Food gardens take root on the front lawn | Canada Voices

One hundred and fifty tomato plants blanketed Alea Cardarelli’s front yard in Gatineau in the summer of 2022.

The unconventional garden was born from a promise Ms. Cardarelli made to her husband: he’d never have to mow their patchy lawn again.

Grocery prices for produce had grown exorbitant. Plus, it felt “sterile” buying tomatoes from a store in summer, Ms. Cardarelli said. So she turned to her sunny, south-facing front yard and began planting tomato seedlings. Midway through that first summer, her bounty surpassed 100 pounds.

“I had neighbours coming by asking what I was doing. They were all excited,” she said. Gifts from other gardeners appeared on her porch – a package of bulbs, a bundle of beans and herbs with a handwritten note.

One day, an older biker arrived to her front yard garden. Clad in leather, an “Eff Trudope” patch stitched on his jacket, he cradled a monster-sized celery plant in his arms. Earlier in the summer, they’d talked about her trouble growing celery. So he uprooted one of his plants and brought it to her, accepting tomato seedlings in return.

“And off he went. Never saw him again, but what a great moment,” said Ms. Cardarelli, a 47-year-old civil servant. “It’s a softer life when you have a front garden. Talking about plants makes everybody kinder.”

Gardeners across Canada are ripping out their front lawns and planting productive vegetable gardens in their place. Some move to the front because it’s sunniest there. Others with backyard vegetable gardens seek to expand their growing territory curbside. Some do it to save on inflated grocery prices and to feel self-reliant. Many talk excitedly about sharing their horticultural tips and harvests with new, unexpected friends out front.

Like pollinator gardens, the rise of food gardens signals a slow shift away from the front lawn − highly manicured and high-maintenance. For years, vegetables weren’t considered attractive enough for the front of the house, with shorn grass and pretty flowers the norm. Early adopters of front yard vegetable gardens risked neighbour complaints about messy compost, pests and the potential for theft.

“Fifteen years ago, it was sort of not acceptable to have a food garden in your front yard. They were something you put in the backyard, out of sight,” said Niki Jabbour, a Halifax gardening expert and author of 2020’s Growing Under Cover. She said that changed as produce prices soared and people saw how beautiful food gardens can be. “It’s a bit of a status symbol now to have a tidy vegetable garden in your front yard producing some of your own food.”

In Scarborough, Ont., Deonarly Songcuya has grown an astonishing variety in her front yard over seven years, including tomatillos, Thai basil, okra, kohlrabi, luffa (a tropical gourd), and sixty pepper varieties, five-alarmers like the Trinidad Scorpion and Carolina Reaper. With the harvest, the 38-year-old makes her own hot sauces, salsas, relishes, sauerkraut and kimchi.

Raised in Manila, Ms. Songcuya remembers her mother growing vegetables on their rooftop, like many in the city did. During typhoon season, the garden fed them through power outages and store closures.

“Now that I have my own garden, I started to reminisce on how and why my mom gardened,” Ms. Songcuya said. “Gardening, it gives me peace.”

She sees her children, 5 and 15, connecting to nature and learning about biodiversity and the value of farmers’ work. Ms. Songcuya joked that this education extends to her husband, who thought tomatoes grow on trees.

She loves giving curious passersby a tour of her green world: “I want to educate people that this is how much you can grow in your front yard.”

Michael Levenston was inspired in the 1970s watching Chinese grandmothers growing “fabulous,” highly productive vegetable gardens on every square inch of their properties in Vancouver’s Chinatown.

“That motivated us to say, a lot of food can be grown,” said Mr. Levenston, executive director of City Farmer Society, a Vancouver non-profit promoting urban agriculture since 1978.

In cities, Canadians are growing food wherever they can find sun and space: front and back yards, yes, but also balconies, rooftops, boulevards, school properties, driveways and alleyways that have been de-paved, even traffic circles. For people living in food deserts, these unconventional gardens offer access to fresh produce. Sometimes, growing it yourself is the only way to get a hard-to-source vegetable for a family recipe.

In 2022, a million Canadian households planned to grow food for the first time, with 85 per cent of new gardeners living in cities, according to a survey from Dalhousie University and Angus Reid.

