Years ago, walking through Trent's main campus nursing a headache and a pile of reading, I stumbled across one of the campus' better-known secrets. The place is full of apples – not crab apples, but the real deal. The more you look for them, the more you'll find. And like any broke, enterprising student, I started harvesting.
Apples are great. Besides keeping the proverbial doctor away, they can also be (fairly easily) transformed into any number of delicious things. Apple pie. Apple sauce. Apple butter. I even made a large – and mostly drinkable – batch of hard apple cider.
Somewhere in the midst of my romance with Trent's apples (and Fleming has an even better supply), I was biking home from campus when I came across concord grapes. They were just sitting there, beside the path, belonging to no one. I'll admit that I looked over my shoulder once or twice as I stuffed my knapsack with grapes (which, by the way, is not a great idea), I couldn't believe that all these grapes were just there, free for the picking.
All of a sudden, it seemed like food was everywhere. Walnut trees by the London foot bridge. Fiddleheads in Jackson's Creek Park. Wild leeks, well, everywhere. I've even heard reports of puffball mushrooms – huge, all-you-can-eat mushrooms that grow in fields and forests in late summer and autumn – but I'll never tell you where. Urban foraging was, suddenly, my new favourite form of procrastination.
Scanning for wild edibles, I began to notice all of the other ways urban spaces are being reclaimed for low-impact, sustainable, close-to-home food production. In Peterborough and beyond, people are re-shaping their relationships to food and the urban landscape.
Big City Veggies
For those who mostly live in apartments, or move frequently, community gardening has provided a way to get harvesting. Below are some interesting alternatives to personal gardening.
VegetablePatch: VegetablePatch is an Ottawa-based urban CSA. A CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture, consists of a community of individuals who purchase up-front shares in a local farm's production. The purchase of shares provides farmers with capital early in the season, when they need it most, and shareholders get a weekly supply of local produce. Farmers and consumers share the risks and rewards of food production.
What's different about VegetablePatch is that, instead of growing crops on a farm outside the city, crops are grown in donated backyards. For those with an appreciation of local, organic produce – but lack a green thumb – VegetablePatch is a great idea. In exchange for use of your backyard, VegetablePatch will plant, tend, and harvest a garden, and provide you with a weekly basket of produce harvested from your (very) local community. All extra produce is sold locally, providing funds to support the organization.
Post-a-Patch: Post-a-patch is another clever idea by the folks behind VegetablePatch. It seems they were inundated with yard donations – more than they could ever hope to farm. So instead, they assembled a sort of yard-exchange, pairing non-gardeners with yard space with local gardeners, sans yard. This seems like a great way to bring communities together, as well as providing another way for apartment dwellers to garden.
Waste Not, Want Not
Not Far From The Tree: Not Far From The Tree is a Toronto initiative that takes forgotten fruit trees on private land and puts it to good use. A full-sized apple tree produces 100-350 pounds of apples a year (thanks Wikipedia!). For Torontonians who have had it with apple pie, Not Far From The Tree will send a team of volunteers to harvest your backyard bounty.
The spoils are then divided equally between the volunteers, the owner of the tree, and local community food programs. So far this year, volunteers have harvested over 18,000 pounds of urban fruit, including sweet cherries, sour cherries, mulberries, plums, apples, pears, sumach, and grapes. The program expects to expand in upcoming years.
Backyard/Farmyard
Backyard Chickens: I have to admit, I want chickens. I try to avoid eating factory-farmed eggs, sure, but with the prevalence of eggs from 'free run' chickens that aren't really, and organic eggs from chickens that are still kept in battery cages, sometimes its tempting to take matters into my own hands. And many have, and love it.
Raising chickens in the city isn't new. In fact, many cities, including Peterborough, banned urban chicken keeping only after World War II, when backyard chickens became associated with Eastern European immigration, and were banned in wave of anti-immigrant sentiment.
In recent years, New York, Portland, Seattle, Victoria, London, and Niagara Falls, along with numerous other US and Canadian cities, have legalized backyard chickens. Most city ordinances limit the size of backyard flocks – often to three hens – and ban the keeping of roosters in the city.
Although it varies by breed, hens in the city, when well cared-for, can be clean, quiet, happy, and healthy, providing three or four eggs a week per hen. If you get the right breed, and provide the right shelter, backyard flocks can manage Canadian winters just fine, and the internet provides a staggering array of hipster urban coop designs.
Keeping backyard chickens isn't illegal in Peterborough; however, it's not exactly legal either. The ordinance states that backyard chickens are legal within city limits provided they are maintained at a 'reasonable distance' from human residences. Since that original ordinance, 'reasonable distance' has been further defined by a city solicitor as 100 feet from any dwelling where food is prepared. I don't know about your backyard, but that pretty much eliminates every house in Peterborough I've ever seen.
That said, an informal survey of Peterborough residents reveals that the city seems to take a 'don't ask don't tell' approach to backyard flocks, and there are plenty of backyard farmers out there.
Trent University Rooftop Garden:
For over a decade, the roof of Trent's science complex has been home to an intensive vegetable garden supervised by Professor (and local farmer) Tom Hutchinson. The garden is used both for research and to provide the food served by the Seasoned Spoon Café. In a previous interview, Hutchinson told Arthur that the garden "demonstrates our ability to use unused space for productive purposes. Since most of us live in cities it behooves us to maximize the ecological aspects of the urban environment. Rooftop gardens clean up pollution and create aesthetically pleasing, calming spaces to be."
Peterborough Gleans:
Gleaning. v. "The act of collecting leftover crops from farmers' fields after they have been commercially harvested, or from fields where it is not economically profitable to harvest" (thanks again, Wikipedia). Peterborough Gleans organizes buses from Peterborough to local farms, where participants 'glean' crops that remain after the harvest.
Peterborough Community Garden Network:
The Peterborough Community Garden Network matches willing pieces of land with enthusiastic gardeners. And that, my dear, is how food is born.
Garden 579/Food Not Bombs:
If you've taken a walk down George Street lately, you've probably seen Garden 579. Garden 579 sits on a site of an abandoned lot, which, with a lot of labour and love, has been transformed into a productive garden and community hub. The garden is collectively tended, and the food it provides contributes to the weekly free meals served at Peterborough City Hall from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m.
