Successful public garden experiment expected to grow

By Jessica Wallace

Every Tuesday morning, Kamloops retiree Lorraine Harries leaves her home, buys a coffee and waters a vegetable garden located several blocks away. Then she picks a few veggies for dinner and heads for home.

It’s not her garden, but Harries doesn’t worry about being accused of trespass or theft. That’s because she's just doing her part to nurture Kamloops' first public vegetable garden, an experimental venture located on a vacant lot in the downtown core that appears to have caught on.

“I hope they do it again next year, I’d volunteer again,” she said.

Harries heard about the public garden through her son, another volunteer who helped plan the garden. She was instantly keen on the idea and has taken it upon herself to walk down to Victoria Street every Tuesday and help out.

As people walk through the garden, browsing and picking vegetables, Harries waters and weeds. She said the garden has been treated with the utmost respect by the friendly visitors wandering through the green space.

“You just help yourself, that’s the community garden, that’s what community means,” she said.

That’s exactly how Laura Kalina, registered dietician with Interior Health and co-founder of the food policy council, envisioned the public garden being used when the idea was hatched two years ago.

“It’s a newer idea in North America,” Kalina said.

She said the main message the garden was designed to inspire was sustainability.

“The average food travels 3,000 kilometres, and look at all we can grow,” she said referring to the bounty of beets, tomatoes, beans, squash, sunflowers, basil, oregano, fennel, Swiss chard and many other vegetables growing in the garden.

"If there was an earthquake in Hope, Kamloops would be out of food in three days,” she added. "It would be nice to grow everything locally—to know where your food comes from.”

Kalina said the garden has nurtured more than vegetables.

“There’s a sense of community—it really builds community pride,” she said. “Lorraine is the perfect example—she comes, she waters, she grabs a few veggies.”

The idea started as a seed in Kalina’s mind but grew into a reality when a local landowner, Casey VanDongen, donated a vacant lot at 121 Victoria St. supporting the cause.

“We didn’t have use for the land at the time,” said VanDongen, president of Tri-City Contracting. “Rather than it just sit there and see it not used at all, that’s what we decided to do with it.”

VanDongen walks through the garden every day on his way to and from work.

“My business is downtown,” he said. “I think it’s a feature for the downtown area. It’s on a site where we demolished a couple buildings, the other parts should be cleaned up but it’s a start.”

He admitted he has no green thumb, but liked the idea of a public garden. “I thought it was a good cause,” he said.

He is happy with the success of the garden in its pilot year and said he would donate the land again as long as the owner of the other half of the lot doesn’t decide to build on it.

“Why not?” he said. “I’m happy, I was hoping to do something.”

After the land was donated, everything fell into place for the public garden.

“We had an excellent response,” Kalina said. “There was never a shortage of volunteers or support,” she added

“We received $5,000 in funding from Interior Health and $60,000 in kind [from various community contributors].”

The city helped by providing water, advertising and promoting the educational aspect of the garden by bringing in an expert on the topic of public gardens, Darrin Nordahl. The Kamloops Food Policy Council and the Thompson-Shuswap Master Gardeners worked with the group to foster volunteers, gain support and build and maintain the garden.

“It was a pilot project,” Kalina said. “It’s about getting stakeholders on board.”

Because of tremendous support the project received from the community and the city, it is expected return next year and may just be here to stay. Organizers are in the process of requesting permanent locations from the city for next year with two locations planned – one downtown and one on the North Shore.