Tag Archives: Thorncliffe Park

Imagining a Tree Corps for Thorncliffe Park

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On a smoking-hot summer day in Toronto, the cabbies hang out at the gritty East York Town Centre’s parking lot in Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park neighbourhood. They know where to stay cool — they’ve found a few small strips of cooling shade from the few trees planted in the mall’s vast concrete parking area.

The cabbies banter, have a smoke, and eat a brown-bag lunch. It feels livable here in the shade, on a scorching day when most folks are trying to stay inside and crank up the AC. Like a little oasis.

One steamy summer day in July, I decided to walk about 7 kilometers from our home in leafy Riverdale to my community garden at Thorncliffe Park. The heat kicked up across the O’Connor viaduct bridge. As I got across the valley bridge and turned into the Thorncliffe neighbourhood, my eyes scouted ahead to find the best shade. I instinctively adjusted my route to stick to the shady spots. I stopped once to take out my hearing devices, toweled down my sweaty head, and tromped on.

Next to the community sports field and playground, there was some great shade from mature trees. But as I got closer to the Thorncliffe mall, the task of finding shade was trickier. Trees were fewer, smaller, and sicker. I clung to some shade along the brick wall of the elementary school, then made a beeline across the heat blanket of the mall’s parking lot for a cluster of trees next to the Quick Lube oil change shop.

In this vast parking area, thousands have people have stood in a snaking line this year waiting for their covid vaccines — sandwiched between a hot sun, and the heat reflecting off the concrete.

Sign of the times: Thorncliffe mall parking lot next to the elementary school.

On the hottest summer day in Toronto in 2021, the temperature can top 36 degrees Celsius. But with climate changes underway, that peak is expected to edge well over 40 degrees by mid-century.

Middle income or wealthy neighborhoods have more cooling shade — their tree canopy is older and better maintained. Lower-income neighborhoods like Thorncliffe Park are hotter. It’s tougher to find the shady, liveable spaces on a hot day — the places that cool our bodies and ease our minds. In addition, wealthier neighbourhoods have better air-conditioning, and those AC systems pump hot air outside, increasing the temperatures for those coping with no AC.

It’s a small step, but we need more trees in Thorncliffe Park, I thought.

As I returned to guerrilla gardening this summer, I got some inspiration on the topic of guerrilla tree planting as one way to keep our city liveable in the years ahead. The first story came from my fellow community gardener Debi Rudoph. In the space of about 15 years, a small maple tree she planted clandestinely at a local grocery store now shaded a public sidewalk nearby. It created gorgeous colour in the fall.

The second inspiration was a video shared by my brother-in-law Darcy McGovern. It tells the tale of guerrilla gardening efforts in New York City. One of the most inspiring was the story of Hattie Carthan. She had witnessed her beloved Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn slowly fall into disrepair. As its black population increased, mortgage lenders used the discriminatory practice of “red-lining” to deny loans to residents. Homes fell into disrepair, as did city streets, sidewalks and infrastructure.

Hattie Carthan

One of the saddest declines was in the neighborhood’s tree canopy, as older trees were not maintained or replaced. With a fierce determination, Hattie became an activist. She formed a local Tree Corps. The group not only saved some existing trees, including an ancient and magnificent Magnolia, but over the course of years planted and maintained more than 1,500 new trees in public areas of their neighborhood.

The Tree Corps. engaged people of all ages to understand and nurture their tree canopy. Slowly, they brought back some beauty, pride, and cooling shade to their beloved “Bed-Stuy”.

As I wandered through the central section of Thorncliffe Park — the mall, school and park that are its lifeblood — I imagined how more trees could enrich this community.

My first thought was selfish — I could plant trees along my own walking route, to keep me cooler in the summers ahead. But I also thought about the thousands of people getting around on foot in Thorncliffe Park on a hot summer day. Coming through the park walkway to the mall. Taking the sidewalks to catch a bus, often in the scorching heat of the sun. Waiting for the bus with no shade in sight, like I have done many times.

I thought about community engagement in Thorncliffe through its Neighborhood Office, community gardens and businesses. And about the immense goodwill of its people.

I imagined a tiny band of willing guerrilla gardeners who would form the first-ever Thorncliffe Park Tree Corps.

The snacking garden

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After all that weeding, watering and waiting, it’s harvest time — but in your haste to share your bounty with family of friends, take a moment to reward yourself first.

Depending on the season, a variety of instant snacks await the industrious gardener:

Let’s say it’s a warm late August day and you are stopping by your garden to pick the first of the carrot crop, along with some luscious-looking dark green-and-purple kale, and beefsteak tomatoes. These fresh organic vegetables will be gobbled up this Labour Day weekend by family who have gathered at your inlaws’ cottage.

