Remembering Victory Gardens During the German U-boat blockade

from the UK National Archives

What if all those community garden groups got their wish and every square inch of our cities were overflowing with food?  What would be the challenges of dealing with the harvest?  Hobson Lin interviewed Stanley regarding his boyhood Victory garden in England during the blockade...Click on the picture below to watch the video or go to this link:

Victory Garden Interview

Britannia Garden Club students win Queen of Green most unique project

all photos by Ian Marcuse, Grandview Woodland Food Connection

An earth day parade organized by youth for youth converged on Britannia Secondary.  Britannia Garden Club was awarded the Queen of Green award, amongst other awards, for most unique project!   Project BUG 's  design participation was a big part of this.  Youth members of the garden club made seed bombs beside their co-design drawings.  Congratulations to the dedicated students involved, and to Ian Marcuse, community organizer of GWFC.   Check out this inspiring Earth day event.

Flickr set of photos for project BUG's display here  and video of the parade here

Project BUG Digital Story

Grandview Woodland Food Connection put together a draft slideshow on Project BUG part 1 .  Stanley narrated this, summarizing the co-design process in a nutshell.  We are privileged to be a part of this process which is a collaboration between GWFC, UBC SCARP students and Co-Design. The purpose is to design a food garden and to demonstrate a participitory design process.

Project BUG next step

Project BUG, organized by Grandview Woodland Food Connection moved into the next design stage today.  Flickr set of photos here.  Students examined the data gathered from the community input.  All the co-design drawings were rated by the community:  Students, parents, teachers and community members had an opportunity to vote on their desired features.  Erin, from SCARP, facilitated a session where groups of students walked through the site and marked their ideas on a plan.  The purpose of the session was to synthesize all the ideas into a plan for the three garden sites.  Dolores Altin, a landscape architect from Evergreen Learning Grounds,  gave students a presentation on food security and garden design.  She showed examples of school food gardens in BC, and emphasized that design of a space is an on-going process.  Followup to this, (update, Oct 2011): The Build party occurred  Fall of 2011

all the features of the drawing were rated "I love it, go for it", "needs more designing" or "this belongs elsewhere".  Today, students considered the features that received a high rating from the community.

Dolores discussing priorities for the design

students learn strategies for overcoming bureaucratic hurdles

Erin displaying the plan for the site

Erin demonstrates a shadow study for the garden site

Stanley facilitates discussion of design ideas in one group during the site walk: "Ask yourself what would you be doing here?"

Project BUG

Grandview Woodland Food Connection asked Stanley and Susan to help facilitate a youth program  in Vancouver.  Using some of the techniques described in the Youth Manual,  students shared their ideas for how they wish to experience a community garden on school grounds.  Here is the flickr set of photos  as well as the follow-up session here and, later a build party for the new student garden

Stanley is facilitating a drawing with youth participants

Susan invites participants to create a city on the wall

participants create a city out of wilderness

Desired personal experience and perceptions noted on this drawing

Day in the Life of the Garden, a graffiti wall.

Susan draws youth harvesting mushrooms on a cob house, at the direction of the participants

Drew Ferrari facilitating a collaborative design dialogue.  This sequence of drawings took less than an hour. activities and features are dictated precisely by participants.  

the collaborative drawing is now complete and features are numbered for voting