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The Nest is UVic’s independent newspaper the Martlet’s podcast, established in November 2024. The Nest features Martlet Editor-in-Chief Sydney Lobe interviewing UVic and greater Victoria community members about what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and how you can get involved. It is recorded CFUV 101.9FM’s studios and airs biweekly at 10:00 Saturday morning on CFUV 101.9 FM. Find out more about the Martlet and our volunteer and staff opportunities at martlet.ca.
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Rae Dawson: Thanks for tuning into The Nest, a podcast by the Martlet, the University of Victoria's independent newspaper. Settle in as we listen to Editor-in-Chief Sydney Lobe talk with UVic and greater Victoria community members about what they're doing, why they're doing it, and how you can get involved. The Nest is produced in the studios of 101.9 FM CFUV radio, on the unceded lands of the Lekwungen peoples and the Songhees, Esquimalt and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples, whose relationship with the land continues to this day.
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Sydney Lobe: Hello, my name is Sydney Lobe and welcome to this episode of The Nest. Today, we're here with Juls Macdonell. Juls is a third-year writing student at UVic with a focus in fiction and poetry. She is passionate about food security and working outside, getting hands in the dirt –– her words. He has been assistant coordinator at the UVic Campus Community Garden at the beginning of this year, but has been working with the gardens since 2022. Juls Macdonell, welcome to The Nest.
Juls Macdonell: Thank you! Thanks for having me.
Sydney Lobe: Yeah, of course, we're really happy to get the chance to talk about your work with the Campus Community Garden. So I want to start this chat with kind of a tall order –– can you verbally bring me through UVic Campus Community Garden, as if we're there, walking through together, for people who might have no idea what it looks like or what it is?
Juls Macdonell: Yeah, we're kind of a unique group when it comes to the UVSS. We have a massive physical space across Mackenzie Avenue from CARSA, and we have to maintain that on top of our office here and duties as an affiliate group. In the garden itself, we have two sheds, one for plot renters, communally, and one for staff. We have two greenhouses exactly the same, one communal and then one for staff. We have two compost piles. One is for industrial compost, UVic comes and picks it up. And then we have one that's organic, that plot renters volunteer to maintain. And then inside that space, there's a gazebo, there's picnic tables where people hang out, and then there's about eighty-nine plots, like individual plot allotments, so roughly seventy-five of those are rented out to individuals. The remaining are communal spaces and then given gardens that the staff maintain. So anything maintained by staff is food that's grown to get donated to the Food Bank at the UVSS or given away. And then the rest of the plots are rented out to individuals who use it as they see fit.
Sydney Lobe: Okay, so just to break that down, you said there are individual plots, and then staff plots, and then community plots. What happens with the community plots? What's grown there?
Juls Macdonell: Kind of whatever the community wants. Okay, yeah, there's specifically three communal plots where anyone is welcome to go in and garden and grow what they want. So volunteers maintain that. And then we have a few communal spaces. We have a memorial bed for an old staff member of the garden, which is full of native plants and flowers. There's a native restoration plot, and then there's a communal urban tea bed. And then coming soon, a new wheelchair accessible bed, which will be communal and probably be kicked off by the Society of Students with a Disability upstairs here.
Sydney Lobe: Amazing, that’s so cool! I'm curious about the Campus Community Garden’s origin story. I know what's been around for a while. I'm not sure exactly if you have insight into what the origin story was, but I was curious if you can speak to that –– what the incentive was to create the garden?
Juls Macdonell: Yeah, I don't know what was going through their heads, but I do know that it was created by student volunteers from the Environmental Studies Department in 1996. So it was the first campus community garden, like a university campus community garden, in Canada at the time. And I have a feeling, I could be wrong, that when they created it, it was not with any sort of permission, because that tends to be the history of most community gardens –– that they're built on a vacant lot, and they kind of ask for forgiveness rather than permission. The optics of tearing down a bunch of raised beds and veggies is really bad for either governments or universities. And so what happened was they ran it as volunteers for a long time. UVic pegged the spot for land development around 2010, 2011, and it spurred guerrilla gardening protests, which happened on the lawn of MacPherson Library as part of a Food Not Lawns movement. And then, in the face of that backlash, UVic gave us the land that we have now on Mackenzie Avenue, which thankfully is bigger than the old spots. That's one silver lining. And somewhere in there, I think it was after all of the protests, it became an official part of the UVSS. It might have happened before, but I have a feeling it was after that the garden was kind of absorbed into UVSS and became something where, instead of being fully run just by volunteers, we have staff paid by student fees.
Sydney Lobe: Amazing. And yeah, I heard you say, the optics of tearing down a bunch of veggie beds looks really bad. So it's always been about growing food, stuff that's usable?