But a bountiful harvest requires a well-fuelled gardener. So while you start to pick the big tomatoes, you can’t help but binge on some sweet Tiny Tims. These cherry tomatoes have grown as “volunteer” plants from compost you applied to the soil this spring. In fact, this year’s volunteer tomato plants are actually the prize winners — they ripened when the sun finally started to shine consistently late this summer after a wet spring. What’s more, these Tiny Tims are much better for you than that 12-pack of Tim Bits you had your eye on while in line for coffee at Timmies.

Nearby, your perennial spinach is delivering a second crop as fall sets in.  The flowers have died back and a new set of lush green leaves has sprouted.  You learned about this plant — also known as perpetual spinach — from your garden neighbor Pat.  She came by one day and asked to take home a few leaves.  You were puzzled by the perennial as it had been planted by the previous gardener of your allotment plot.  You were accustomed to annual spinach planted from seed each spring.

But Pat set you straight — perpetual spinach is a vigorous producer of spinach-like leaves that pack a spicy punch.  It’s a low maintenance and nutritious snack.  So you follow up your Tiny Tim binge with a chaser of several snacking leaves of perpetual spinach.

And as you admire your first crop of Kale, which will be steamed for dinner on the weekend, you cannot help but notice the first scarlet runner beans that are ripening on your crude bamboo trellis. Your nephew Ben planted the seeds this spring.  You pick a few to snack on — they are tasty and crunchy. And on a more sensible note, they are sure to give the snacking gardener his or her daily fibre requirement.

Now give yourself a pat on the back.  You are taking home some fresh vegetables to share with others. But as the Wealthy Barber once said when he shared his retirement planning secrets…

…you paid yourself first.

 

 

 

 

 

Garden resolutions

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The community garden sleeps, so we make resolutions for 2013:

— take time to smell the roses, not beat the clock

— remember my fellow gardener Ralph Persad’s motto: you give you get

— help cut the grass — the Briggs and Stratton motor is the ninth wonder of the world, right behind the Sturmey Archer three-speed hub. Plus, clinical trials have proven that a volunteer community gardener mowing the grass on two dollars worth of gasoline experiences more joy than Steve Jobs got building his $200-milllion super yacht.

— try planting something different and radical — like brussel sprouts

— sharpen my spade and my sense of humour — does anyone know any good gardening jokes? I think that’s how Russell Peters got his start in comedy.

— support the volunteer committee that works hard to run our non-profit community garden at Thorncliffe Park

— leverage my folk carpentry skills to repair one side of my rectangular wooden fence; this means the fence will be whole by 2016 — the same time the Gardiner Expressway is condemned.

— be patient for once and don’t put the tomato plants in too early — NOT!!

— listen to my garden neighbors and share their stories.

Perpetual harvest — Interview with Ralph Persad

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While some think about putting their gardens to bed while the days grow shorter, Ralph Persad is getting in a second crop of greens.

The long-time gardener at Thornciffe Park Garden Club is planting spinach, radish and Bok Choi for harvest throughout late October and November. Meanwhile, his mainstay crops are enjoying a renaissance. After summer dry spells, the tomato vines have started to set new fruit on yellow blossoms, and his pepper plants are getting a second wind.

In fact, with multiple crop cycles — and a little help from his freezer at home — Ralph enjoys a kind of perpetual harvest.

“I grow a lot of hot peppers and freeze them all,” Ralph says.  “I take them out whenever I need them throughout the year and blend them into sauce.”

He also freezes tomatoes straight from the vine. “When it’s time to make tomato sauce in the winter, you hold the frozen tomato under some hot water.” There are no frozen tomatoes close at hand in the East York Town Centre food court at the moment, so Ralph demonstrates using an imaginary one. He crunches his fist and the imaginary tomato’s skin pops off nicely. An interviewer can almost smell the sauce starting to simmer.

Frozen bitter melon, long beans and other greens also put food on Ralph’s table year round.

“They say bitter melon is good for the blood. You can fry it up with some onion, garlic and a little olive oil. It goes nicely with a pita and some melted cheese.”

Ralph comes by food-growing honestly, having helped his parents work a 26-acre mixed farm near Rio Claro, Trinidad as a boy.

“Before school, I was up at 5:30 to milk the cows, and I would deliver the milk in bottles on my bike to local customers.

Ralph wasn’t compensated for the milking duties, but his father did offer a 50-cent bounty on squirrels. “They would nibble our cocoa pods and bananas so they were considered pests. After milking the cows, I would try to shoot a few squirrels before school. The dogs got the squirrel meat and the tail went to my dad as proof so I could collect the bounty.”

