Spring and summertime means that it’s time to till the soil, plant seeds, tend to the garden and, hopefully, watch the plants grow. For a few Ontario young adults, their community gardens mean a lot more.
In the Victoria Hills area of Kitchener, Ont., an area that is populated mainly by immigrant groups and sees a great deal of violence, there are two community gardens run by Christians.
Brandi and Nathan Thorpe, 23 and 28, respectively, who both are graduates of Canadian Mennonite University, Winnipeg, are gardeners at the Victoria Hills Community Garden and helped pioneer a second one at Hazelglen Alliance Church, where they attend. There is currently just one plot at the church, but they hope to expand it to more than 15 in the future for the churchgoers and community to make use of.
Andrew Wiebe, 28, who attends Breslau Mennonite Church, works at the community gardens and coordinated the set-up of new plots this year.
The point of the gardens, they say, is to create a safe space for people in their community to gather and to get to know one another better. While they plant rhubarb, parsley, onions, potatoes, spinach, garlic, tomatoes, melons, squash, and a whole host of other fruits and vegetables, long-time Canadians connect with diverse groups of immigrants from China, Sudan, Burma Myanmar, Iran, Iraq and Turkey, among other countries.
“I have a Kurdish friend and we talk about the best practices for growing different things,” Wiebe says. “I learn a lot from him, so we really connect around the garden.”
The Thorpes have invited friends from the garden over for tea and they have reciprocated. The couple recently spent a weekend at a lake with an Iranian couple.
Because there are so many different people groups in Kitchener, there is a tendency for people to stick with their own group and not branch out, Nathan says. “People, including myself, have a trend towards staying with their own kind and doing what’s familiar. This garden and many other things encourage people to interact with one another in a peaceful activity.”
“It allows a consistent space for us to share our lives together,” Brandi adds.
According to the Thorpes and Wiebe, the gardens are also about promoting peace in a broken neighbourhood.
“One of the major obstacles in most peace work is ignorance of the other,” Brandi says, citing, “fear of other religions and people groups. In order to remove that, you have to know who the other is. We live in a community with a dozen or two different people groups. When it comes to gardening, it’s so easy to get to know your neighbour and to remove that fear.”
“I think it’s a good way to work for peace in the neighbourhood,” Wiebe says. “We have some inter-ethnic enmity, so I see this as a good way of crossing some of the cultural barriers and helping people in friendship across these barriers.”
Wiebe does this, in part, by teaching neighbourhood children about gardening.
Finally, the Thorpes find spiritual parallels in their work in the gardens.
“I have been amazed, year after year, the amount of spiritual parallels that relate to gardening,” Nathan says.
“It all comes down to the fact that God loves us,” Brandi notes. “We do what we do because God loves us.”
The community gardens function because of volunteers and donations. They have received a couple of municipal government grants and local businesses donate tools. They sometimes borrow equipment from people in the neighbourhood.
And for the people in this typically low-income area of town, the community gardens also help lower food costs.
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