My engagement with urban agriculture started with a gift to my husband Jim a few months before we moved to Toronto.  A close friend gave him eight small yellow envelops of seeds as a birthday present.  The uneven typing  on the envelopes read “White Queen,” “Tigerella,” “Lime Salad,” “Purple Cherokee,” “Yellow Pear,” “Black Seaman,” “Peasant’s Paste,” and “Druzba.”  They were heirloom tomato seeds from a Seed Sanctuary in Kingston, Ontario.

The following February we bought a seed starting tray, potting soil and a cheap grow light and planted a full tray of seeds.  The thought of growing tomatoes from seed, especially in a basement apartment with a north facing window, seemed like we were setting ourselves up for failure.  Up until this point the only tomato plants in my life had come from garden centres.  Every June, my parents would take us to buy tomato seedlings from warm, humid greenhouses scented with chemical fertilizers.  And now here we were starting tomato seeds in February, months before the potential plants would head outside in what seemed to be a totally inhospitable environment for heat and sun-loving tomatoes.

I was wrong about the tomatoes.  We ended up with over 40 healthy seedlings when it came time to transplant them to larger pots.  And then there was the question of where to put them.  The patch of grass outside our apartment window was ours to use but our landlord was insistent that we were only allowed to plant in pots.  It could handle a few plants, but what about the rest?  The need to find a place for our tomatoes led us to find Maloca Community Garden at York University, where Jim and I were both studying.  The initial e-mails sent to the garden were slow to be answered but in a short time we were showing up to regular community work days and had negotiated a plot for most of our tomatoes.  This was my introduction to community gardening and urban agriculture.

A lot has happened since that first introduction to growing food in the city.  That first year we invited a couple of on campus friends to help us out with our plot of tomatoes.  The tomatoes grew into a dense thicket (and were delicious).  That fall Jim and I were elected to the community garden’s steering committee and we spent the following season leading workdays, setting up a blog, fighting to get the garden on the campus map and trying to grow the “community” part of the garden in addition to the vegetables.  The third year we passed responsibilities of the garden over to a new steering committee but helped to get a new water tank and grew not only enough tomatoes for ourselves but also many for our communal plots.  That summer was when I started working in Markham, a large suburb north of Toronto, with a big part of what I’m focusing on related to local food and urban agriculture planning.

Community gardens and urban agriculture are moving into the mainstream.  And whether the trendiness of the 100 mile diet or the necessity caused by a global recession is the source of this current interest, there are a lot of reasons why our Canadian cities should be embracing community gardens and figuring out how agriculture can work in cities and suburbs.  Beyond the potential to reduce the carbon footprint of our food by growing and eating food we grow, there are other environmental benefits including reduced use of pesticides (most community gardens prohibit the use of all but the most natural pesticides), onsite management of organic waste through composting and much needed plant variety for our pollinators.  Plus community gardens can serve as great site for eco education and with a bit of management can help beautify communities.  Beyond the environmental benefits, there are also social, cultural and economic benefits to community gardens, including healthy food and physical activity, improved community safety, access to culturally appropriate foods, welcoming public space, increased food knowledge, affordable program to maintain, and improved partnerships throughout the community.  And there are also a lot of ways that cities can support community gardens including supportive land use policies, financial support, public-private partnerships, technical assistance with site and design, management of programs, education and design.