Community Gardening

First off, we live in a rain forest. Of course the forest is gone in the Lower Mainland--and so is our once deep, rich, and healthy topsoil--so we have to deal with the challenge of hydrology, aka retaining water for our food gardens and controlling run-off to protect everything from our neighbour's property to our stream and ocean water quality and biodiversity.

A great PDF how-to guide on creating a "rain garden"--which was written for our bioregion--is too large at 14 megaBytes to post on this site's server, so it is being hosted on a VV Director's Cloud account, and can be downloaded by clicking on this hyperlink.  If this link does not work, send us an email by clicking here and we can email it out in sections.

Kits Village has a gardening collaborative group, with members gardening in the Kits Village Collaborative Garden (now in our 8th year), a Green Space, in our Permaculture in Planters project and also a couple small Permaculture Food Forests. New members are welcome. We helped helped start and participated in the Westside Collaborative Garden (2010-12), and members helped start and participate in the Kits Community Centre Collaborative Garden. We also have 3 seed libraries, dinner groups, a recycling depot, host drop-in spaghetti nights, etc.

At Cottonwood Community Garden (just outside our Fieldhouse),Village has Permaculture, Herb Spiral, Inner City Village and DTES Neighbourhood House plots. Village also sponsors Woodland Community Garden.

At Abethau, we garden weekly at our Collaborative Permaculture Garden in the Community Eco-Art Garden.

If you're interested in participating in a VV community or collaborative garden or new gardening project please contact commmunitygardening@villagevancouver.ca or ross@villagevancouver.ca.

Interested in Seed Saving and Seed Sharing? Check out our Village Vancouver Seed Savers Group and Cedar Cottage Seed Savers Collective to learn how and to take advantage of nature's bounty.  Will you take on this task for your neighbourhood, and be the plant saviour for another corner of the earth? Currently, other Village seed saving efforts include Main Street Neighbourhood Seed Library and Kits Village Seed Savers/Kits Seed Library.
Another great Vancouver group, the Vancouver Plant & Seed Exchange Network, has started an amazing plant and seed sharing web resource, leveraging the power of nature and of the internet to expand our food choices for a 100-foot diet. Just click on this link.