Orchard Garden Day 9: Sustainability and Guerilla Gardening

 A lovely conclusion to the end of our second week at the Orchard Garden! Time certainly flies when you’re having fun.

We started the day with quite a lot of rain, but we found refuge under a tent in the garden (some of the beautiful signs we painted yesterday didn’t fare too well in the rain though…) With the pattering of rain adding some atmosphere to our first activity of the day, Nicolás led us in a discussion about sustainability: having become a bit of a buzzword in recent years, he wanted to know more about what sustainability meant to each of us. We discussed curricular connections we’ve already witnessed, the negative impacts of guilt and fear-mongering in sustainability movements, and how to bring awareness, hope, and action on these important issues into our classrooms. 

Nicolás then led us in a roleplay discussion activity to explore the difficulty of balancing social, cultural, economic, and environmental sustainability (described in more detail below). We started to discuss, but as the downpour continued, we paused to move inside to Scarfe, taking with us the supplies we would need for the afternoon’s guerilla gardening near the Education building.

The scenario for the debate was that the city of Vancouver and urban developers wanted to build affordable social housing for low-income individuals, students, families, and seniors to live on UBC campus right where the UBC Orchard Garden and Farm were on. There were also some Indigenous artifacts that were found in the area that the developers wanted to build on which baffled many. The 3 stakeholders involved were the urban developers (with a rep from the city of Vancouver as a mediator), Indigenous Group Advocates, and the UBC Academics.

Urban Developers (Nicole): We opened the discussion, which presented the need for social housing and the initial points of our proposal. Our proposal highlighted that the housing crisis is bigger than ever and there is a severe shortage of affordable housing and social housing. By developing social housing, we would hope to prevent further homelessness in Vancouver and provide supportive housing solutions for students, low-income families and individuals, and seniors. Throughout the discussion with the other stakeholders, we noted that although our objective is to build developments, our intentions are good and considerate, and we want to preserve cultural heritage and Indigenous artifacts. We also want to nurture, continue, and further the production and inquiry in the Orchard Garden and UBC Farm. Our imaginative perspective also opened opportunities for designs to be proposed, where collaboration space, research space, and public teaching areas can be incorporated, as well as indoor gardens, rooftop gardens, and hydroponic gardens, where Indigenous plants are included throughout. We also proposed the possibility of incorporating the Indigenous totems and artifacts within the infrastructure of the developments. We presented the idea of a glass ceiling greenhouse courtyard for Indigenous plants and totems, and the building name could also be in honour of the Indigenous group. We presented the idea of a partnership between the buildings and the Orchard Garden & UBC Farm where individuals who live in the social housing could work for the Farm and Garden. We made note of our stance in the situation as well; we were not typical Urban Developers who may just want to get things done the quick and dirty way. Instead, we are developers who care about the cultural heritage of the land, we care about the Farm, the Garden and the community, and we want to ensure voices are heard and acknowledged in the process. 

Indigenous Advocacy Group (Ian/Sally): Our opening comments brought up the importance of the cultural artifacts which were found in the UBC farm. This would prevent the developers from accessing the farm as per agreements with the government culturally sensitive artifacts are off limits. Arguments towards the need for housing with that totem field attached to orchard gardens could be allocated more space. However, if this was the case space should be allocated to continuing the orchard gardens work in the interior spaces of the first floor of the building or on the roof. This would not only help benefit and add to the education of UBC students, but also provide more non-standard learning environments and improve the Orchard Gardens reach. Along with the space in the UBC farm being allocated for indigenous uses (in addition to the spaces already allocated), there would also be research which would be required before ascertaining what work could be done moving forwards. To truly know whose property the poles belong to, research should be done by archeologists and anthropologists at the university working alongside indigenous groups and if the poles belonging to an unknown group could not find an existing group to be linked to, they should be added to the Museum of Anthropology’s (MOA) collection and used for further research. Using the space on the farm as a display case for the newly found treasures would not be acceptable as well, as these poles were living things, and the space should not be a display case for the dead, or housing above their grave. However, if some space on the farm could be used then that should be integrated into the learning environment, but 50% would be too much. This is all presumptuous anyways, as if the poles found are similar of any other sites found on the coast, then full seismic and non-destructive research should be done to determine if there are any other preserved or buried treasures in the area. This would delay the project a decade at least.

UBC Academics (Lorilie): We discussed the importance of the Orchard Garden and the UBC farm which is used to grow food for many people in the community. The food produced in these lands help provide food to students such as UBC Food Services, as well as the general public through weekly farmers’ markets. Additionally, students use these spaces to do their phd and master dissertations and conduct research in these areas. Classes are also held in the UBC Orchard Garden and around 500 students take these classes in these spaces every year; most of them are teachers and teacher-candidates. In addition, these spaces hold international importance as well because there are conferences being held in these spaces where people present their research. The UBC Academics propose that it would be alright to build on these lands if and only if, we create a space where the housing is partially underground and the roof is an extension to the orchard garden where students can be hired by the orchard garden and farm to plant and grow crops. We decided that the design of the building should be something sustainable like Nanyang Technological University’s “Green Roof”, where part of the building is underground, and the other part has a green space that is connected to the main orchard garden or UBC Farm. In addition, students from all over the world that come to UBC would be able to plant crops that remind them of home, as well as Indigenous crops. Something to think about when we build on these lands, however, would be those Indigenous artifacts that are on the lands, which is why it is important to consult with Indigenous groups, archaeologists and anthropologists in this matter when creating this building.

Nanyang Technological University

Following our debate (which honestly continued through lunch as we all had so many thoughts to share), we began planning for the workshop we will lead next Saturday as the conclusion to our CFE. We will be painting signage for the garden and exploring the many uses of dandelions, especially through weaving/braiding/twining their dried stems. Today, we talked about the different objectives that a sign may have: to warn, to prohibit, to inform, to guide. Hopefully, the signage we create with workshop participants can guide future visitors to the garden and empower them to explore the garden with some important contextual information. We chose dandelions as the second focus of our workshop as we have spent a lot of time rethinking their frequent categorization as a weed, when in fact they are nutritious and beneficial in so many ways. Shifting our perspective on plants like these supports a vision of sustainability and using what we have to its fullest.

Scenes from the guerilla garden

Finally, we headed back outside, but this time to the side of Scarfe: we had some guerilla (not gorilla, as it turns out) gardening to do. Equipped with the older, potentially less viable seeds that we found in the shed reorganization earlier this week, we installed our one sign that fully survived the rain and turned up the dirt in a garden bed at a quiet and sunny corner of the Scarfe building, among lush fennel and evening primrose plants that had been introduced previously by the Orchard Garden. We scattered vegetable and herb seeds - tomatoes, spinach, basil, rutabaga, lavender, pac choi, green beans, and more - with reckless abandon throughout the patch, and topped it all off with a truly excessive amount of wildflower seeds, crossing our fingers that any of these will grow in the coming months. I am already looking forward to passing by this patch while we have classes on campus this summer to see what has survived and thrived.