Victory Garden founders (left to right) Lisa Giroday, Sandra Lopuch and Sam Philips specialize in transforming marginalized urban spaces into land for food production.
Photograph by: Jennilee Marigomen , submitted photo
Traveling through Vancouver's back alleys and narrow nooks, Lisa Giroday sees land that's ripe for food production in places that most people would easily dismiss.
As the urban agriculture movement continues to take hold, Giroday wants to challenge the limits of where people think food can be grown.
Got a patch of grass in front of your townhouse? A strip of greenery straddling the sidewalk and road? An apartment building with a perimeter of hedges? All those "marginalized" spaces where people might think to do no more than plant a bush or some flowers can be used for edible gardening, she says.
Giroday launched Victory Gardens in March along with friends Sam Philips, a master gardener, and Sandra Lopuch, an industrial designer. Their primary goal is to find innovative ways to incorporate local food production into urban environments.
In the past five months, they've helped clients install raised beds in overlooked spaces such as street boulevards, as well as holding edible gardening workshops to encourage more people to grow their own food.
Creativity is a big part of the Victory Gardens ethos. One of the first projects they took on was carving out edible gardening space for a town-house complex in Strathcona. The five owners each had a small "front yard," a plot about six by 12 feet, and they wanted a garden that looked great, but also produced food.
Victory Gardens helped them incorporate all sorts of salad greens into the existing ornamental gardens - lettuce, spinach, arugula, kale and chard - as well as root vegetables such as carrots and beets. And on the chain link fence that separated the townhouse complex from a neighbouring building, Victory Gardens spotted wasted space that could be transformed into a green wall of peas and beans.
"It looks amazing, it fully covers the chain link fence. So it offers that really nice esthetic appeal but it also reimagines where we can put food. A chain-link fence is really a built-in trellis, it's the perfect function!" says Giroday.
In another project, Victory Gardens installed a raised bed on the south side of a low-rise apartment building in Vancouver. Where once there was an overgrown patch, essentially a small plot between a pathway and the building, there's now a bounty of squash, corn, beets and tomatoes shared by tenants.
Giroday says any space can be used to grow food - from balconies, patios to rooftops - and is excited to see the movement take hold in different ways. A new condo building on Main Street has 12 community garden plots on its roof for residents and Victory Gardens recently consulted with another condo developer about incorporating community plots in a new apartment building.
The way Giroday sees it, the more food we can grow, the less dependent we become on imports and fossil fuels and the more sustainable we become as a society.
"The act of growing food has a pretty powerful way of changing people's perspective on how they consume. It's all round this pretty good thing," says Giroday.
Read more: http://www.theprovince.com/Life/2312467/story.html#ixzz21nGPyo4P
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