Have you ever wondered how many veggies come from our gardens, including those downtown and from our farm? You might not be surprised to hear that most of our veggies come from our peri-urban farm while our urban gardens produce a considerably smaller quantity. To know more about how much produce was grown and a full debrief on the 2014 season, click here.
Still, the urban gardens play an important role as the entry point for many community members into the wonderful world of gardening and local food production. In fact, Santropol Roulant’s urban gardens become a playground and classroom every season for young and not-so-young gardeners.
One of the Roulant’s educational projects, named Entre grange et gratte-ciel, brings two different types of agriculture together: urban agriculture which happens in the city and peri-urban agriculture, which is defined as a somewhat identical agriculture to the one we find in the countryside, but which happens in the urban periphery. One aspect of this project includes the preparation and facilitation of educational workshops welcoming more than 320 young montrealers coming from several day camps and schools such as Camp Cosmos, Y des femmes, Robin des Bois, YMCA, Pousses urbaines, Am Stram Gram, McGill Explorations Summer Camp, Ateliers Boite-à-Lunch, Elizabeth High School and Gerald McShane School.
We want to thank and congratulate our summer interns, Corinne, Jérémie, Marc-Antoine, Justine, Keara, Morijah, Guillaume, to have made of these workshops a real success. Here’s an idea of what it looked like:
July 2014. When a group from Camp Cosmos visits Santropol Roulant’s, they take a full tour of the building (kitchen, compost room, bikeshop, volunteer lounge), a finish with the grand highlight: The rooftop garden! The kids participate in a discovery game with their senses, becoming honeybees and exploring the garden with their eyes closed. The kids are enjoying it so much that the camp counsellors have a hard time to move on to the next activity. Finally, the animators succeed in attracting the kids’ attention and invite them to harvest some of the rooftop grown veggies which will be used in a salad and eaten on the spot. Some of the veggies will also be offered to kids for them to bring them home and share them with their families. The group reach the carrot patch the kids have been waiting for. A camp animator ask: ‘Who wants to harvest some carrots?’. A young girl takes on the challenge, without any specific expectations. It’s only when the carrot is out of the ground and sits in her hands that she shouts with great enthusiasm: ‘I HARVESTED MY FIRST CARROT!’ The camp counsellors assisting the scene will long remember her reaction full of excitement. After this moment, they will be able to say that a day in the Roulant’s gardens definitely impacted their young visitors, reconnecting them to the source of their food.
We want to thank the financial partners for this project: the Fonds régional d’investissement jeunesse (FRIJ), TD Friends of the Environment Foundation and the Telus Community Boards. Thanks to their support, many hundreds of young Montrealers had the chance to live a unique experience in Santropol Roulant’s gardens.
The project Entre grange et gratte-ciel was also on the front page of the Gazette last July. To read the article or watch a short video of one of the garden tours, click here.
Finally, we want to share with you a testimony from one of the coordinators at the Ateliers Boite-à-Lunch sharing a kid’s reaction right after she visited Santropol Roulant’s farm:
‘When we got back to the office, Arianne walked through the garden out back and immediately asked if she could come help grow food in the garden.We are signing her up this week to start collective gardening!
Wow! The Roulant’s garden team is now looking forward to a well deserved rest. Their efforts were fruitful and there are many things to be proud of!
We wish a wonderful winter season to all!
– Noémie, Carlo, Tim and Sam, on behalf of SR’s Agriculture Team