Fruits (and vegetables) of their labour: Why I got involved in this gardening project

It's early March, and I'm sitting at the kitchen table, slowly turning the pages of a seed catalogue. Since Snowmageddon, the world has been monochromatic and my eyes are hungry for colour.

The orange of a Nantes carrot. The pale green of a Alderman tall telephone pea. The luscious red of a strawberry just begging to be bitten.

I've loved gardening, specifically vegetable gardening, my entire life. I remember helping my father haul home buckets of beach sand and peat, laboriously turning it into the rocky clay next to our house, hilling up rows with tiny footpaths between.

I also remember reaching into the soil to pull up a radish, forgetting that we'd recently added capelin to the beds, and coming up with a handful of maggoty fish. Gardening isn't all roses, after all.

But here, in early March, there's more going on. The news is full of stories of the new virus running rampant in China and it's coming our way.

It's kind of hard to believe, but something in the pit of my stomach tells me this is going to be a scary year. Maybe a scarce year.

Where the food comes from

I've always felt this vague worry about the fact that we live on a rocky island in the middle of the Atlantic where practically everything we eat is shipped in. I've heard it said that we have seven days of food stores here before we'd run out though I don't know whether that's true or not.

But as global borders start to close and food production lines start to fragment, my worries increase. My garden planning takes on a new tone, feeling less like a hobby and more like a stockpile.

At the grocery store, I am disheartened by how expensive fresh food is. (Not to mention how not-very-fresh it is by the time it gets to us.) I think about how, if the ever-rising grocery bill is concerning for my middle-class dual-income household, what must it be like for someone who doesn't have my privilege?

I imagine the despair a parent must feel when their child asks for grapes or berries and they have to say no because they're not in the budget.

And again, there's the 2020 factor.

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What will this year look like for those families when prices inevitably go up due to scarcity, and how can I help? Donations are nice, but maybe I could teach some folks how to grow their own veggies instead?

Then I realize the people who might benefit most from a small kitchen garden also might not have a yard in which to plant. Or funds for the materials to get started. And that's when Project Grow was born.

Things fell into place

An amazing team of volunteers quickly came together.

The details were many. The idea shifted and changed as we worked through logistics of sourcing supplies, the quickly approaching growing season, the weight of a container once filled with soil. We settled on smaller containers restaurant bus bins, in fact.

We chose plants that would be easy to grow in shallow soil, in our trying climate, for someone who was a complete novice.

We found those who were eager to own their own little patch of green, thanks to the Community Centre Alliance. And on a gorgeous sunny day in late May, we stood on the grounds of Government House and shoveled soil into containers, topped each with a brown bag of seeds and fertilizer, added our how to handbook, and sent 500 gardens-to-be off to the homes of our gardeners-to-be.

I don't know if we actually lowered anyone's food bill this summer. I don't know if anyone ate substantially more nutritious food because of Project Grow.

But I do know that hundreds of people put their hands in the soil, planted seeds, gently watered tender shoots and tasted the fruit of their labourinstead of that of a farm worker thousands of kilometres away.

I do know that kids and parents shared the joy of growing and eating their own food at home.

And I hope at least a few of them discovered not only a new passion, but the knowledge that maybe we actually can grow everything we need to fill our bellies right here in Newfoundland and Labrador if only we have the collective will do so.

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