Somehow this spring seemed to pass like a flash, perhaps due to the flurry of my activity, from moving to High Park to starting a brand new job with the City of Toronto, Parks Forestry & Recreation.  In the role of Expansion Assistant, with the Children’s Garden & Exploring Toronto Programs, I have the great fortune of being able to support City of Toronto sites integrating children’s gardening and environmental education into their programming.  The Program’s flagship location is the High Park Children’s Garden, a site I previously volunteered at in 2007.  The site is exemplary with wheel chair accessibility and raised beds.  In my role, I am seeking ways to include horticultural therapy practices into program delivery, in order to ensure that gardening can be fully enjoyed by all young people.

As part of this Program’s capacity building mandate, we offer City Staff Training and started the season with an interactive workshop, delivered by Jane Hayes, that provided many creative ideas for children’s garden programming.

A significant task, early on the job, was to pick the plant orders (vegetables and flowers) for a number of Expansion Sites across the City and to make deliveries.  I was thrilled to find myself once again in a greenhouse setting, especially considering the energy and activity of the large scale operation at the High Park Greenhouses.

Last spring/summer I spent considerable time working at the Providence Farm Greenhouse and was now pleasantly surprised to discover how transferable the skills I had gained were in my new place of employment.  My Horticultural Therapy Internship at Providence Farm was intended to develop my skills in working with people, yet it has become evident that I gained a considerable amount of horticulture knowledge simultaneously, including plant identification, watering, pest control, seeding, transplanting and picking.

Unfortunately, I am part of the on-going workers’ strike and haven’t been able to tend to the gardens and enthusiastic new gardeners.  I hope it will be resolved quickly…

We had an exciting kick-off to spring at the H.O.P.E. Community Garden in Parkdale with outdoor nature activities for kids during March Break.  Children and parents biked, walked, took the TTC and in one case, drove all the way from Scarborough to join us on the blue tarp at Masaryk Park.  We had beautiful spring weather, minus the rain.  We stretched like seeds, matched animals with their marks, smelt, tasted and planted basil, built a magic forest and garden guardians, explored objects from nature blindfolded, filled musical bean shakers and created food art snacks.  At the start, everyone wondered if there was really anything alive in the garden, but after investigating with magnifying glasses, signs of spring were discovered peeking through the soil.

Thank you to Greenest City for hosting and Garden Jane for supporting our learning in organizing and facilitating this programming.  Special appreciation of Leah and Marilyn for working with the children in the garden.

We continue to work through the Natural Farming ideas of Masanobu Fukuoka and consider practical applications for this knowledge in an urban area like Toronto.

From Fukuoka’s book, The One-Straw Revolution, I was able to glean the following quotes which I found to be particularly meaningful for my studies in horticultural therapy:

“Ultimately it is not the growing technique which is the most important factor, but rather the state of mind of the farmer (46).”

“Food and medicine are not two different things:  they are the front and back of one body.  Chemically grown vegetables may be eaten for food, but they cannot be used as medicine (100).”

“If a sick person returns to a healthy environment often the disease will disappear (144).”

We have an “in the garden” session set-up for April and in the meantime an opportunity to consider how to unite the body, the heart and the mind through our garden practices.

Program Information:

Will your kids go a little CRAZY over March Break?
Need something to do with them?

Join us for activities at the H.O.P.E. Community Garden
Wednesday March 18th & Friday March 20th
2 pm – 4 pm

Kids will make art, listen to stories and plant seeds.
Parents, we need you or a guardian there. But you get to RELAX,
make new friends and join activities if you want.

Dress for the outdoors. Rain or shine. We’ll have yummy snacks.

Who: Children, ages 3-9 and a parent or guardian
Where: Masaryk Park, 220 Cowan Ave. (meet in the garden)
Cost: $5 per child (includes snack for all)

Pre-Registration Required
Call 647.438.0038 (Weekdays 9-6) or Email register@greenestcity.ca

Greenest City

Garden Jane