Mount Forest Community Garden finds new home

MOUNT FOREST – The Mount Forest Community Garden has moved to new digs and celebrated the transition with a free breakfast and tour of the gardens on July 9.

The new location is on the old fairgrounds on King Street East.

The previous location was on private land, and the owner could no longer accommodate the garden after the three-year lease was up.

So last October, organizers started looking for a new location and reached out to the township, who identified the land where the garden now stands.

With council’s blessing, the move was a go.

It took a lot of muscle and community support to move sheds, greenhouses, tools and such to the new location, which happened last fall before winter set in.

And then to construct raised beds, pathways and a fence surrounding the gardens – all this done through a very soggy May.

“This community is amazing,” Elsa Mann, chair of the garden’s leadership committee, said at the breakfast event. “I get choked up talking about it. It’s been an incredible journey.”

With the work completed, it was time to celebrate the achievement and thank the long list of businesses and individuals who sponsored the garden and contributed with labour and in-kind donations.

The garden has 40 garden plots that are rented out for $15 a season. Renters are also asked to contribute eight hours of labour for communal projects to maintain and improve the site.

On the unfenced side of a storage garage is a “grab and go” garden, where anyone can help themselves to whatever they want – herbs, tomatoes and peppers among those offerings.

There’s also a “sharing shelf,” where gardeners can leave excess produce they can’t use, for  distribution to local food banks.

Volunteer gardeners have taken over a garden at Wellington Heights Secondary School and another site in the community, where they grow specifically for the Arthur and Mount Forest food banks; for Raw Carrot Soup Enterprise, a Mount Forest United Church outreach project employing people with disabilities to make soup; and for Ramoth House, a cooperative residence serving young women who are pregnant or parenting a child under one.

Joe Wettlaufer works for the family health team and was the garden manager at the previous site.

“We’re looking for other food access sites as well,” he said, adding a sharing shelf is coming to the local library, where anyone can help themselves.

The garden was initially a project of the Mount Forest Family Health Team which saw an opportunity to address food insecurity and improve social connections and mental health coming out of the pandemic.

The notion has blossomed, more individuals and groups have become involved and now officials hope the garden will become its own independent, incorporated non-profit organization.

They are currently seeking people to sit on a board of directors.

And once the township completes its Parks and Recreation Master Plan, they hope to expand the space, its activities and workshops,and its reach in the community.

It’s quite a vision and those who attended the breakfast were very passionate about making it a reality.

“To think that in May, this was just a storage space,” said Nola Marion, who also sits on the leadership committee.

“But everyone came together and look, it’s quite impressive. It feels like it was always meant to be here.”