Garden Club – Farmers on 57th

Love, Respect, Kindness, Generosity, Connection and Possibility

karen September 30, 2022 September 30, 2022Accessibility, Community, CSA, Garden Club, Grow Your Own Food Course, Growing Eden, Pearson Dogwood Community Gardeners, Summer Student, Urban Farming Volunteer Learning Program, Volunteer, Youth Employment

We are a settler-led and predominantly white organization farming in the territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ Nations. We want to create a safe space for all to join our community, inclusive of people who have experienced trauma and who seek land-based healing and improved food access. We want to guide our day-to-day work, organizational decisions and future by shared values. To discover our shared values as a community we proposed organizational values of Love, Respect, Kindness and Generosity. Core staff and volunteers explored these values in a March 2022 workshop by Kathi Camilleri who is trained and has…

Solstice Garden Club and Indigenous history

sarah June 22, 2022 June 25, 2022Accessibility, Community, Garden Club

Happy Solstice all! The longest day of the year was marked by grey skies and occasional sprinkling of rain. Today is also National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada with several George Pearson Centre (GPC) residents attending celebrations at the Musqueam reserve, returning aglow. Many nations are represented by the people who live at GPC. We work to reflect on our shared history and towards reconciliation. The land we are on today has long been home to the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people. Just down the hill is the site of the former Musqueam winter village c̓əsnaʔəm which existed long before Vancouver was…

Seeking Garden Club Volunteers

sarah May 25, 2022 May 26, 2022Accessibility, Community, Garden Club, Get Involved, Opportunities, Volunteer

We started our well loved Garden Club program with the residents of George Pearson Centre (GPC) at the end of March by starting seeds indoors. This is our 14th year!! It has been a bit chilly so far, for many of the gardeners here, who all get around with the use of a wheelchair. GPC is a longterm residential care facility that is home to 114 adults of all ages. We are now looking for volunteers who are friendly, empathetic, enjoy creating a sense of community, and are interested in working one-on-one with gardeners with disabilities. This program is a…

Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on an Urban Farm

karen February 16, 2022 February 16, 2022Accessibility, Community, CSA, Garden Club

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Farmers on 57th in 2020 were multiple: loss of reliable access to washrooms, indoor storage and programming space and increases in the cost of agricultural inputs, while at the same time, a growth in CSA membership.

Bird’s nest in the raspberries

sarah June 30, 2021 August 13, 2021Garden Club

At the Pearson’s residents Garden Club we have a robust thicket of raspberries which brings us great berry joy. One day whilst picking we heard a ‘pip, pip’ bird sound from the bush. Turns out it was the parent bird trying to draw our attention away from its nest, which was balanced in the bushes, about chest height. Such pretty coloured eggs. It is a white-crowned sparrow nest. We all gathered round, and showed pictures and videos to those who couldn’t see the nest from their wheelchair. Sharing such discoveries make them even more special!

Garden Club grows again

sarah March 31, 2021 February 23, 2022Garden Club

After the unfortunate hiatus in 2020, where Garden Club was fenced off and COVID-19 protocols forced our first break from running the Pearson resident’s gardening program – we resumed in 2021 and the resident gardens are thriving once again. Thankfully the gardens only had a single year of wild growth – not long enough for the blackberries to take over, but certainly long enough for some strange and giant brassicas to have emerged! The below kale plant was planted in 2019 but then skipped going to seed in 2020 for reasons only known to itself. It carried on growing arms…

Pandemic pivoting

sarah July 13, 2020 August 13, 2021Accessibility, Community, Flowers, Garden Club

It has been awhile since we’ve reported from the Garden Club at the George Pearson Centre the long term care facility site, home to 114 residents with disabilities (and abilities, such as green thumbs!) As we all know, 2020 was a very different year, after about mid March. It was tough. We at Farmers on 57th were poised to run another glorious season of therapeutic gardening in partnership with Pearson….when everything stopped. Pearson was locked down to outsiders that weren’t considered essential. At first, family and friends could only visit their loved one through the window. In the end, despite…

Garden Club still grounded

sarah April 19, 2020 February 23, 2022Garden Club

The very popular Garden Club program didn’t start this year (yet), because of the pandemic. We haven’t given up hope that some kind of safe gardening program can serve as Garden Club. Normally we gather together and plants seeds indoors, at the end of March. Every Tuesday after that it is Garden Club from 2-4pm, until the end of September or so. It is a lively gathering of residents, family members, staff, and volunteers. We marvel at colours, smells, sights and tastes. But in 2020, we have a pandemic with a dangerous virus. Many Pearson residents have vulnerable health states…

COVID-19 Precautions

sarah March 17, 2020 February 23, 2022Garden Club

Pearson is home to people with vulnerable health states. Some depend on ventilators to breathe. An outbreak of COVID-19 could be devastating here. We hope it doesn’t happen, and VCH is assuring us they are taking all the precautions necessary to prevent it from coming to GPC. They are allowing immediate family members still to visit, thankfully, but to visit only their relative, and not to wander around the facility. We already have hand sanitizer by every door, and all visitors are reminded to stay away if they have any symptoms. Temporary Visitation Guidelines have been established that limit visits…

Accessible Pathway Renewal Complete!

sarah February 5, 2020 May 14, 2021Accessibility, Community, Garden Club

Hello! Sarah here, reporting from the Therapeutic Gardens at GPC. I’m pleased to share that the pathways around the gardens here have been renovated so they are once again smooth. Farmers on 57th built these gardens in 2009, and the pathways were last renewed in 2015. In 2019 we noticed they were getting reallllly bumpy, and some residents felt uncomfortable and unsafe when going around the gardens in their wheelchairs. It wasn’t exactly an easy job, with our accessible surface being heavy rubber mats that don’t shift when wheelchairs grip them. They were all lifted up, the ground re-leveled, and…