Edible landscaping
“They have made a dramatic difference. Before, all you would see was cigarette butts,” said Pat Pietromonaco, Property Manager at Facilities Management.
Now, the planters are brimming with ground cherries, borage, parsley, kale, calendula, peppers and tomatoes. People still take cigarette breaks on the benches around the planters, but the earth remains butt-free.
Pietromonaco credits Facilities Management staff, greenhouse volunteers, the Sustainability Action Fund and Sustainable Concordia. All of these groups came together to make Quartier Concordia around the Hall Building a bit greener and the results have been impressive.
Beautifying the neighbourhood was one of the ideas that emerged last spring during a discussion on how to better integrate the community living and working in Quartier Concordia with those either working or studying at the university.
“Edible landscaping makes sense, there’s an inordinate amount of interest in urban agriculture,” says Greenhouse Coordinator Arlene Throness of the project to fill the planters with edibles. The model, already popularized elsewhere, establishes collective gardens and encourages passers-by to gather what they need, taking no more than 20% of any one harvest to ensure that the crop renews itself.
The planters on the west side of the Hall Building had fallen into disrepair. They had become, as Pietromonaco pointed out, oversized ashtrays.
The greenhouse team (which has a volunteer list of 400 names collected in the last academic year, a testament to the project’s popularity) proposed the project at the end of the academic year. Facilities management was immediately on board.
Besides financing soil and seedlings for the project, funded through the Sustainability Action Fund, the facilities management team also provided the labour to get the planters back in shape.
“We put the right pieces together to get things done,” said Pietromonaco. “But it was the enthusiasm of Arlene and the greenhouse team that got things done.”
That same push helped see the creation of a vertical garden behind the mezzanine of the Hall Building. The project was proposed in conjunction with a group that has been using greenhouse space to develop vertical planting techniques for use in urban spaces like balconies.
With the help of facilities management and engineers to install electricity and plumbing for a self-watering system, bins are stacked in a vertical frame along the back wall of the Hall Building terrace. Each bin holds sage, thyme or grasses and one plant that “tastes just like Hubba- Bubba bubble gum,” according to Throness. She hopes that the greenhouse team will be able to green more space around Quartier Concordia in the future.