The Farm - Part 2 - The Neighbours

Land acquisition in farming is a whole thing.

It’s really challenging for new farmers to find the right set-up, and there are plenty of horror stories out there about land-lease relationships gone sour. When I share this story it’s important for you to know how special and very, very rare my experience has been.

 

The luckiest of stars aligned for me, as they say.

I live on a typical urban side street two blocks from a hospital between two busy main roads. It’s typical except for the massive 3-story 100-year-old house on 1/4 acre of land standing directly across the street from mine.

The house is surrounded by long-standing gardens and borders a small creek (Bowker Creek). It runs alongside a municipal community nature space which is a huge grassy field with pathways and trees. It’s a tiny paradise right in the middle of the city, and I see nothing but nature out my front windows.

When I moved into my little yellow rental in 2019, the gardens across the street were not at their best. They were home to overgrown pathways and the remnants of ideas that various hopeful gardeners had left behind.

I regularly saw random twenty-somethings coming and going from the house, and just assumed a bunch of students lived there. Having been to a house party or two myself in that house 20+ years ago it seemed like a fair assessment.

Cut to November 2022 (where Part 1 of this story left off). Not much had changed with my kitchen window view, but my life had certainly gone in a new direction.

I had just decided to quit my job to be home for my kid and become a flower farmer in my teeny 400 square foot backyard. I was really fired up about my ideas. If you’ve ever heard me talk about a passion project of mine, it is obvious that I am nerding out haaaard.

My brain gets a goal and starts filling in the puzzle pieces. I draw pictures of what I have in mind and start making to-do lists about what I need to do to get there. I list and prioritize and re-prioritize tasks based on pieces like time, materials, physical space and resources until it all clicks and heads in the right direction. I’m a gal who can get things done (cue self-high-five here).

I’d been blankly staring at that space for 3 years prior to all of this without any intention attached to it at all. I looked at it everyday and through the seasons, said hello to the youth who lived there and that was about it.

I’d set my goals in motion with my enrolment in Floret’s farming course and by planting those 3000 tulips in Fall 2022. Suddenly my puzzle-solving brain started envisioning all kinds of beautiful things happening in that space across the street and I decided to reach out to the neighbours.

I left a note in their mailbox asking if I could grow on their land in exchange for upkeep and maintenance, and Heather connected with me within the day.

Turns out, I’d known them the entire time I’d lived there but didn’t realise it! The young folks I’d seen around were the grown-up versions of the same kids I’d taught in my basement art studio around the corner 10 years prior, and their mom, Heather, was still the homeowner.

That property is really big, and there are little gardens tucked everywhere around it. There’s even a teeny orchard. It needs continual basic maintenance to just keep it under control, never mind doing anything productive with the gardens or caring for the house itself. You need someone who is dedicated to the garden as their work.

Mother Nature is not shy about taking back what’s hers when the humans stop trying to control things. A few months of neglect on a property that size and you’re in for an uphill battle with the blackberries and bindweed.

Heather and I came up with a handshake agreement that felt good for both of us. We’ve since signed an actual agreement, but at the beginning we just decided to trust each other. As single moms and neighbours, it felt good to team up like that and it was something that we both needed.

I got the extra space to learn, think, sweat, create my dreams and (attempt to) grow flowers to earn some money for rent and groceries. Heather, in turn, found someone she could trust to steward her property who is hell-bent on making it all look as beautiful as possible and is in it long-term.

She let me have access to the gardens behind her house and in January 2023, I got to work. I put on my work gloves and raincoat and began to cut through the tangle of blackberry vines. I yanked up weeds and exposed some pathways. I made a garden map and a seed starting plan.

In the evenings, I started (and killed) hundreds of seedlings in my studio at home while I listened to flower farming podcasts and worked on completing my course.

I muscled the wet soil into rows and asked a few friends to help me move 9 yards of compost into place. I built a rickety fence in an attempt to keep the deer out, and I cleaned out the cooler. I was dedicated to this plan of mine.

My son was halfway through Grade 1 at this time. What had started as a positive school year for him began to become more and more difficult starting in January 2023. He was having multiple meltdowns every day, he was fully refusing to participate, and his attendance became patchy. His time with his father had been consistently inconsistent. He was struggling. His reaction to school was so intense that I decided to remove him from the school environment over Spring Break.

That Spring we became involved in an investigation surrounding the reported mistreatment of four children by their teacher/principal. An EA risked her job to report what she’d seen, and her truth-telling saved our kids.

That teacher did not complete the school year at that school, and two of the four kids (mine included) did not return to that school for the 2023/24 school year, nor did she.

I know. What the actual hell right? I could go on. See something, say something and know your rights.

Having a young traumatized child in full-fledged autistic burnout at home full-time while I figured out my first season of farming was not exactly in my plan. The puzzle of our lives had just become more complex.

I kept going.

He needed to feel continual calm and safety with a constant co-regulating adult near him at all times in order to get out of burnout. I found a very flexible homeschool option that provided funding for in home educational assistance that I could choose on my own.

I hired an incredibly nurturing and safe family friend who just sat with him for that season and built his capacity for trust. She saved us (Sam we love you!). She is also a neighbour whom I’ve know for 15+ years and whose child was one of my very first art students back when I was teaching out of a garage in Gordon Head in 2008.

I carried on with my plan between meltdowns and therapies and trampoline-bouncing and seed-starting and racoon-battling and grocery-shopping and lawn-mowing and Instagramming and…well, you get the idea.

I got my municipal permits and made a website and kept devouring everything I could about flower farming…along with all the books and courses on autistic burnout and trauma I could find to build my skills in those areas as well. My dad built me my Farmstand and I was selling tulips from it before I’d even painted anything.

The garden kept me focused and moving forward because nothing happens too quickly in a garden. It’s slow and steady. You can tend to it in fits and starts if that’s all you’ve got, and something will grow.

I finally planted that garden in the back of Heather’s house in late April of 2023, a little on the late side, but I planted those seedlings anyway. I started 70 dahlias and hundreds of annuals of all kinds. I didn’t stop.

I kept going and things started blooming.

In July 2023 Heather allowed me to dig into the garden space along Haultain Street, changing my kitchen window view forever.

xo - Renée

In Part 3, you’ll meet yet another incredible neighbour from two doors down who helped me protect what I’d started and single-handedly turned my simple drawings into reality. In an added twist, a Farmstand fan connects me with another tiny urban-farming gem owned by a heart-forward couple who were looking for their steward. Stay tuned!