On a recent summer morning, I walked my dog to Laurier Heights Food Forest, a community orchard with fruit-bearing trees and berry bushes. Chopper sat patiently beside the bushes while I gathered our favourite sun-warmed raspberries and chatted with my 94-year-old neighbour who became a community league member to help maintain the forest.
Like many, she initially thought it was a City of Edmonton project, but in fact, it began as an unsanctioned initiative by long-time residents Marilyn Dale and Karen Wilk, who first imagined creating a community orchard in 2018. They pitched their idea to Community Services in a Dragons’ Den-style competition and won $1,000 towards the purchase of trees and plants. That was the easy part.
After almost a year of navigating the paperwork and still not getting anywhere, they took matters into their own hands. “We went completely rogue,” says Wilk, then president of the Laurier Heights Community League, which is how we met. (Full disclosure: I joined the board in 2023, and now volunteer as communications lead.) With a small army of “guerilla gardeners” (amongst the volunteers, a master orchardist and permaculture expert), they rented a bobcat and started digging and planting — government approval be damned.
The City eventually sanctioned the project and permitted its expansion. It’s a good thing too, considering that it just cancelled the City Farms program, a five-acre urban farm that produced over 114,000 kilograms of fresh produce exclusively for Edmonton Food Bank clients. With household budgets stretched thin and food prices continuing to rise, we need to think about feeding ourselves. Food forests are one simple way to help. Sharing food from our personal gardens is another.
Canadians have a long history of growing their own food in difficult times. During the Second World War, communities across the country planted Victory Gardens to reduce pressure on transportation networks needed to move soldiers and supplies and boost morale. During the pandemic, tending gardens was a practical pastime and a meaningful way for people to stay grounded. For some, it also became essential to their well-being and sense of resilience.
When Avi Levin lost his job as a molecular virologist in 2018, gardening helped manage the stress of unemployment. Within a few years, his stress-relief garden in Ottewell was producing more than he could eat, so he set up a small market cart in his front yard to sell extra apricots, herbs and vegetables for cheap. Today, Levin’s Ottewell property, including his home and renovated garage, is a veritable urban farm. Starting in December, he grows hundreds of seedlings on rolling metal racks in time for the spring opening of his self-serve market. I visited him just before the May long weekend to buy organic, home-grown seedlings for my garden.
Levin is soft-spoken and reserved — until you ask about planting. “People just don’t know that there are so many things you can grow here,” he says, showing me the vines on an arched trellis that will eventually produce Arctic Kiwi (similar to a regular kiwi, but smaller and fuzz-less). A weather station on a tall pole above his roof monitors rain, wind and temperature.
Like the food forest, Levin thought it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission. But now his operation, PHD Farms, is one of 104 officially registered urban agriculture developments — that is, “development that involves growing fruits, vegetables, plants, or raising chickens or bees in urban areas for use beyond personal consumption.” He rotates his “crops,” experiments with soil composition and keeps an intricate spreadsheet for planting dates — “but the rest is up here,” he said, tapping his head.
Last year, Levin’s property handily won first place for Edible Gardens in Front Yards in Bloom, another municipal program discontinued this year to focus on “core services.” (It’s now being resurrected by the Edmonton Horticultural Society as a pilot program with community leagues.) While cutting the beautification initiative was controversial, the overall impact pales in comparison to losing the City Farm and suspending funds for Sustainable Food Edmonton’s largest program, a community garden initiative supporting urban agriculture projects across the city.
Edmonton Food Bank sends out 40,000 food hampers monthly, double the amount since 2021, according to program director Carrie-Anne Cyre. When we met at the north central food bank depot on a morning in April, about a month after City Farms was nixed, the line of clients was already twenty deep. Folks used wagons, suitcases, backpacks and bags to transport food home, not knowing the hampers might be lighter this summer, at least when it comes to produce.
Last year, in addition to collecting leftover and excess goods from grocers and restaurants that would otherwise become waste, Cyre’s team started collecting their leftover seeds to start a seed bank. This spring, those seeds and seed packets were distributed to clients, encouraging them to grow their own produce.
Over at Sustainable Food Edmonton, community garden facilitator Junetta Jamerson (Top 40, ’09) had a couple dozen pending applications for new or expanding community gardens when she learned the non-profit’s flagship program had been defunded. Jamerson encourages people to get creative with the spaces they have: “Even if you have a pot, even if it’s not a real pot, and it’s just a bucket that you put a hole in the bottom, start building these skills — get your hands in the dirt.”
When food insecurity is at a high point in Alberta, the decision to cut these programs seems short-sighted. From what public information I gathered, the total cost to the public for funding the City Farm and Sustainable Food Edmonton program combined was about $500,000. In the meantime, organizers and volunteers with all three initiatives are looking for alternative funding to increase food resilience. As well, Kingsway Mall is nearly doubling its rooftop garden output to more than 136 kilograms of produce for the Edmonton Food Bank — a tiny fraction of what City Farms offered, but it’s not nothing.
Growing and sharing food, planting a food forest, or starting a community garden won’t fix food insecurity, but they do help build what Jamerson calls “an ecosystem of care.” As food security concerns grow, grassroots efforts and creative thinking will be essential where publicly funded programs fall short. Lucky for Edmonton, more and more people are beginning to cultivate that kind of food resilience from the ground up.
This article appears in the July/August 2025 issue of Edify
