It has taken a few years but lavender now dots the sloping space, its purple tubular features adding to the revitalized esthetic.
When Jenafor Shaffer first moved to Plateau Village in the Pemberton Heights neighbourhood five years ago, she was excited to work on the shared gardening area available to residents of the townhouse complex.
“I’ve always loved to garden,” she notes. “One of the reasons I moved into this complex is we have a large piece of property with lots of gardening and opportunities for people to garden if they wish to.”
It wasn’t long, though, before she noticed an “eye-sore” lurking at the end of the complex. Located on district property, the green space was overrun with blackberries, knotweeds, old stumps, and garbage.
Shaffer decided she wanted to clean it up. Along with Heather Maytum and a few other residents, including her husband, the team of helping hands set to work deleting the detritus.
When they were done, Shaffer had an idea: “I thought this would be a perfect place to do a community garden or a vegetable garden.”
After contacting the district, the group was connected with a liaison, who was working on starting a program to beautify some of the district’s property.
“So we were actually the first what they call Adopt a Street Garden,” explains Shaffer.
The district provided bark mulch to put around the beds and down the slope, Shaffer’s husband built boxes to house veggies, the group of neighbours added some seating to the area, and a new garden and community space was born.
“We just have so much support from neighbours,” says Shaffer. “It’s a lovely neighbourhood.”
The little-garden-that-could has been producing vegetables for a while now even though it only has about five vegetable boxes, and Shaffer hopes their yield will increase each year.
“We love doing it so we’ve worked hard at doing it,” she notes. “Overall it’s doing great.”
This year, her husband built a small greenhouse for tomatoes, and blueberry shrubs have been added to the slope alongside the lavender. “It’s starting to look pretty good. Every year it’s going to look better,” says Shaffer.
Although this isn’t technically a community garden, anyone is welcome to visit the space and sit with their coffee or have a chat with a neighbour. And the vegetables are all up for grabs.
“The food that we grow we share,” says Shaffer, adding: “Anybody who passes by leaves with a handful of vegetables.”
