UVic "reconstructs" their lawn

Despite my predictions to the contrary, UVic Grounds moved in last night, went to town with their heavy machinery before putting up a beautiful fence. Ball’s in the guerrilla gardeners court now.

What exactly do they want? The first and most logical demand is for new community garden space, preferably smack in the middle of campus. They also want a giant educational farm, 15 acres be exact. Their suggested location: Cedar Hill X Rd. lands. Given the lands were once a farm and still have fruit trees, these ideas seem fairly reasonable so far.

Still in the reasonable category is the idea of more fruit trees on campus, to take advantage of Victoria’s Mediterranean-like climate. It is their time-frame and scale I quibble with: 500 trees  in five years. Trees take a decade or more to mature. Simpler would be to change (or subvert, depending on your worldview) UVic’s natural tree replacement and addition programs. The only work needed now revising whatever plan already exists.

And now we get to the insane. A department of agriculture? With 6 full time faculty? Aside from the small matter that UVic seriously lacks office and classroom space for its existing courses — let alone a brand new department — where is the money going to come from? What are they going to teach? And more cynically, what kind of monetization is possible? So I say: get thyself to UBC. They are BC’s agriculture specialists. Have been for a long time. No need to duplicate that.

The rest are a wash. Ten acres of ethnobotanical gardens? A LEED certified building? A food harvest festival? Interesting and not impossible.

Surprisingly, the garden in question is still in existence as of today. Like the rabbit problem, I suspect the university will wait for the summer to deal with it. Less students to chain themselves to bulldozers/live-traps that way.

If all this digging has prompted one good thing, it is that students are talking about community gardens, most of them for the first time. Whether or not that is a good thing is a matter of debate, like I had with a fellow student yesterday. Maybe something will come of this. After all, the reasonable community gardens group can play good cop: “Well, you could be dealing with them…”

Youth protecting Yams, satirical take on the Youth protecting Youth issue*.

The guerrilla gardeners at UVic have — technically still are — struck again, replanting the garden in front of the McPherson Library. With the current community gardens under threat of being turned into a warehouse, students decided to take direct action and plant a garden in the middle of UVic. That work was subsequently ripped out by UVic in the middle of night, spawning this second effort.

While the UVic Student’s Society, perhaps  not surprisingly, lacks an official position on the ad-hoc community garden, one of the senior UVSS people I spoke to said the UVSS lacks even a more generic statement of support for community gardens at UVic and that it ” might be a good idea”.

What happens next is anyone’s guess. Several people I spoke to seemed to think that the university will likely wait until the summer to rip out this garden 2.0, mostly to avoid further confrontation. Bunnies might not be the only things getting culled this summer.

*Youth Protecting Youth is a pro-life group that was denied club funding by the UVSS due to their use of shock tactics with images of aborted fetuses.

Monteith St. Allotment gardens. Photo credit: Friends of Bowker Creek

Oak Bay’s allotment gardens are expanding. With the recent clearing of the land on the south side of Bowker Creek, space was created for a dozen new garden plots. Given the expansion, Oak Bay Parks and Rec thought it would be a good time to talk about the future of the allotment gardens with many the existing and wait listed allotment gardeners. The discussion covered a number of possibilities, including standardizing size of the beds, the creation of an association to help govern the gardens and more.

The two most contentious ideas, that of shrinking the beds to a standard size and of a 3-year rotation plan were both roundly rejected by both existing and wait listed plot holders. The benefit of shrinking to a standardized 6.5′ x 17′ is that it would allow 38 plots in the space of the existing 12. Both of these proposals were felt to be disrespectful of existing users who have spent years improving the soil.

In many other municipalities, an association governs the allotment gardens, so the idea was raised of creating something similar in Oak Bay. There was a lot of discussion around the pros and cons of such a scheme with no clear consensus. Regardless of that, the current plot holders will be asked to nominate an informal spokesperson to liaise staff.

When the question of costs came up, it was quickly made clear that the current $15/year was too low to cover the nearly $800/year cost of running the gardens, $340 of which is the water bill alone. With the price set to rise to $30/year, the current plot holders wanted access to year-round washroom in Fireman’s Park and possibly a fence to keep out people and deer.

With the current wait list at 25 and an average wait of 7 years, the question of expanding beyond Monteith St. has come up many times. Many areas of the municipality might be able to host to new allotment gardens, including areas such as Fireman’s Park just across the street to Uplands Park to the green space by the track at Oak Bay High School. All of these are and a few more were raised as possibilities, although there are many obstacles between now and the first shovel hitting the ground.

One of the current plot holders mentioned that the allotment gardens have never really been advertised, so their knowledge has mostly spread through word of mouth. This lack of knowledge is also probably only Councillor Ney and myself were the only spectators as it were. Everybody else at the meeting was either directly involved with Parks, either as staff or on the commission, a current plot holder or on the wait list.

Both the Minutes and Recommendations (both PDF) are available. The next step is for the recommendations to go to the Parks and Recreation Commission, who can make the decisions necessary. They meet next at 7pm on February 3rd, 2010 in the Council Chambers at Oak Bay Municipal Hall.

Image is licensed Creative Commons By Attribution. Hattip to Urban Cartography.

Estevan Village Food Roots pocket market

Yesterday marked the return of the Food Roots pocket market in Estevan Village. This means good, local produce is now available every Thursday from 3pm to 6pm. Of course, I had to go down buy some vegetables, take a few pictures and chat with people.

When I was there around 4pm, it was fairly busy, with at least one person at shopping at all times. Speaking with Larkin, the Food Roots employee running the stall, she said that this was amongst their busiest markets and that business on of the first day of this year has already been pretty good.

Larkin was kind enough to take some Bicycle Master Plan promotion cards. They can be seen by the till. The more people we can reach, the better the plan will be.

For those in other parts of the city, Food Roots operates a total of 11 number of markets around Greater Victoria, from Vic West where they started to right downtown in Centennial Square. If you don’t have a pocket market near your house, they offer a handy Pocket Market toolkit to help you get one going.

A few more shots of the market in action:

John Snively with his haul of vegetables

Larkin with customer