Tubs of Dirt Transform Concrete Campus

#89. Tubs of Dirt Transform Concrete Campus

© Leila Marie Farah

Seeds

The Edible Campus project demonstrates that underutilized concrete spaces can be unobtrusively made edible with little effort and low cost. Student volunteers maintain over one hundred simple containers in a 93-square-metre modular, mobile seasonal garden. The site is a corner on McGill University’s downtown campus with heavy pedestrian traffic. Edible Campus allows Santropol Roulant, a Montréal charity that delivers food, to source organic fruit and vegetables locally and provide up to ninety meals daily during the harvest. Fourty percent of the kitchen's organic wastes are turned into natural fertilizer through vermicomposting, with part of the output reintroduced in the garden's soil. By localizing food production, the Edible Campus also reduces food miles.

Actors:

Minimum Cost Housing Group of McGill University (Vikram Bhatt and Leila Marie Farah); Alternatives (Ismaël Hautecoeur); Santropol Roulant (Jane Rabinowicz and Tim Murphy); volunteers

Location: McGill University downtown campus, Montréal, Canada, since May 2007

Tools: Recycled plastic tubs, soil and compost, fruit and vegetable seeds, water

Gardening

Low Effort