Location:  Redeemer Lutheran Church & St Joan of Arc Catholic Church, Bloor St West. 

For more info and photos please go to: www.gardenpartytoronto.com and to see a lovely video of the garden please click here.

This Year’s Successes

The Garden Party is a giving garden. Over the past 18 years, we have been growing and donating herbs and vegetables initially to the Parkdale Activity Recreation Centre (PARC) and St. Francis Table, both located on Queen Street West in the Parkdale neighbourhood and later expanding to other local food banks. This year, our donations went to PARC and St. Francis Table.

This year, we donated 285.25 Kg (629 lbs.) of fresh produce and 308 herb bundles. Between May 28, our first delivery, and October 15, one of our last, we made 34 deliveries.

This year, we increased the number of rows of beans we planted and a volunteer started peas early in the spring which provided harvests early in the spring. The pea seeds were purchased at the Parkdale Seedy Saturday. These efforts helped generate a larger yield than in 2023.

Pea seedlings in March (started at home by a volunteer)

We had two planning meetings before the beginning of the planting season and through a facilitated process by two of our volunteers who are trained facilitators, we identified successes and failures from last year and developed a garden plan together that had a greater focus on our higher yield produce – beans, kale and cherry tomatoes.

New Volunteers

We continued our regular Saturday morning gardening sessions with people signing up to water for specific weeks from June until September. We attracted several new volunteers this year and had several students join us to complete their community service hours.

We also had campers from the Jardin Infantil Academy take on watering duties for several weeks this summer. One of our volunteers is the Founder and Director of the Jardin Infantil Academy which is based out of Redeemer Lutheran. She had the following comments to say about the campers’ experiences helping with the garden this summer:

Much gratitude to you all, for including my little campers in the watering schedule and to Louis [one of our long-time volunteers] for teaching them how to water and care for the garden. The children loved it! It had a positive impact on them. They went home talking to their families about the experience. We got many positive comments from their parents.

- Marta Estrada

Garden Tours

The two churches that provide the land for our gardens, Redeemer Lutheran and St. Joan of Arc, held a blessing of the garden on September 8 that was attended by volunteer gardeners and members of the two churches. This event provided an opportunity for the congregants to learn more about the garden and see what was growing.

We also provided impromptu tours throughout the season to people who just stopped by on their way by the garden and explained the purpose of the garden and how we were a project of the Parkdale Hort. Unfortunately, some of our produce (ripe tomatoes) was taken by people when we weren’t there – fine if they really needed it, but we do not think this was always the case.

Research

This year, our gardens were the host site of two nest boxes as part of the research by Ph.D. student Sisley Irwin at the B.U.G.S. Lab at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus. Sisley installed the boxes in May to recruit solitary bees and wasps at low densities. Sisley is trying to understand how temperature and urbanization affect cavity nesting bee communities by surveying cavity nesting bees over the summer months across the City of Toronto. She removed the boxes at the end of October.

Her project was investigating the effect of temperature on small-bodied solitary bees in urban greenspaces. The early life stages of bees in nest boxes are immobile, and therefore restrained to the nest site, making them particularly susceptible to temperature extremes. Cities are becoming increasingly warm, leaving bees closer to their thermal limit, and at greater risk of decline. Determining how solitary bees will respond to temperature across an urban landscape can be used to inform conservation efforts. She believes this research has the potential to support efforts to provide evidence-based data on the benefits of community gardening, as well as practical recommendations for improving the sustainability and impact of pollinator enhancement programs on biodiversity conservation. We will receive a copy of her research findings when she concludes her work.

Donations and Other Funding

We received a donation of two sets of vegetable seedlings from the Stop Community Food Centre, which were grown in their greenhouse and we also got seedlings through CAMH’s garden. We also received a few leftover tomato plants from the Hort’s plant sale which did very well and produced heirloom tomatoes.

One of our long-time members died in the spring and we received a donation in her memory from two members of her church. Two of our volunteers also made a generous financial donation this spring.

One of our volunteers was able to use his technical talents to set up a new website for The Garden Party in the spring. www.gardenpartytoronto.com

Redeemer Lutheran Church pays the cost of watering the garden.

- Christine Hughes