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Lacombe Park Community Garden a free "edible landscape"

A bloom of volunteers turned up - and turned up soil - on Saturday for a sunny permablitz to transform the expansive lawn surrounding Grace Family Church on Liberton Drive into a beautiful and edible free food forest for the whole community.
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SCOTT HAYES/Photo Volunteers (including permaculture expert Kenton Zerbin in the hat and St. Albert's Neighbourhood Development Co-ordinator Angie Dedrick walking to the left) joined the permablitz on June 13 to landscape and plant many fruit-producing trees and bushes at the site of the Lacombe Park Community Garden surrounding the parking lot at Grace Family Church.

You might call it a kind of magic to take a piece of grassy land and turn it into a wonderful wonderland of edible gardenry.

Elwira Rosiak would agree that the Lacombe Park Community Garden and Meeting Place project is magical ... but it’s also a lot of grunt work. Happy grunt work, though, especially with the huge payoff.

Thankfully, organizing committee member Rosiak had 20 or so sets of helping hands last Saturday for the first stage of the permablitz effort – a variation on the flash mob theme – with dirt digging, tree planting, watering, a fair bit of sweating on such a beautiful, sunny day, and more. Many of those helpers were strangers at the start of the day but certainly they became friends by the end, all of whom seemed to have a firm belief in the cause.

“They are supporters of the movement of edible landscapes and community, and they have come out from Edmonton and other places to support this cause. We hope that this idea spreads in St. Albert. It's a must,” she said.

One of those key dirty-fingernailed supporters was Jennifer Conneely, who lives in the neighbourhood and responded to the flyer that came to her house.

“The idea is to use unused space to produce food. With the COVID craziness that happened, everyone has started thinking about food security: just to have a place where you can grow apples and you can pick raspberries. You've got all this stuff that's just producing and it's in space that was not used anyway and so then the community can share,” she explained.

A permaculture is a design system for getting humans back into their local landscape, explained Sturgeon County permaculture educator and creator Kenton Zerbin. He planned and laid out the space into what he calls “a free community edible landscape,” taking into account such details as having different fruits being produced sequentially so that there is always something ripe for the picking. He calls it “the edible calendar.”

He’s an expert on permaculture and frequently offers workshops on the subject with a course at NAIT that he will soon be offering as well. He presented to the Lacombe Park group back in February after Pastor Mike McElroy proposed the project and the organizing committee received a $5,190 Environmental Initiative Grant from the city.

Permaculture is about sustainability on one hand but it’s also about recognizing the costs and benefits of the landscapes around us, even in our own front yards.

“Often it has to do with creating homes that are really efficient, and landscapes that are truly sustainable and often edible. They’re actually doing something back for us. We’re often putting a lot of effort into our landscape. We don't get much back out other than enjoyment,” he started.

“What’s sustainable? You're putting energy in. Does it give you energy back? Imagine you're balancing your bank accounts. You can't live on a negative budget. You will have to save money. We often don't think of our landscapes that way. How are they building abundance? How are they building biodiversity? How are they building soil? How are they growing food, so that we can also be in abundance with it? That's the thing. The essence of permaculture is how do we create abundant systems that are truly sustainable and beyond sustainable?”

As for the concept of the permablitz, he said building any system takes work. Many hands make light work, he noted, likening the effort to a good old-fashioned barnraising.

Along with the land and the volunteer labour was an ample supply of donated trees from Hole's Greenhouses plus some other generous deals from Sunstar Nurseries, 40 cubic yards of compost thanks to Edmonton’s Cleanit Greenit, pruning courtesy of Untamed Feast, sheet mulching materials thanks to Sobeys, and storage by Sto-N-Go RV Storage. There was also a hefty amount of help from Russ T Recycling, which was on site previously to lay out a terrace tier of logs (supplied by Arbor Man). This is the kind of landscaping effort that would have otherwise ended up in numerous sore backs, Rosiak added, calling Russ T’s proprietor Russell Ball their “lifesaver” while noting the pandemic made things even more interesting.

“While we couldn't reach out to individuals, we found a lot of businesses stepped up, even John at Good Deedz bringing the plants from the nursery. A lot of the times we found in our grants, we didn't have money for transportation, heavy machinery, stuff like that. The money just isn't there. We didn't know to apply for other grants that will allow us. A lot of the times we have access to materials that we can’t bring in and we can’t build anything. A lot of businesses stepped up.”

Future stages of the project will call for more blitzes. Look for ‘Lacombe Park Community Garden’ on Facebook for volunteer calls. One day soon, there will even be raised garden beds and an amphitheatre area for future community use.

“We're hoping that this space can become a food sharing and an education space so that we can teach people about gardening because Elwira and I don't know much about permaculture so it was a learning process for us, but we'd like it to be a learning process for everyone. There's all these yards in St. Albert and we can all be producing a lot more food. If you think about even a generation ago, all the grandmas had apple trees and rhubarb. It was just there and you took it for granted. Those types of yards are a dying breed,” Conneely added.


Scott Hayes, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

About the Author: Scott Hayes, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Ecology and Environment Reporter at the Fitzhugh Newspaper since July 2022 under Local Journalism Initiative funding provided by News Media Canada.
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