Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3
In a twist on the local food movement, some people in Canada’s capital city are tearing up their lawns and planting vegetables for sale at local markets. Correspondent Darrell Harvey reports from Ottawa.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  As long as you’re staying put, you might want to consider a little gardening.  In Canada’s capital, Ottawa, city dwellers are turning their lawns into small scale organic farms.  It’s part of a small agricultural movement called urban farming.  And as Darrell Harvey reports, it’s taking the local food movement right into your backyard.

DARRELL HARVEY:  Kirsten Brouse calls herself a farmer, except she doesn’t drive a tractor or live in the country.  She tends to her crops with care and a spray bottle in her sixth floor apartment in downtown Ottawa.

KIRSTEN BROUSE:  So here we’ve set up essentially a greenhouse in my apartment building.  We have a mix of things in here.  We have some kale down here you can see, we have some tomatoes and some peppers.  We have lots of cabbage.

HARVEY: Brouse points to 100 dirt filled trays stacked against a window overlooking her balcony.  These seedlings are the start of this year’s crop.  They’ll eventually end up planted right here in the center of Canada’s capital city of more than one and a half million people.  This urban farming is giving new meaning to the local food movement’s 100 mile diet.

BROUSE: Yeah, 100 miles to about 100 meters.  It’s going to be like local on a whole different scale.

HARVEY: Brouse works with Vegetable Patch, a company that farms backyards throughout the city.  It was started two years ago by Jesse Payne, a former software engineer.  Standing on one of his backyard plots not far from a busy expressway, Payne says he was inspired to start farming in the city after he began to notice where his food was coming from.

JESSE PAYNE:  During the summer time there is no reason that I should go to the grocery store and buy my peas from China.  Or buy some cabbage from South Africa.  To me that doesn’t make sense and people have kind of forgotten in North American cities that we do have space here and it is okay to grow food here and provide for ourselves.

HARVEY: So that’s what he and his fellow urban farmers are doing.  Genevieve Legal-Leblanc is one of them.  She’s toiling away in a backyard plot the size of a basketball court behind an apartment building.  She smoothes out the soil with a rake and presses pea seeds into the dirt one by one.

GENEVIEVE LEGAL-LEBLANC:  There are sugar anne peas, which are essentially the yummiest vegetable on earth.

HARVEY: Legal-Leblanc left behind an office job to try her hand at urban farming.  Using shovels and a rototiller, she and her colleagues are digging up prized lawns and turning them into small scale farms.  The homeowners get a weekly basket of produce.  The farmers sell the rest to a local market and to consumer investors in the form of farm shares.  On this day, they’re digging up four new lawns.  Carryl Potter owns one of them.  He says turning his backyard into an urban farm is a win-win.

CARRYL POTTER:  It means less mowing and of course we get vegetables every week.  Our neighbor now is doing it.  Three doors down is doing it.  People across the street, friends of ours are doing it.

HARVEY: Other Canadian cities such as Vancouver and Toronto have begun to map their arable land space with an eye to growing more food inside city limits.  Here in Ottawa, Vegetable Patch has found no shortage of homeowners ready to give up their grass.  But farming in the city does come with unique challenges.  For one, urban farmers must grow up instead of out.

LEGAL-LEBLANC:  And so we’ve chosen climbing varieties of cucumbers, some squash and tomatoes and bean and peas and that sort of thing.  So we’re using every square inch.

HARVEY: Farming techniques are also more intensive.  As soon as one crop is harvested, another is planted, sometimes four or five crops in a season, using the same piece of dirt.  Vegetable Patch is aiming for $25,000.00 in sales this year.  It’s not going to make anyone rich, but Legal-Leblanc says the rewards go deeper.

LEGAL-LEBLANC:  Why is it that I quit my job to do this, it’s because I really love this work.  I can’t imagine being happier.

HARVEY: She says other people may not want to get their hands dirty, but they still want to see where and how their food is grown.  And it’s much easier for city dwellers to do that when their local farmer lives in the next apartment.  For The World, I’m Darrell Harvey in Ottawa.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.