Burnaby Allotment Gardens is home to almost 1,000 pairs of green thumbs
STORY AND PHOTOS BY MARIO BARTEL
BURNABY NEWSLEADER
NOTE: This was written JUNE 14th 2008
Greg McEwen has carved himself a little piece of paradise. He also chopped and dug and yanked and hauled.
When his wife, Denise, gave him a plot in the back corner of the Burnaby Allotment Gardens as a birthday present 22 years ago, the area tucked into the extreme southeast corner of Burnaby below Marine Way still hadn’t been cleared. McEwen looked at the tangled growth of trees, bushes and brush and thought, “it was just a lot work I didn’t need.” But with visions of being able to build a tool shed dancing through the New Westminster carpenter’s head, they got busy. And really, really dirty.
Sitting on the stoop of his bright blue tool shed with the smiling yellow sun mounted above the door, rainbow coloured whirlygigs spinning in the breeze and grape vines beginning their annual crawl over the gabled roof, McEwen still winces at the thought of all that work.
But it was all worth it.
Two or three times a week the McEwens escape their apartment to get their hands dirty. Greg tends to the tomatoes and erects structures like the picnic table he built around a nearby tree while Denise and his mother, Marion McLaren, fuss over the flower gardens that surround their plot “It’s sort of therapeutic,” says Greg. “I like the outdoors and the garden is a place to be outdoors. This is our backyard.”
That’s how many of the nearly 1.000 gardeners who tend the 373 plots at the gardens feel.
They’re city folk who live in apartments or condos without space to grow a few vegetables, or immigrants who were initiated as children to grow their own food and now seek a plot of land like they had back home.
‘THIS IS MY CHURCH’
Like Frank Mesini. 72, whose family back in Italy, near Venice, were orchardists. He’s been growing beets, tomatoes, potatoes, garlic, radicchio and beans in his plots for more than 20 years. Now retired from his work in a factory, he turns the soil, plucks the weeds and hauls the water hose for a few hours every morning.
“I don’t go to church. This is my church here,” he says, leaning on his spade, swear beading on his brow beneath his wide straw hat. “I see nature, the trees growing, the vegetables; to me, I’m here in paradise.”
Like many of the gardeners from the “old country,” Mesini is strictly old school. Fertilizers and pesticides never touch his peppers. Instead, he labouriously turns old organic matter like clippings, dead weeds and even egg shells back into the black earth. He was composting long before it became a how-to segment on Home and Garden TV.
BARAGA was founded in the mid 1970s with a grant from the provincial government and the City of Burnaby.
THE TWO-MILE DIET
Mike Calderone, 85, is one of BARAGA’s originals. After a lifetime of toil, including seven years crouched in a Belgium coal mine 1,600 feet underground, he needed an escape.
“What am I going to do at home, watch TV all day?” says Calderone, his thick fingers wrapped around a tumbler of his own homemade apple wine as he takes a break from. raising his garden beds with a foundation of grass clippings. “Nobody bothers me here. It’s nice and cool.”
Calderone visits his garden a couple of days a week, leaving home at five in the morning, puttering around his potatoes, peppers and parsnips until one in the afternoon. The parsnips aren’t doing so well this year, he frets. But that’s OK, he’ll try a third planting.
“Once you come down here, the rest of the day goes so good,” says Calderone.
Like most gardeners, he grows more. than he could possibly eat, so he shares his bounty with friends, family and even his dentist, with whom he trades tomatoes for free dental work. He’s especially proud of his garlic crop, which he uses to spice his homemade sausages.
The gardens are as much about growing community as sprouting spinach, says Thompson. Senior gardeners like Calderone are always willing to share their years of experience and knowledge. When members fall ill, go on an extended vacation or are otherwise unable to care for their plot, others pitch in to keep it going. A portion of the harvest is donated regularly to the Food Bank. And Thompson says he can’t even begin to calculate how many friends, family and co-workers benefit from the gardeners’ toil.
“They’re advocating a lOO-mile radius for growing your own food, but I think we’re down to a two-mile radius here,” says Thompson.
Back in the McEwen’s corner of paradise, Greg points to the rows of corn just starting to eke their way up to the late spring sky. Never in his wildest dreams did he ever imagine himself a gardener.
“I didn’t know a weed from a plant,” he says. “But it’s worth the effort you put into it.”
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