Juls Macdonell: Yeah, so when the protests were happening in 2011 it was because of all this talk about food security and the price of food and food accessibility. And it was very interesting to read about that and see that, really, it's the same thing we're dealing with now in terms of just having a place to grow food, knowing how to grow food, knowing what food is, what it looks like when it's in the ground. A lot of people don't know because you see it just in a box at the grocery store and so especially for students who are living in dorms, you can kind of live vicariously through gardening at the garden. And really, for anyone in Victoria, food is so expensive here, I think 90% of our food is import. And so being able to just have some knowledge on how to grow your own food, or what it takes to grow food, because that's a whole other thing – how to feed like the people of the world is really good context.
Sydney Lobe: Yeah. I'm curious about one thing you just said, that seeing food in the store, a lot of people don't understand what it looks like to see food growing or to harvest food. What does it mean for someone to learn what it looks like to see food in the ground, and maybe in the context of the Campus Community Garden, somebody who's just used to seeing packaged food in the store and has kind of no experience with gardening –– have you seen that firsthand with anyone?
Juls Macdonell: We have. We've experienced it where people have come to the garden and they've never held a shovel before, because they grew up in an urban setting, and it just never was a thing. I think the biggest impact that I've seen personally, I think there's multiple, but my favourite is the realization that it's actually it is both deceptively easy and deceptively difficult to garden. It's really easy in the way that it's quite simple to plant a seed and water it and be surprised that every day you come back, it's bigger and at the end you get a vegetable or a fruit. But then also, the knowledge ceiling of gardening is so intimidatingly massive. But still, if you just want to plant something and grow a tomato, kind of anyone can do it if you have the sun and the water and dirt. And I think there's a benefit to seeing how easy it is, but also kind of the intent that has to go into it to get that sort of reward.
Sydney Lobe: Yeah, intent, yeah –– and the appreciation of the process that maybe people can be a little bit disconnected from at times just because of the world that we live in.
Juls Macdonell: Yeah, definitely. There is a special thing of eating a cherry tomato that you've grown off the vine, or that someone that you helped grow. Garden fresh is definitely not just a pretty word, it's real, it tastes so good.
Sydney Lobe: Yeah, one of my most vivid childhood memories is eating tomatoes off the plant in my Oma and Opa’s yard. They had so many tomato plants, and those sun ripened cherry tomatoes –– a little bit of dust on the outside, because, you know, you're not washing them, you're just eating them right off the plant. There's nothing like it!
Juls Macdonell: Yeah, it’s true, yeah. That’s my favourite! [laughter]
Sydney Lobe: I feel like I have a decent picture of what the garden looks like, but can you walk me through a week in the life, kind of tending to the community gardens. What can people expect to see out there day by day? Or what does your role look like? Or the roles of your co-workers?
Juls Macdonell: Yeah, it's very dynamic. For my position specifically I'm kind of, what's –– the man in the van in a heist? [laughter] I'm organizing all the plot renters and behind the scenes kind of administrative office stuff. I'll be more in the garden when my schedule allows for it. But we have the physical garden space of all those plots, and then there's a spreadsheet of all those plots, which is all so gigantic. And it's kind of like herding cats, because we have to allocate based on students, staff and faculty, and organize and that kind of thing.
But my fellow co-workers are more garden based, and so they are out there tending to the staff plots. In the summer, we have a watering schedule. Everyone needs to go out and water, sometimes twice a day if it's really hot, to keep all of our beds alive. But if you walk into the garden on any given day, there will usually be staff in there. Not so much this time of the year, but kind of early spring to late fall. There's tons of people –– not tons, but throughout the day people kind of come in and go. And so people of all ages will be in there gardening, because we do rent to staff as well and a lot of the time they have their families come. So they might bring their kids, or they'll bring their grandparents, it's so cute. And so there's a lot of people poking around gardening, chatting, washing their veggies, mowing, mulching, grabbing compost, tossing it.
Every Friday, we have work parties, and so there'll be like a little squad of people hanging out getting something done. Sometimes we have class tours, so anyone in ES200 has been on one of those tours, and has been toured around the garden. Yeah, basically the tasks are split into the looking after the garden physically, and then looking after the garden kind of spreadsheet wise, to organize the people and communicate. And then we have an outreach person who helps with events and stuff. But a lot of the time, our tasks just end up overlapping because there is just so much of it.
Sydney Lobe: Gotcha. Have a lot of those people that rent plots been stewarding those plots for many years? Or is there decent turnover?