The push follows great interest in food gardening since the arrival of COVID-19 and the panic buying and grocery store lineups that followed. Under lockdown, neighbours desperate for human contact migrated toward the street, sitting on their porches and gardening out front.

“For a long time, people have gone to their backyards for privacy: that’s where all the living happened,” said Tara Nolan, whose book Gardening Your Front Yard was published one day before the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic.

“More and more, people are doing more within their front yards,” said Ms. Nolan, who’s been cultivating a vegetable garden in front of her home in Dundas, Ont.

City Farmer Society’s Mr. Levenston said people gravitate toward growing more of their own food in times of crisis and uncertainty. Through the First and Second World Wars, Canadians uprooted front yards, flower beds and vacant lots for “victory gardens,” which helped fill pantries during rationing and freed up transport for military shipments overseas.

Today, some vegetable growers have the Trump administration’s trade war, tariffs and deportations of migrant farm workers on their minds.

Call it food sovereignty or self-sufficiency, gardeners like to rely on themselves.

Since planting her front yard garden in Liverpool, N.S., in 2023, retired RCMP officer Sherry Williams estimates her grocery bills have been cut by half.

Ms. Williams, 66, and her husband, Joe Young, 73, grow beans, peppers, cucumbers, corn and peaches, plus staples like potatoes, onions and garlic. Last year, they harvested 100 pounds of blueberries, canned 65 pounds of beets and 45 pounds of tomatoes.

Between their gardening, her sewing quilts and her husband building guitars, they’ve been mentoring a neighbour in his twenties who grew interested in their teeming front yard project.

“It catches one to another,” Ms. Williams said. “Not only are you eating real food, you’re saving too.”

A greenhouse built by Mr. Young extended their growing season from April to November, while a cold storage room keeps the harvest fresh for months.

“Costco, for us, is an hour and a half away,” she said. “We don’t get produce there anymore.”

Front yard gardens can involve an initial expense, Halifax author Ms. Jabbour cautioned: think seeds, soil, costly raised beds made of cedar, galvanized metal troughs. Eventually it pays off, especially for those growing hard-to-source heirloom varieties.

As front yard gardens grow more popular, many cities across Canada have established rules around the practice, including restrictions on gardening structures obstructing sight lines or drainage. Several Canadian cities, including Edmonton, Saskatoon, Victoria and most recently Ottawa and Thunder Bay, now allow vegetable growing in boulevards just beyond people’s properties. Gardeners need to heed various rules around digging, raised beds, moveable containers, invasive species, height and setback requirements.

“When you provide these sorts of opportunities, it’s giving one more avenue for people to grow their own food,” said Rob Maclachlan, program manager in Ottawa’s right-of-way branch. “It provides a great sense of community.”

Some use the extra land to grow heaps of produce to freeze and preserve over winter; others garden to give it away.

Toronto’s Anjum Chagpar started vegetable gardening during the first summer of the pandemic because she was worried about supply chain disruptions. She soon discovered how therapeutic it is to run her hands through the soil.

This spring she sowed beans and potatoes out front. Then she planted seedlings at the side of her house, which sits on a corner lot, beyond her fence on a narrow strip of land open to the street. Anything that grows there – beans, grape tomatoes – will be up for grabs. She’ll put up signs that make clear people can help themselves.

“I want to grow food that anyone is able to pick as they walk by, and also as an experiment to see if this idea seeds other ideas about sharing green spaces to share food,” said Ms. Chagpar, a 53-year-old systems designer working in climate action.

Of course, some gardeners guard their treasures more closely. Ms. Chagpar recalled a large sign posted outside a front yard garden belonging to residents at a low-rise apartment near her home. The sign chastised vegetable thieves pilfering the garden. One resident was particularly distraught after a pepper he’d grown from seed was snatched. “It was for a special recipe,” Ms. Chagpar said.

In Gatineau, Ms. Cardarelli doesn’t fret too much about theft from her highly visible garden.

“The only folks stealing seem to be some zealous skunks and raccoons taking bites and tossing,” she said. “I’d be happy if someone took vegetables. If that’s what they need to make ends meet, I’d give it myself.”

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