Downtown Eastside grandmas plant seeds, grow more than garden vegetables

Urban Farming Poh-Pohs. Photo Clare Yow  Source: Vancouver Food Network

Kevin Griffin, Vancouver Sun

Jun 29, 2020 - In a Downtown Eastside community garden, a group of grandmother gardeners love their vegetables — and the vegetables love them right back.

For two growing seasons, more than a dozen older women from the Vancouver neighbourhood have been growing bok choy, watercress, tomatoes and other vegetables in raised beds on a plot of land at the corner of Jackson and East Hastings.

While the garden started out in part to provide fresh produce for seniors living in a neighbourhood where more than half the grocery stores have closed in recent years, it blossomed into something more.

Women who started out as strangers became friends as they shared stories and got to know each other by gardening, weeding, harvesting and cooking.

Their camaraderie has been recorded in a podcast called Roots and Seeds.

For 2020, the physical distancing requirements of the novel coronavirus pandemic meant the urban farmers couldn’t sow heritage seeds in the garden as they intended, said Kathleen Flaherty, podcast co-writer with Kathy Feng.

But Flaherty is hopeful the women may be able to start planting by August.

“A lot of these plants have a short growing season,” she said. “I have a little bit of optimism about that.”

The garden is planted by the women in Urban Farming Poh-Pohs (poh-poh means grandmother or elderly woman in Cantonese).

In the podcast, the poh-pohs talk mostly in Cantonese and Mandarin which is translated. They recount the challenge of not being able to speak English when they first arrived in Canada. But most aren’t complainers, said narrator Kathy Feng. They have become philosophical over time about adjusting to a new life in Vancouver.

The gardening project is a collaboration between the Carnegie Seniors Program, led by Doris Chow, and the DTES Neighbourhood House Seniors Program, led by Simin Sun.

Read full article on the Vancouver Sun here ⇥

Read more and view more photos by Clare Yow on the Vancouver Food Network ⇥

The Roots and Seeds podcast, with interviews by Veronique West, is available in English, Mandarin and Cantonese.