Edible Garden Tour spreads local knowledge

Posted by Chris Shepherd on July 12th, 2010

Growing a successful vegetable garden takes experience and knowledge of the local environmental conditions. It can take a few seasons to become familiar with the tricks needed to accommodate the local climate and there’s a move in Nelson to make sharing that information easier.

At the end of this month that city will have its Second Annual Edible Garden Tour. The tour is self-guided and will feature roughly 20 gardens around Nelson.

Valerie Sanderson is organizing the tour “to give people a chance to showcase what they’re doing in growing food in the city and to give people a chance to learn from each other.”

She wants to consolidate the vegetable-growing knowledge in Nelson and also find a way to form links between the older generations (and their vast experience growing food) and the new gardeners in the community.

A taste of the tour

Sanderson gave me an advance tour of two of the gardens that will be part of the Edible Garden Tour. The first garden belongs to Nicholas Albright.

Albright’s garden is a wandering garden that flanks his Fairview home on both sides and dominates the backyard. He’s been building it up over the past year and half, turning over sod in favour of vegetable gardens. His goal is to have no grass within two years.

“It’s a bugger of a lot of work to dig up the turf,” Albright says with a smile. “You have to enjoy it.”

He calls his garden “a bit of a mish-mash,” but there’s a purpose behind having the same kind of vegetable growing in several different spots: Albright is looking for places in his garden that are best for each type of food.

He says gardening is the only thing keeping him sane. He grows corn, peas, tomatoes, artichokes, strawberries, zucchinis and many other veggies.

The other garden Sanderson brought me to was simpler, but still has something to teach, Sanderson says. It’s another Fairview garden, this one tended by a small community of women living in the house. The garden was neglected for a time before the women moved in and they’re discovering the garden’s potential together.

Sanderson likes what the two gardens show can be done.

Albright’s garden shows what one person with focus and energy can accomplish. The other shows what people can do together.

“It’s about food, but it’s also about people coming together and dealing with each other,” Sanderson says.

The details

Sanderson started this year’s garden tour by visiting the local seed exchanges looking for people with gardens to share. She collected a list of those interested and of those, some committed to being on the tour.

Sanderson will keep the tour small, around 20 gardens, to make it easy for people to walk the route. Too many gardens and the event, meant to encourage self-sustainability, becomes ironically unsustainable.

The Second Annual Edible Garden Tour in Nelson runs on Saturday, July 24 from 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Maps are available at Ellison’s Market and at the farmer’s market at Cottonwood Falls on the 24th.

While the majority of the tour is self-guided, there will be a guided tour of gardens in the Fairview neighbourhood, led by Don Carmichael.

This tour starts at 10:30 a.m. and meets at the arboretum and Kootenay Plant Garden by the field house in the Lakeside Soccer Fields. The walk should take about two hours. For more information contact Carmichael at coreyogi@gmail.com.

Here’s a map of Carmichael’s tour:
View Mindful Walking: a mini edible garden tour trek in a larger map.