Canada: A secret garden in Montreal helps fill emergency food baskets
It’s “about wanting to take control over our food donations,” said Eric Kingsley, Sun Youth’s director of emergency services.
By Susan Schwartz
Montreal Gazette
Aug 03, 2020
Excerpt:
For Michelle Della Corte, there is poetry in the urban gardens in which she spends her days — in the Swiss chard and kale now being harvested weekly, in the tomatoes and the corn, the eggplant, the sunlight and the heat: all of it.
Della Corte is garden co-ordinator of Sun Youth’s two urban gardens, both of which provide organic produce for the community organization’s emergency food basket program. She works three days a week at the larger garden, at Sun Youth’s St-Laurent warehouse, and two days at its newer garden, a hidden, verdant spot on the site of the former Outremont rail yard just along the road from Sun Youth’s administrative centre on Parc Ave. near Beaubien St.
The unused portion of terrain on the Université de Montréal’s new campus, where a science complex is under construction, is known as Projets éphémères; it’s home to more than a dozen urban agriculture projects whose usual educational activities and gatherings have been moved online this season by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last year, a total of about 2,000 pounds of produce was harvested from the two Sun Youth gardens; that’s a fair bit, although not enough to supply all the produce in its emergency food baskets, which go to about 130 families per day. That figure is up from 100 before pandemic-related job losses, financial insecurity and other troubles greatly increased demand.
