Over the past three years, the number of community gardens in Vancouver has more than doubled, yet the wait lists show no signs of getting any shorter. Green thumbs rose to the City’s challenge of creating 2,010 gardens by 2010 to serve as a legacy of the recent Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games. Despite this huge increase in availability, Andrew Pask of the City’s Social Policy Division, estimates that the wait list for garden plots across the city is “at least in the thousands.”

As a Project Coordinator for the Vancouver City Hall Community Garden, I receive many requests from interested gardeners wanting to be put on the wait list. There is currently a list of close to 60 people hoping to join this garden, but many other gardens have even longer waiting lists. Want a plot at the Davie Village Community Garden? With a list of 150 interested gardeners, you might be waiting until 2022.

It’s easy to understand why these gardens have become so popular, as gardening has been shown to reduce stress, and carries the tangible reward of taking home your very own produce, even if you don’t have a backyard. In Vancouver more so than most areas, affordable land has become scarce, pushing the demand for community gardens even higher. There’s still an abundance of brown fields that could be turned into gardens, that just need the right group planning and initiative to be turned into a garden. (To learn more, download our free resource,  No Plot is Too Small.)

There’s also simple quick start-up solutions if you want to garden and live in a condo, such as woolly pockets or a simple container garden. I’d personally encourage anyone to go try and get some dirt under their fingernails –I’m almost certain you’ll be glad that you did.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 19th, 2010 at 9:52 am and is filed under Gardening, In the Field, Issues, Vancouver. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.