by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Nothing says local empowerment like fresh vegetables.

For the past five years, groups of community-oriented NDG gardeners have been hewing and hoeing throughout the summer in order to get the kind of nutritional access not available to them in local supermarkets. And, thumbing their collective noses at profit-driven agro-industry giants, what they haven’t been able to eat, they donate to local food banks and community organizations.

The Victory Garden Network—named after the community gardens of World War II, and run with the same spirit of solidarity and community—has grown rapidly. Run by community organization Eco-initiatives and having started out as a small group of dedicated gardeners to over 180 individuals today, it has since teamed up with neighbourhood organizations like the NDG Food Depot, Head and Hands, Chez mes amis restaurant and Forward House, a mental health resource, to become one of the most respected and well-known advocates for community gardening. They celebrated their fifth anniversary, and their re-branding of Eco-initiatives as Communiterre, last weekend at their 19th and newest garden, the Phoenix, built over a former gas station parking lot behind the Unitarian Church at Claremont and de Maisonneuve.

But it doesn’t stop with just fresh fruit and veggies, says Communiterre’s development officer Martha Stiegman. The gardens also provide a way for people to get food they can’t get elsewhere.

“Food security means having access to culturally appropriate food,” she says. “Not everyone wants to eat Kraft Dinner. It’s a way for people to grow the kinds of food that they can’t find because it’s too expensive, like organic okra, or a chilli pepper from Kenya.”

It’s also sociable. Run as a co-op, each garden has input from every group member, who meet at the beginning of the season to decide what to grow. Each member takes what they need throughout the year, and donates what’s left over—Stiegman says it’s about a third of all the produce—to local food banks. And there’s no waiting list to join.

“The group dynamic is very important,” she says. “There’s always room to join. We find the room.”

Which is important to someone like Anita DeMeo, a single mother of three who moved to Montreal 12 years ago from the Gaspé. “When I first got here, I called the city and was told that they’d put me on a waiting list for a garden,” she says. “And after three or four years of waiting, I gave up.” After finding out about the garden at a local food bank, she joined up and has been a part of the network for almost five years.

The network will also be starting up what they are calling the Good Food Box program, which buys organically grown produce off local farmers and sells them by the bag-load at reasonable prices. “It’s like a hybrid between a food bank and a community-supported agriculture group, where we make the link between community groups and organic farmers,” Stiegman says.

And that’s good news for the financially strapped, DeMeo says. “You’re saving 20 to 40 per cent on vegetables. That’s what happens when you cut out the middleman.”