Green roof garden rooted in food, how things grow.
Lee Earl leads a tour during the grand opening of Access Point on the Danforth's new green roof Tuesday evening.
Staff photo/NICK PERRY
Just east of Victoria Park and Danforth avenues, two storeys above the busy street sits a small urban oasis.
The roof of AccessPoint on the Danforth's renovated space at 3079 Danforth Ave. has been transformed into a garden bursting with greenery and food.
Axelle Janczur is the executive director of Access Alliance Multicultural Health and Community Services, which initiated the project. She said the space was perfect for the green makeover.
"This space, when we saw it we thought it could be a roof top garden," she said.
The organization held a roof garden celebration Tuesday evening.
While some green roofs only provide an environmental and aesthetic benefit, this roof goes a step further. It is an educational space for the thousands of high-rise dwellers who live in nearby Teesdale and Crescent Town.
"This is a real demonstration project to be able to show people how to grow food in small spaces," Janczur said. "This is an ideal location."
The infrastructure for the garden was completed late last year and in the spring community volunteers and staff set out planting the garden, which features a variety of plants including vegetables, herbs and native flowers.
"There's a focus on growing food and herbs here, but there's also some ornamentals," said Lara Mrosovsky, the green roof co-ordinator.
Local school children even helped with some of the planting and by doing so learned where food comes from.
The garden isn't a community garden in the traditional sense where people can sign up for a plot and grow their own food, but it is a community space.
"It's more of a demonstration project where people can learn about food and growing and how things relate to nature," Janczur said.
She added Access Alliance has always been focused on detriments of health and so programs related to food security have always been part of its mandate.
Mrosovsky wrote a guide to growing food on a balcony and that resource coupled with the garden space will allow the organization to teach the community how to grow fresh, healthy food themselves.
"There's really a big educational component," she said. "We're really trying to make it a learning garden as well as a beautiful oasis in the city."
The garden, already full of greenery, is home to tomatoes, Chinese red hot pepper, Asian eggplant, sweet peppers, echinacea, parsley, mint, okra, mustard, lavender, and rosemary, among other things. Sunflowers and scarlet runner beans should soon be visible from the sidewalk - something the on-site day care requested.
"When you're down below you can look up and know there's a garden here," Mrosovsky said.
The food is being used in the on-site community kitchen - some of the dishes served at the celebration contained ingredients grown on the roof - and volunteers who help with planting, maintenance and harvesting will be sent home with a small amount of fresh food.