Juls Macdonell: Some of them, yeah. So, we have the plots split into three, roughly. So one-third is for undergraduates, one-third for graduates, and then one-third for staff and faculty. And staff and faculty have a three year wait list because there's just so little turnover that if we didn't split it up that way, the whole garden would just be staff and faculty. But mostly it's the staff and faculty who stay the longest because they don't have an end term on their studies or something. And I think a few of them have been there, I want to say, since –– 2015, 2016 are probably some of the oldest ones, which is coming up on a decade now. So it's pretty good!
Sydney Lobe: Yeah. Can I ask what it costs to rent a plot?
Juls Macdonell: Yeah so right now, the fee I don't think has gone up since –– it's either 2001 or 2011? It's $30 for a full year, and it's for a three by four meter plot. So it's very inexpensive. We are looking at changing some of our policies to move into a sliding scale system for the purpose of better equity. Especially because the plot fee –– for $30 a year per plot –– it's really not kind of, it's not paying our wages. Most of our money comes from student fees, it's more just to help recoup costs. And so moving into a sliding scale would just make it a little bit more accessible. But yeah, I don't actually know what fees are like in other community gardens in town, but I've heard that ours is very good.
Sydney Lobe: Okay! Good to know. So I was thinking about the idea of a community garden and the fact that presumably, or at least it's my guess, that the organization is as focused on the process as it is the result. I don't know if that's something that resonates for you, but I mean the action of gardening and stewarding a plot of land, tending to the plants that you're looking after, likely takes up the majority of your mental space, time, energy. And the product is great to have, of course, food to eat. But I also see a major benefit in that practice, and at least I've experienced that in my life with family gardening and things like that. And I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about, in that context, how you define success for this operation?
Juls Macdonell: Oh, my god, yeah, that's such a good question.
Sydney Lobe: It's loaded, I know. I was talking for a long time there –– I was like, this is gonna be a lot to answer.
Juls Macdonell: No, I love it. I'd say it's an interesting thing, because every year we plant stuff, and every year we harvest food, and so that sort of work and reward is cyclical and quite fast and rewarding. But it's also on a much larger scale –– like, we have kiwi plants in the garden which are maybe a couple years old now, and I won't see those kiwis before I graduate, and it's going to be years before eventual garden staff get to see those kiwis. And that's part of the practice for us is this legacy work, where we get to harvest, right now, grapes and apples from trees that were planted long ago, but stuff that we're planting now is also not going to be seen until eventual garden staff long from now.
And so some of what we do in terms of intentional work won't necessarily come back to us personally, but it's still seen as this amazing kind of ongoing growth where we're contributing to something, and it's easy to do that because we came into something that had been contributed to prior. And so it's this nice kind of like passing the baton basically, between different generations, so to speak, of garden staff. But in terms of just working in the dirt, it definitely is its own reward in some way. Every time I get dirt on my hands –– it seems like such a strange thing to say, but everyone who comes to work parties and stuff always says, “Oh, it feels so good just to touch soil and get in there.” So there is definitely something kind of inherent in just working outside.
Sydney Lobe: Totally, yeah, that's something I heard from my mom my whole life. She's a gardener, and she would always go outside and then say, “Oh, it just feels so good to get your hands in the dirt.” Yeah, there's something about it, I guess. I'm curious –– it's interesting what you say about legacy work, and I'm curious what meaning that takes on for you, if any outside of the context of gardening?
Juls Macdonell: Yeah, it's hard to separate it from the context. I mean, we do other work that's not just garden stuff. So some of our events have been inspired by events past, like our Farm Crawl, we dug through decades old Google Docs and physical binders in our office space to see kind of what they were doing to choose that. We started a journal this year, which hopefully will live on after we've turned over fully. And then a big part of it too for the garden, and also just, I think, for all of us too, is like any sort of radical action, which a community garden is –– giving away food shouldn't be radical, but it is –– all ties back to Indigenous rights, especially locally here in the garden. We're very aware that we have to operate within both the institution of UVic and the institution of UVSS when it comes to policies and what we can do with the land. But we can, in our own way, choose ways to act within those institutions that are honourable to this much bigger legacy work that we're still a part of. And that is frustrating sometimes, but ultimately feels good to do what we can.
Sydney Lobe: What are those honourable ways of acting?
Juls Macdonell: One way is very seasonal. The Long Moon is starting soon, which is a period of time where we don't disrupt the earth, the idea is to let it rest. And so from December 15 to 13, I think those dates are specific to this year, we won't be doing any work that disrupts the ground and the garden.
Sydney Lobe: From December 15 to January 13?
Juls Macdonell: That's it, yeah. And we also do a couple different Indigenous planting methods, like Three Sisters is one that a lot of people have heard about, where you have squash plants on the ground, and then you have corn growing interspersed, and then you grow beans that vine up the corn. And the idea is they all kind of are able to work in tandem to look after each other. We've done a couple native plant identification workshops, and then our native plant restoration plot is also in the interest of seed saving and cultivating some specifically local plants. And just being able to kind of educate people about what they were, what they were used for, why they're important.