Ralph’s parents both ran small businesses during the day but also produced bananas, mangoes, coffee, cocoa and oranges on their farm. Ralph would pick the oranges on demand – 4 cents each for 100 – for a woman who upsold them as snacks for 6 cents each outside a local movie theatre. The family also had a “cooking garden” near the house to produce greens year-round.

His uncle was working for the TTC in Toronto and invited the teenaged Ralph up from Trinidad for a few weeks in the summer of 1970. Ralph recalls the vibrant scene on Yonge Street when a long stretch south of Bloor was closed off in the summer as a car-free music and culinary mecca.

In short order, Ralph completed a welding course at a school on Jarvis Street, and obtained his welding licence, a work permit and a welding job at a hot water heater manufacturer. When the company moved out of Toronto, Ralph followed in his uncle’s footsteps by joining the TTC.  He brought his welding skills and upgraded his electrical, machine-shop and lock-smith talents as an all-purpose trouble-shooter for maintenance of TTC properties.

Around the same time, Ralph got back to his food-growing roots when a friend invited him to see his garden plot at the Thorncliffe club, one of Toronto’s oldest community gardens.

“I call it my backyard,” says Ralph of his small rectangular garden loaded with organic vegetables. “I go there, listen to my gospel music. I can sit and meditate. I relax and play a game of cards with my plot neighbor, or start a conversation with people passing by.”

More than 100 plots at the community garden — on hydro land north of Overlea Boulevard — offer fresh air, friendship and fresh produce for Thorncliffe residents and their families.

“This is my therapy,” he says. “When my garden grows nice, I sleep better. I put my head on the pillow and nothing bothers me.” A diet of organic vegetables, and daily exercise including running, doesn’t hurt.

Ralph learned new growing techniques for the Canadian climate from garden plot old-timers and likes to return the favour to younger gardeners.”  He says he’s still learning. In fact, he has his eye on a radish-like green grown by Indian gardeners that is reputed to be good for the heart.

At 61, the man of the perpetual harvest is still in perpetual motion at his job. But he’s planning retirement soon. He will work part-time with one of his sons, who has a heating/cooling business. And he wants to offer his energy and talents to the developing world.

“In life, you give, you get.”

Miracles and disasters in the urban garden

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About this time of year you’ll start to hear the hype about the miracle garden:

Grow 800 pounds of organic produce on a postage-stamp-sized plot – in just minutes a week! Garden yourself to victory in the coming food security apocalypse — without even getting your hands dirty!

But if you’re planning to roll up your sleeves to grow food in the city, don’t plan on the miracles unless you’re prepared to sweat some major disasters.

Or to put a more positive spin on life in an urban garden — every garden disaster makes each garden miracle that much sweeter.

That’s one of the lessons you’ve learned from Joe, Athena, Robert, Carmen, Andy and your many gardening comrades in ten years at one of Toronto’s oldest allotment gardens. Not to mention the escapades of the mysterious red currant thief.

Disaster: the squash devil

One year you planted several varieties of squash in a raised bed fortified with much well-rotted manure. Using your limited carpentry skills honed from childhood tree-fort building in Don Mills, you constructed a kind of folk-art trellis upon which you imagined your squash plants would rocket their way skyward.

You kept the bed well watered and the plants burst from the soil — the rocketing had begun. Yet while the green foliage showed the desired vigour, one by one, every single delicate yellow bloom withered on the squash vine.

One day your allotment neighbor, Joe, identified the culprit – a small black-and-yellow bug that feasted on squash blossoms. “He’s a devil,” said Joe, showing you the bug before squishing him between his thumb and forefinger.

Joe and Athena

You trusted Joe. He and his wife Athena, retired from the restaurant trade, grew an orderly Greek-themed garden filled with tomatoes, beans, onions and tasty greens. They enjoyed the long summer evenings in late June on lawn chairs outside their plot. Joe ferried fresh produce daily back to his nearby apartment on a rickety blue bicycle. Joe’s secret to gardening was soil preparation, and he spent days carefully hand-tilling his plot each fall, to be ready for the next growing season.

And Joe knew his pests.“You gotta pick off every bug and kill ‘em,” Joe said, proceeding to smear the bug on your garden fence, possibly as a warning to the devil’s comrades.

This minutes-a-week-to-gardening-victory thing just wasn’t working. You figured if you quit your desk job you could keep up with the devil-squishing. But you needed to pay the mortgage.

