Six new boxes will soon sprout new plants in the Yates Street Community Garden, thanks to a collaboration between two environment-focused Victoria groups.
The lot serves as an oasis in the city – where an apiary provides respite for native bees and a plum tree in full bloom points to the promise of spring and summer growth.
“We’ve got this great community of about 100 people in a very small lot right in downtown and we’ve got condos going up all around us,” said organizer Lisa Small.
A garden community working more than 90 plots, its organizers discovered added space when making room for an artist to access the back wall for a grant-funded mural last year, but the cost of building new boxes seemed prohibitive for the small non-profit.
New boxes were “out of the realm of possibility,” Small said. But she’d heard of reuse group ReWood Victoria and reached out in hope.
Little did Small know that gardens are the group’s key mandate.
The box-builders learned something new, though, she added, specifically tweaking their designs to create raised beds called “trugs” that allow prime accessibility for folks using a variety of mobility aids.
ReWood – described by member Stuart Culbertson as a “group of retired gents living in Oak Bay” – focuses on liberating lumber from a landfill future and reinventing it as growing infrastructure.
“The quality of wood, you might not want it in your house, but for gardens it’s perfect,” Culbertson said.
The group formed after one of those gents first heard, then saw, a house under demolition across the street, spurring questions about wood waste. He knew the biggest expense in setting up a community garden is wood, required for gardens, fences and sheds. The revelations coincided with Victoria crafting a construction waste bylaw incentivizing material repurposing and recycling.
That summer of 2022, ReWood turned its first teardown into a garden.
“We’re very committed to keeping wood out of the landfill,” Culbertson said. “We are demonstrating, I think, that there are other uses for this wood other than being landed in the landfill.”
They’ve since installed growing boxes at schools, Government House, Island Health residential sites, and a couple of social projects with FED Urban Agriculture. They’re always on the lookout for wood and volunteers; anyone with either can email rewoodvic@gmail.com.
ReWood has processed about 17 tonnes in a couple of short years, including some from that first year in the City of Victoria, stored at the Sandown site in North Saanich.
The group worked the wood, pulling nails and making it usable, then brought it back to the city on a sunny Saturday morning. At Yates Street, an eager group of three dozen or so volunteers and gardeners greeted them.
“By the time we left, they were filled with soil and numbered and ready to go,” Culbertson said.
“It was a very efficient party,” Little agreed with a laugh. “As they built the boxes, a group would start filling them with soil.”
Under the mural titled Sower, by Victoria artist Jesse Campbell, six new boxes stand ready to grow, recrafted from an old home taken apart in city limits. Both the build and the teardown were done with volunteer labour.
Of the six, the Disability Resource Centre will take over two, and the other four will help whittle down the names on the 300-person waiting list for garden plots.
“The timing is great,” Small said. “It’s the perfect time to have them ready to move in for the spring.”
