Canada: Move Over Farm To Table: Rooftop-to-table Is The Latest Word In Eating Local
For Rawlings, the challenges of urban gardening are far outweighed by the many rewards, which include developing a greater appreciation for the true cost of food waste.
By Chris Johns
Special to The Star
Thu., April 15, 2021
Excerpts:
The first signs of spring are popping up throughout southern Ontario, but what makes this bucolic scene different is that we’re two storeys up, on the roof of the brewery/restaurant Avling at the decidedly un-farm-like intersection of Queen and Pape in Leslieville.
The urban garden, which has been growing since Avling opened in 2019, supplies a varied abundance of produce, from carrots, green beans and tomatoes to snow peas, zucchini and beets, and all kinds of herbs. Some of this bounty makes it into the brewery’s storefront farmers’ market, started last summer and available seasonally, but most is used to keep the kitchen in the freshest ingredients possible. They even grow hops, though not nearly enough to provide for the brewery year-round.
Avling’s 4,000 square feet of rooftop garden can’t rival those vast acreages and will probably never even yield enough produce to turn a profit, but for Meighen that’s beside the point. “The idea was really about building an education space, a community space, a way to make the agricultural concepts of what ‘farm to table’ can mean concrete for people.”
The brewery ran a few gardening workshops last summer and plans on doing so again this year (pandemic restrictions permitting). Meighen and the restaurant’s two full-time gardeners, Lindsay Sangster and Micheline Lalonde, envision a place where people can learn how to replenish and improve their soil, or discover the proper way to save seeds, or even just where kids can come and plant a tomato seed, watch it grow through the year and bring home a few ripe tomatoes when they’re in season.
