One of the very interesting benefits of the garden has to do with the fact that so many young people have no idea where vegetables come from. They come by the garden, and we try to get them involved.
There's a science school that is just on top of the hill right behind us, and they have started bringing the students down. They spent a couple of years, because they had a champion at the school who was interested in the gardening, so they spent as much time as they could. Unfortunately, in school in Calgary, because it's based on an agricultural system, when you come down in May and June there's nothing happening other than the land having been prepared and seeded. Then the students come back after the summer and they get to see the harvesting.
In most places in Calgary, you have about a four-month gardening period, so whatever you can do, you do, but it did inspire the school to incorporate their own program. They've built a garden plot at the school and they're now gardening there, so the students are getting a very good first-hand awareness of what gardening is all about.
It's a great way to get the seniors involved. In fact, the reason I got involved is I'm the young kid in the garden. Marsh, for example, has been there for 80 years gardening, and fitness-wise, I'd put him up against even the doctor here, or anybody in this room. He is fantastically fit because he's living in that garden and he's working hard. It has given him a purpose, something to do, and that's why I'd like to get community gardens going for the seniors in our neighbourhood.
If you know Calgary.... Actually, I have a picture. I brought a map in case anybody wanted to see where the garden is and I have a Calgary heritage calendar that shows the garden to give you an idea of what we're talking about. They're not bilingual, but I have them in my briefcase if anyone wants to see them later.
It took me two and a half years of fighting with the city to try to protect it, and we finally got protection because we got it turned into a heritage site. I went on a speaking trail for 18 months trying to convince people that it was a community garden, and I found out as soon as I got the heritage site designation that it couldn't be a community garden, because a community garden typically is an eight-by-four plot with a hundred people in there, and we couldn't do that. That's why we have to get another place going, but what I did on the speaking trail was challenge other people to get the city involved to help them get community gardens going in the city.
I was trying to save the Bridgeland-Riverside garden. The alderman said, “Well, there are already seven community gardens in the city. We don't need any more.” Now, five years later, there are over 130 community garden initiatives in the city of Calgary. They have really taken off.
The timing was good. It was very propitious that I was doing it just as there started to be a lot of focus on the benefits of community gardens, so that's a whole other issue there.
I was trying to talk about the push-back I was facing in trying to get this saved and about how we could get past that.
One thing that happens in the city is that when a new house is built, people want to maximize their footprint on the land, so they chop down all the old trees and they plant these new trees that are never going to get back to giving the benefits that you have in the other cities. Calgary is very rapidly losing its tree growth in the communities, I think. I moved out of one of the older, well-established, very wealthy neighbourhoods in Calgary to come to Bridgeland-Riverside, because in the older wealthy places, with all this new oil money there are no trees left, because they wanted to have big houses there. I didn't want to live in a place like that.
There are a lot of very intangible benefits and some tangible benefits as well, as we've discussed today. A lot of them are intangible. I could go on for two hours on that, but I won't.