A new community garden has officially opened at the Garden City Lands.
Two hundred more garden plots in Richmond are ready to be planted with fruits, veggies, legumes or flowers – depending on the individual gardener’s taste.
This newest community garden is located at the Garden City Lands – a 136-acre plot of Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) farmland in Richmond’s City Centre – and is the 11th community garden the city has created.
But all the plots at this new site are already spoken for, and the waitlist city-wide for community garden plots continues to be in the 500-person range.
At the official opening on Monday morning, Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie pointed out 40 to 50 years ago, Richmond residents usually had room in their own large-lot backyards to garden, but with the city densifying, this is no longer possible for many residents.
Hence, the push for more community gardens.
This 200-plot community garden is larger than many other community gardens in Richmond, some of which have just a few dozen plots.
Each garden plot is comprised of two tubs placed on a gravel bed, filled with soil from Richmond and compost from leaves gathered in city parks.
While the tubs are currently located on a large bed of gravel, Ian Lai, executive director of Urban Bounty that manages all the community gardens in the city, said they are waiting for permission from the Agricultural Land Commission to do soil-based gardening.
The plots are spaced out with a metre between them to allow accessibility for people in wheelchairs or scooters.
Two beehives located behind the garden plots are home to 120,000 bees in the summer that pollinate the Garden City Lands and surrounding areas. The bees travel as far as file miles and produce about 200 pounds of honey a year.
Urban Bounty collects the honey for sale, Lai explained.
Some plans for Garden City Lands fell through
The city has been adding elements to the Garden City Lands after buying it in 2010 for about $59 million.
The Garden City Lands had several uses over the past 100 years – and some plans that fell through.
Almost 100 years ago, when the tram ran from Vancouver to Steveston, people would come to the Garden City Lands for target practice.
About three years ago, soil analysis showed lead, arsenic, molybdenum and antimony in the soil, possibly from it being a rifle range.
Communication towers were located on the Garden City Lands until about the early part of this millennium.
This left behind hydrocarbons – residual petroleum – on the site, which was deemed at unacceptable levels for agricultural land.
The city received a grant a few years ago of $175,000 from the Union of BC Municipalities to remediate the soil.
At some point, it was proposed that a stadium would be built on the Garden City Lands in conjunction with the Commonwealth Games, which Richmond was bidding for. This, nevertheless, fell through.
Later, the Lands were proposed as an international broadcast centre during the 2010 Olympics, and another plan was to ask to pull it out of the ALR and make it a residential area.
Neither of these plans materialized.
Finally, in 2010, city council voted to buy the land.
While Brodie said it’s fair to call the current plans “piecemeal,” a larger vision of the Garden City Lands is being worked on.
“We have an overall concept but we have to drill down on (details),” he said, adding, however, everything that is done on the Lands needs approval from the ALC.
About half will be kept in a passive state, leaving the bog on the east side of the plot as a “carbon sink” and for other environmental reasons, Brodie pointed out.
Source/ richmond-news
