner of McTavish and Dr. Penfield into a student-run terrace garden. Montréal’s First Strategic Plan for Sustainable Development/ Premier plan stratégique de développement durable de la collectivité montréalaise identifies support for urban agriculture as one of the priority goals for 2007-2009.
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As the food and energy crises escalate reconnecting with locally grown food will be unavoidable. My familiarity with community garden projects is limited, though I know Calgary has a number of initiatives, including on the U of C Campus. The Calgary Community Gardens Meetup Group is unexpectedly run by several of my friends. (They continue to surprise me).
I look forward to talking more about this with them soon — there’s some very neat stuff happening around this in Canada. The time might be right for a more aggressive push again at the Calgary Campus.
