Urban Farming Program

Project Overview

The Urban Farming Program converted eleven vacant lots and three rooftops into productive growing space, in partnership with Energy Hub and the neighbourhood associations that had been asking for them for years. Every site is run by the people who live beside it.

Our part was the unglamorous half: soil testing and remediation, water access, the twenty-year leases that make a fruit tree worth planting, and the insurance that lets a volunteer pick up a spade.

Building the Sites

Six of the eleven lots needed contaminated topsoil removed before anything could be planted in the ground. Raised beds on a capped surface were faster and cheaper on four of them, and the difference is visible in how quickly each site reached full production.

Water and season

Rainwater capture covers roughly seventy per cent of demand across the programme, with mains supply as backup. Two sites run unheated polytunnels, which extends the harvest at each end of the year by about six weeks.

Who grows what

Each site chooses its own crops. That was a deliberate decision rather than an absence of one: sites that were given a planting plan had markedly lower volunteer retention than those that argued their own out.

Results

The programme produced 14 tonnes of food in its second season, distributed entirely within the neighbourhoods that grew it, and now involves more than 400 regular volunteers.