So your plants continued to rocket skyward that summer without producing a single squash. It was a garden disaster.

Miracle: the onion volunteers

But think back a little further and you will recall a garden miracle.

You had been two years on the waiting list for a plot at the Thorncliffe Park Garden Club, when you got the call. The club president, an elegant retired railway engineer named Robert, phoned to welcome you to the club. You had your piece of paradise – a 12×20-foot garden in full sunlight in a hydro corridor near Toronto’s Thorncliffe neighborhood.

Robert — who with his wife Carmen nourished a gorgeous mixed garden of vegetables and flowers — accepted your $20 fee, and showed you your plot number 6. It didn’t look like much on a cold April day: just a patch of dirt surrounded by a 2-foot wooden fence in reasonable repair.

But poking through the ground were green “volunteers” – several varieties of onion, and a multitude of garlic shoots.

You carefully dug up the volunteers, prepared a patch of soil, and arranged them in neat rows. Robert dropped by in his broad-brimmed hat and khakis to offer encouragement. “I have some elephant garlic bulbs for you, my dear,” he added. (In addition to his generosity in sharing plants and produce, he punctuated some sentences with this gender-neutral term of endearment, perhaps a turn of phrase from his native Ceylon).

Spring greens at Thorncliffe

You reciprocated by lending him some muscle to move a mountain of earthworm-laced soil to his plot – a special delivery from a farm outside the city. You and Robert were both out of breath following the shoveling workout, and rewarded yourselves with a shared thermos of coffee and a few minutes of peace in the community garden.

Later that summer, you pulled up the plants and took home your onion bounty, placing it in the basement to dry.

The onions and garlic from that summer fortified your home-made soups for many months that winter. The capper was when your daughter Colleen wolfed down a bowl of the house special and asked “Are there seconds?”It was a garden miracle.

Disaster: the red currant thief

But then, there was the case of the red currant thief.

You’re not talking about a guy who sneaks into the garden at night and steals the little red currant berries that dangle in delicate clusters from the currant foliage.

This guy took the whole bush.

The previous summer, you had proudly guided your spouse Nadine, daughters Alison and Colleen, and step-brother Stefan to your red currant patch, where they had picked bags full of berries. That weekend you spent a night at the stove at your inlaws’ cottage, boiling the berries into little pots of clear currant jam. Your father-in-law Claus stopped by to offer free advice during the critical gelling stage.

Your gardeners’ pride was compounded by the fact that you had successfully propagated the plants by taking cuttings in the fall. You had planted the cuttings and then carefully tended the new bushes over several years as the berry production slowly increased.

It was an unusually warm day in late March the next spring, and you had come back to the garden to admire your pruning job on my three red currant bushes.

But where your middle currant bush once stood now gaped… a crater. The thief hadn’t even bothered to backfill the hole from which he had wrenched your bush, roots and all.

When it comes to crime, you can’t go much lower than stealing an honest man’s shrub.

Miracle: best boy special delivery

But you forgive the shrub thief by remembering the miracle of the Best Boy special delivery.

It was a scorching summer in T.O., a summer for heat-lovers. And you’re talking tomatoes.

Another garden plot neighbor, Andy, had taken to giving you regular advice in a very direct manner, and booming voice, on many gardening subjects. Andy was the Thorncliffe Park Garden Club’s number 1 “fixer.” When he wasn’t working his own plot, Andy could be found sawing and hammering away doing odd jobs on neighbors’ plot fences, and going for coffee runs in his aging but immaculate silver Volvo.

Your first inclination was to play dumb, or to avoid this nosy gardening neighbor — until Marina set you straight.

“Listen to the old man,” said Marina, who grew bitter-melon and other exotic (to you) vegetables. “He knows what he’s talking about.”

Andy decreed that the best tomato seedlings could be found at small garden shop on Pape Avenue. You parked illegally across the road and jay-ran over to spot the shop’s last flat of tomato seedlings. The price was a steep but the seedlings had thick sturdy cores and healthy leaves, and an intriguing brand name: Best Boy.

Andy took pity on your initial attempt to plant the seedling plants, brushing you aside to show you how to dig them a little deeper and to pick off the lower stems, helping the Best Boys set down a good root system.

In the heat of that summer you had a bumper crop. You convinced your older daughter Alison to join you for the harvest.

You picked baskets of deep red unblemished tomatoes, and set them in the trunk of your red Echo. You two put aside a good quantity for home use, and proceeded to play a pair of tomato Robin Hoods, driving through Toronto’s Riverdale streets to bestow a surprise gift of Best Boys upon friends and neighbors.

It was a miracle of miracles in the urban garden.