The People's Garden Project with Angela Walcott

The podcast series, hosted by Angela Walcott, begins by exploring Derek Barber's farming journey and the process of co-creating Homestead TO. homesteadto.com/ Angela Walcott: Derek and Vinyse Barber teach others how to grow food without pesticides and herbicides through Homestead TO. It's an online and in-person program where you'll learn about balcony and yard growing techniques, as well as seed starting, building garden beds, composting, seed saving, and how to prepare your garden for the winter. In this episode, we'll learn more about how Derek Barber became so interested in gardening and what path he took to become a farmer. Derek Barber: Yeah. In terms of where I learned to grow, I always try to start out by just learning the fundamentals. So I took 25 different courses at Guelph within the horticulture certificate program, within their growing food for profit program, within the sustainable urban agriculture program. And then just a whole lot of electives on top of that. Learned all the basics and all the science behind really what makes plants grow, what makes soil work, how does one grow sustainably and whatnot. So that was the educational side or the more academic side, how I learned. But then beyond that, it was volunteering or just in some cases where I was able to find jobs, just anything in all different parts of agriculture. And I spent some time learning a little bit about landscaping so I could figure out how to do edible landscaping. I spent some time at a rooftop garden, a couple of rooftop gardens, actually container growing operations at a couple of baseline farms where you learn large scale farming and whatnot, and then volunteering at every community garden that I could. And I even got the pleasure of starting up a community garden as well, in Midtown Toronto. And then all that combined, the academic knowledge from Guelph, the practical knowledge from all these other different organizations kind of combined to really build the knowledge that I have. But I say that, but I still learn pretty much every day. You learn from your mistakes, but also from all the different combinations and permutations that can happen in nature. You never know it all. No, as much as people will tell you otherwise, nobody does.

Angela Walcott: In Episode 2 of The People's Garden Project, Derek Barber talks about food security, sustainability, and investing in your soil. Derek Barber: When you're running a garden and growing food, you definitely get a huge appreciation for nature because you're dependent on it. Unless you're gonna farm that conventional style and just use all fertilizer and just completely till the soil every year, you're dependent on all the different natural processes, and you start to even appreciate things like weeds for their benefits, even though obviously you don't want them there. But things like the different water cycles and the nutrient cycles that exist in nature, you are beholden to them. So you don't wanna fight it, you want just kind of roll with it. And that's kinda a big part of sustainable gardening, and that's a big part of our program. When we start talking about focus on your soil and invest in your soil, what we're really talking about is focus on nature and invest in nature and all the ecosystems that are already there. The last thing you want to do is build a sterile garden. It might look clean, but it's not good tasting food. It's not healthy from coming outta that garden. What we were trying to do, we actually sat down and created a bit of a vision board, and we picked a theme on this one, and we had a different theme where we created kind of an animal based organization and helped animals, and we created this organization because we wanted to help food security. We thought that was something that was really lacking in the city of Toronto where we don't produce enough our own food. We are really dependent on others. And if there's ever different transportation shocks, logistical shocks, pandemic type things where that can slow the flow of food going into the city, we have a bit of a problem. So we just kind of looked at the different ways to address food security. And honestly, we tried them all. We started out by doing a little bit of market gardening. We tried working for other kind of farm organizations or urban farming type organizations. But one of the things that we kind of just meandered into was just teaching other people, and we kind of hit upon something that we like because probably about a good 20 or more percent of all the land already in Toronto is usable, growable, front yards, backyards, and balconies. And if you could unlock that to growing food, that is the best way to really create food security in the city. Cuz real estate is the one thing that really prevents most people from growing. So just access to land or access to growable land, and if you're focusing on grass and shrubs and flowers, you can't focus on food. So we just basically teach people how to convert their gardens to growing food, and that's our way of just the way we think we're gonna have the most impact on improving food security in the city.

Angela Walcott: In Episode 3 of The People's Garden Project, Derek Barber of Homestead TO talks about the future farming program, which includes sustainable growing operations. Derek Barber: What we're trying to do in the first year of the program, we just teach people how to grow food in the first place. But then in the second year program, we try to give people access to space and they create models that they can really scale up or expand. So we're trying to enable people with the ability to just have land so they can start growing food for others and do something to really improve food security in the city of Toronto. 80% productivity is really good in Year One because it just gets better and better after that, as long as you're investing in the soil basically. Pretty soon by Year Three, we're gonna have probably about 12 inches of top quality, highly fertile, highly nutrient rich soil, but also a good water retention abilities in the soil. It's gonna be pretty awesome. It's mostly gonna be the graduates of the program that then take space. We're not trying to make it a community garden. What we're trying to do is we're trying to actually create sustainable growing operations in here. So whether it's just necessarily people growing for themselves. For that part, we're trying to just educate people on how to grow in their backyards and the front yards and their balconies and their countertops and whatnot. But then for this Year Two and Year Three type spaces on that, we're trying to create more sustainable operations. Something that can scale up and cause if I get my way, we're gonna be creating all sorts of new farmers within the city. Whether they're farming on public space, in just continuous backyards, whether they're farming in the Hydro corridors, anything like that. Something that we can really just dramatically increase the space, the productivity of that space, and ultimately the food grown in the city. Cause ideally, we should be able to grow about 50% of our food or fresh fruits and vegetables within the city limits. There's a whole lot of cities, even in northern climates all over the world that can do that. But in Toronto right now, it's about 3 or 4% of fruits and vegetables are kind of grown in the city. For everything else, we're dependent on others and that is the opposite of sustainability.