With a laugh, Jennifer Cliche describes her corner lot urban garden as “business in the front and fun in the back.”
Despite it being canning, dehydrating and freezing season in her productive Saanich garden, Cliche pops in to visit Dinah Johnson’s shared urban garden.
Both busy with their small plots, they’re also opening those spaces to others with the Victoria Urban Food Garden Tour – a self-guided visit to 11 inspiring gardens in Victoria, Oak Bay and Saanich. The Saturday, Sept. 7 tour, which last ran in 2019, also serves as a fundraiser for the nonprofit Rainbow Kitchen Society. The tour runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Cliche and her husband have spent the past few years cultivating and streamlining for productivity the soil of their Saanich corner lot.
They no longer purchase tomato products and so far this year expect 75 pounds of potatoes, 25 pounds of onions and weeks worth of asparagus.
Both retired around the pandemic-inspired boost in backyard gardening, amping up their game at that time, and were already inviting folks to tour their corner lot with the front devoted to food production and a backyard orchard.
“I want to encourage people to grow their own food,” Cliche said.
Johnston has slightly more chaotic community space shared by a handful of house-dwellers. Seven people share the duties of the garden, chiselled and hand-crafted atop a rocky outcrop also in Saanich.
“It’s very wild and free-flowing, there’s no straight lines,” Johnston said. “It’s nice to show people you don’t have to do it perfectly.”
It’s a jumble of flowers, herbs, native, medicinal and food plants, tended by informal roles where everyone brings their own level of expertise.
Food is the most challenging in their rocky outcrop, dotted with Garry oaks. It’s a tough landscape with challenging access, they’ve recruited friends in the past to bucket up appropriate soil, or chips to line the paths.
“Everything here has its own beauty and purpose,” Johnston said. “Everyone put so much effort into creating our garden, we want people to come.”
They’re almost on opposite ends of the growing spectrum: Cliche and husband Remi Cliche want to see exactly how productive they can be on their little piece of land, while Johnston and housemates happily do what they can to create a productive space inside busy schedules.
That diversity is prevalent on the tour, ranging from those heavy on the food to primarily ornamental with the stories behind the spaces an added part of the charm, said Rebecca Lang, an organizer alongside business partner Kaleigh Valois.
One woman had never gardened before. The Canadian-born wife of a Japanese man, she has cultivated a way to connect with her Japanese father-in-law. “It’s made a bridge in a way,” Lang said.
Another growing space paved a path for its owner to reunite with their heritage in what Lang describes as an “epic” garden.
Born in the Philippines on a farm, the gardener sought help creating something to remind him of his childhood. His husband is a lawyer who has never gardened, but loves the kitchen.
“One grows, one cooks. It’s given their relationship another layer of connection,” Lang said.
Lang got involved in 2017 when her home garden was on the tour.
“My passion is incorporating food into what would otherwise be ornamental gardens,” she said. “This style of gardening is so in fashion right now. People are so stoked about growing food. It’s a growing sector of the gardening interest.”
“It’s more a gardening tour that is interactive and people can actually learn from,” Lang said.
The goal, all three women say, is that visitors won’t feel like strangers, but potential new fellow gardeners.
The tour has always supported the Women’s Cooperative Farm in South Africa and has previously supported local organizations such as The Single Parent Resource. This year, Rainbow Kitchen benefits from 20 subscription boxes purchased by the tour from a couple of small local farms. “Those will continue on past the tour as well, to the end of the season,” Lang said.
Known for its hot meals, Rainbow Kitchen also offers a market where surplus donations, including the subscription box produce, can be shopped from.
“They can take it if they need it or it’s something they can use. It’s a really cool system and that’s what attracts me,” Lang said. “There’s always a certain faction of people who don’t have access to be able to grow or to buy and eat organic local produce.”
Two on the tour this year are those Lang and Valois have designed and created with upkeep by the owners, two are previous attendees, and the rest are the result of social media and door-knocking to create a spread of spaces for visitors to access across Saanich, Oak Bay and Victoria.
“It’s like choose your own adventure, you choose the ones you want to go to,” Lang said.
Tickets, $25, are limited and available online at https://vicurbanfoodgardens.wixsite.com/tour.
