Click here to view a gallery of Fresh Roots at work

By Sarah Buell and Ryan Elias

This summer, Ilana Labow and Gray Oron plan to feed 150 people from six backyards in East Vancouver.

Labow is the director and Oron the head farmer for , an urban agriculture project that turns yard space into farms and divides the spoils between hosts, gardeners and shareholders.

“We wanted to really test ourselves and see, can we really grow food on a larger scale in the city without having actual land and using people’s backyards that are laying covered in sod and not tended?” said Labow.

Converting a backyard is a labour-intensive 12 to 18 hour process. It begins with Labow, Oron and a crew of interns and volunteers converting empty expanses of grass and moss into lush, fertile soil which they then seed and irrigate.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The harvest

By mid-May, Fresh Roots will be producing weekly boxes of produce and herbs. Hosts and labourers will each get their own crate filled with the week’s harvest. The rest will go to shareholders who buy in at the beginning of the season for $650.

That amount buys them 22 weekly produce crates and sets aside $100 towards a farm investment fund which covers the cost of present and future conversions.

“These people are buying their vegetables for the year,” said Oron. “They support the farmer in a way that allows the farmer to have the cash that’s needed in the beginning of the season and use the full potential of the area that we have.”

Click here to view a gallery of Fresh Roots' gardens

Because the gardens are grown with techniques, each will bear a wide range of produce.

Over the course of the growing season, they will harvest over 100 varieties of vegetables, berries and herbs, including but not limited to:

• Four varieties of arugula
• 15 varieties of baby greens
• Edible flowers
• Spaghetti and butternut squash
• Carrots
• Tomatoes
• Strawberries
• Many kinds of herbs
• Garlic
• Several varieties of peas and beans

The business

Both Labow and Oron have day jobs: Oron is a software engineer and Labow the multifaith coordinator for . Fresh Roots was initially conceived as a side-project.

“The idea was we were just going to do a project, see how it goes and grow food in backyards,” Labow said. The question the pair sought to answer: “Is it possible to really grow food reliably in this way and make it something that the community can have access to?”

With the success of a one-garden pilot project in the summer of 2009, the two started converting additional yards last November. Neither expected it to quickly dominate their schedules.

Labow and Oron both work 80 hour weeks just to keep up. The administrative and logistical demands of running six farms with diverse owners and needs spread out over a two square kilometre area are greater than either anticipated.

“Farming on its own is a huge amount of work,” said Labow.

The host

Chris Anthony is one of the East Vancouver residents who gave over his backyard to the project. He heard about Fresh Roots through Oron, whom he met two years ago at , a local community garden.

As part of his contract with Fresh Roots, he’ll get a portion of the garden for his personal use.

“I think in areas like this a lot of the kids and a lot of people don’t get a chance to experience a lot of the same things that you could in other neighbourhoods,” he said. “I find this is a really good way to get people out and trying things that they might not otherwise get a chance to try. I think it’s really good for the community and for the people.”

The community

Though everybody involved in Fresh Roots is passionate about food, Labow and Oron hope to go beyond simply producing weekly vegetable boxes. They see the project as a starting point for education programs to rebuild food skills and knowledge.

Fresh Roots already has an internship program in place with UBC’s program. With a background working with underserved youth in Chicago, Labow hopes to offer vocational skills programs next year, possibly in tandem with the .

“The momentum of the possibilities of what we can do and what we can offer… it’s huge,” she said.

In the meantime, Oron is excited to get some of the region’s most fertile soil out from under sod and back in the hands of farmers.

“Cities were built on the best growing areas because that’s where people started living and expanded into,” he said. “We’re reclaiming that soil.”

It’s an appetite for more than a well-balanced, vegan meal. These students want to take a bite out of the huge amount of wasted food tossed into the garbage every week.

Community Eats receives boxes full of of produce every week that would otherwise be thrown into a garbage.

