Many urban gardeners like the idea of eating organic, but have little practice in making it work in their own gardens. Some have attempted to grow a portion of their food in their own backyard, and even grow it organically. Whether due to time or inclination, this isn't a solution for everyone. The time of individual gardeners remains a limiting factor on the urban agriculture movement.
An additional challenge for the urban gardener is the need to grow a wide variety of vegetables. Individuals often end up with too much of one vegetable, and not nearly enough of another. Friends and neighbors suddenly become the recipients of more zucchini than they know what to do with. Unless everyone in the neighborhood is an avid amateur gardener, each growing different things, it's not easy to trade zucchinis for a full spectrum of vegetables. As a result, city-grown vegetables have remained a hobbyist's passion. It didn't make sense to try to grow food at scale in the backyards of the city—until now.
Enter VegetablePatch.ca. Their model is simple, but ingenious. It's perfect for people who like the idea of a vegetable garden (and all the goodies it brings), but not all the work involved. In exchange for the use of a section of their garden, VegetablePatch will deliver a mixed basket of vegetables to their door weekly. These vegetables will be not just from their own backyard, but from a collection of similar gardens all over the city. The owner of the land gets convenient, diverse, local organic produce. All with no money and no work.
VegetablePatch keeps afloat by selling the excess produce to other people without gardens of their own. They deliver to the door, either to home or workplace, and offer the convenience of computerized ordering. They also have a special requests system that tries to accomodate people's preferences. The founder, Jesse Boynton Payne, had previous experience in organic farming and in the Ottawa high-tech sector before he decided to launch VegetablePatch. Payne's mission: "to encourage gardening in the urban environment—and to make a little extra income from it."
Demand to share garden space has been tremendous. VegetablePatch had more offers than they can handle this season. So: a feature to look out for in the coming weeks—Post-a-Patch. Payne comments:
This is something I've been working on slowly. Hopefully I'll have it up in the next week or two. Let's say you have a space in your backyard. You can create a posting that you want to share it. In Ottawa, there's a high need for community gardens—but they're scarce. A lot of people who contact me live in apartments and would like to get their hands dirty. Post-a-Patch will be a community garden on the web.
The Post-a-Patch feature is designed to complement VegetablePatch's main business, growing and delivering food. Starting this year, VegetablePatch.ca will operate on a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) model. A backyard-garden CSA: imagine that!
Image credit: Jesse Boynton Payne
