Canada: Vancouver Downtown Eastside grandmas plant seeds, grow more than garden vegetables
The Urban Farming Poh-Pohs are a group of grandmothers and older women who grow vegetables in raised beds on a plot of land at Jackson and East Hastings in Vancouver
By Kevin Griffin
Vancouver Sun
Jun 29, 2020
Excerpt:
In a Downtown Eastside community garden, a group of grandmother gardeners love their vegetables — and the vegetables love them right back.
For two growing seasons, more than a dozen older women from the Vancouver neighbourhood have been growing bok choy, watercress, tomatoes and other vegetables in raised beds on a plot of land at the corner of Jackson and East Hastings.
While the garden started out in part to provide fresh produce for seniors living in a neighbourhood where more than half the grocery stores have closed in recent years, it blossomed into something more.
Women who started out as strangers became friends as they shared stories and got to know each other by gardening, weeding, harvesting and cooking.
Their camaraderie has been recorded in a podcast called Roots and Seeds.
For 2020, the physical distancing requirements of the novel coronavirus pandemic meant the urban farmers couldn’t sow heritage seeds in the garden as they intended, said Kathleen Flaherty, podcast co-writer with Kathy Feng.