Students volunteer to chop, peel, stir and cook over 14 boxes of vegetables and slice over 60 loaves of bread as part of their program. It’s a program designed to foster a healthy eating community to promote a sustainable environment.

Best of all, it’s free.

“It’s such a neat experience being here when there are 300 people lined up to get food,” said Renee Wild, a student who took up the role of Community Eats organizer and director after some of the founders graduated.

Wild latched onto the program after she volunteered as a cook and server when started in 2007.

“It was really nice to see the community it was building,” said Wild. “What’s really great about Community Eats is you see what you’re doing and the happiness it creates.

“You’re cooking the food or going to pick it up in the warehouses where there’s tons and tons of food that’s going to be thrown away and seeing how grateful people are for a free meal and it keeps me involved.”

Every week Wild and other students collect bread donations from Terra Breads and Save-On-Foods, and vegetable donations from a farmer.

Reduce waste

Students learn about the food and how to reduce waste when they enjoy their free meal. They savour the taste of dishes cooked using bruised, squishy and unwanted produce unsuitable for grocery stores shelves said Wild.


The meal is free because the food is all donated. Anyone who wants a bowl of vegan stew follows only one rule: BYOB or “bring your own bowl,” said Wild.

Food containers are a must because Community Eats strives to create as little waste as possible.

Students at Sprouts find the easy-going atmosphere ideal to socialize, study and eat healthy.

Wild hopes teaching students to use reusable containers, and feeding them delicious meals made from foods normally thrown away, will spark students to be more conscious about what they waste.

“It’s delicious,” said Alyse Alaouze, a student who decided to help with the food’s preparation after her friends convinced her to try Community Eats. She guaranteed anyone trying the food will be back for another taste.

“I try to be aware of our environmental situation. It means taking care of what we’ve got and making sure it lasts forever, and not abusing and over-using everything.”

is a major problem and 61 per cent of all wasted food could have been eaten if people buying it planned better and stored food smarter, according to a report done in the United Kingdom from Waste & Resources Action Program.

A single family in Toronto throws out over 275 kilograms of food every year, according to the Toronto Star.

“It’s about the bigger picture,” said Dr. Jennifer Klenz, from the UBC Department of Biology and Zoology.“When you start looking at everything you do as taking up a piece of land, it really makes you think because the earth is only so big.”

Klenz tries to teach her students to consciously think about the environment, and how they impact it, as “wasting less stuff and buying less stuff.”

“We’re pretty wasteful,” said Klenz. “You can keep food for quite a while after the best-before date.

“Another part of this eco-footprint stuff is just mindfulness. When you plan ahead, look at what you have in the fridge and use it instead of throwing it out. Re-cook leftovers and be creative. It’s amazing what you can get. It’s little, simple, common sense things you can do to make a difference.”

Community Eats utilizes all of the tips Klenz gives to students. The Community Eats cooks use whatever is heading for the garbage bin.

“Every week is different,” said Wild. “On Wednesday we go and pick up this food and you never know what you’re getting. And then, on Thursday you’re cooking it into a full meal.”

Interesting concoctions

The stew is then served to droves of spoon wielding students on Friday, beginning at 11:30 a.m.

The volunteers dream up interesting concoctions, said Wild. Cooking is a learning curve and the cooks toss whatever they’ve got into a pot and hope for the best, she said.

But students dig into whatever veggie stews served and if they want to bring a small donation, that’s welcome too, said Wild.

“When you see the amount of food that would otherwise be wasted and you taste how good the meals are, it’s really amazing.

“Every time I look at the food it shocks me to think it would have been thrown out.”



Mike Green, Brooke Hykaway and Jessica Michielin take a bite out of the equation that vegetarianism automatically equals healthy.

This slideshow is a supplement to the story ‘Healing Garden’ nourishes Aboriginal Vancouverites.




The first garden

Click to return to the story on how backyards in East Vancouver are being turned into urban farms.

Sustainable transportation

Click to return to the story on how backyards in East Vancouver are being turned into urban farms.