Sydney Lobe: Yeah, thank you. I'm curious if you can share any sort of anecdotes or stories, examples of moments when you've seen or felt success in your work?
Juls Macdonell: Oh my god, so many. Me, yeah, I think one of the best moments of success is probably every late fall, just seeing the garden come to life. Not just in how much food has been grown and it's harvest season and there's so much food, but also just in seeing the garden. There's ten foot tall sunflowers everywhere, and it's really busy with all these plot renters there and we have a lot of events because of September. It's perfect timing, because there's new students in we had a really lovely little potluck early September, and a bunch of people brought food and cider, and we laid out the picnic tables and some tablecloths, and just sat down with strangers and had dinner.
And that was kind of exactly what a lot of us want the garden to be, is this little –– there were maybe only twenty people. We've had events at the garden where there is like seventy people, and that's amazing too, but it's nice to just have almost more frequent, smaller events, to just bring people together casually and welcome them into the space, than to always have these big bashes, even though they're fun. But just to kind of enjoy the time outside and eat some food, whether it's from the garden or not, and get to know other people. Yeah, those are some of my favourites, any of our events that we do also –– they're so rewarding. I'm always so stressed day of, intense anxiety and then every single time they go great, and I leave feeling so healed and like, what was I worried about?
Sydney Lobe: That's the event planning arc. [laughter] You have to go through it!
Juls Macdonell: One-hundred percent, yeah. For me personally, I mean, I don't do much of the food growing, so I can't speak to that. But the journal was kind of my baby, and so it's really nice seeing that succeed. And then same with last summer –– for the first time, we did poetry picnic open mic nights in the summer and those were really lovely. It was golden hour poetry reading outside and yeah, just made me very happy.
Sydney Lobe: Yeah, that sounds really special. I'm curious –– I know, before we sat down in here, you talked a little bit about the fact that you started at the Campus Community Garden in 2022 because you like being outside, you like getting your hands dirty. Why have you stayed?
Juls Macdonell: That's such an interesting question. I was almost not going to stay because I applied for Co-op, and I was like, I'm going to get a job, something to do with writing or English, more kind of why I'm –– my studies at school. And then, to be blunt, I didn't get a co-op job. And thankfully, the coordinator at the garden at the time said, “We can just increase your hours for the summer here so you can stay.” And that was not my plan, but I said, “Okay, great, that's good,” because I needed a job.
And then we ended up having this massive staff turnover at the end of that summer. I think it was summer 2023 and the refresh that came about because of that was so invigorating, and it made me so happy and empowered to get into the assistant coordinator position and to work closely with Lyndsay, the coordinator, to create engagement again, because COVID kind of killed everything that was going on. And then there were kind of staffing turnover ongoing issues, and so getting to see that bounce back and be part of it was so –– it just felt so good. Yeah, and we went crazy planning events last year. We did way too many events, we were completely burned out. But the result is that this year we have this incredible board and people who are really active and volunteering their time, and staff is all solid now and I can't, I haven't thought about getting a co-op for this year or anything. I'm just here now because I really like it. Yeah, absolutely.
Sydney Lobe: I'm glad to hear, that's awesome. So I know, as somebody who started at the Campus Community Garden in 2022 you might not know the answer to this firsthand, but I'm assuming you have maybe some anecdotal information. It's just something I'm really curious about –– thinking about COVID, which you just mentioned, and if you can speak at all to how the way people engage with the garden has changed from before COVID to now? I mean, I feel like post-COVID, I've really been drawn more than I ever was to nature and outdoors and just getting my feet in the dirt or the sand or whatever. And so I was wondering if you've seen any of that in the work you've been doing, or if anyone has kind of passed that on information on to you that was there pre-COVID as well?
Juls Macdonell: Yeah, when I started the coordinator at the time had been at the garden while COVID happened. And so what I saw was that prior to COVID, it was very busy from what I could tell. The garden also at that point had a very active and full board and staff team who, people were –– the work parties were a big deal. It looked very –– I don't want to say that it was necessarily more active than it is now, because I've always pictured it in my head as we're trying to get there. And I think it might be that even though we have gotten there in the last few months, that I struggled to to recognize that, but I think we have. But what happened was they couldn't do the work parties at all. They had to do sign ups and distancing because it was outside, but it was still –– you're sharing hand tools. Sanitization is not really a big thing for garden tools.
Sydney Lobe: I was gonna say!
Juls Macdonell: It is when it comes to –– like, for the food bank, we do like sanitize the tools and the containers and stuff, for sure. But in a communal shed, it's very difficult to track if people are being, you know –– you can put up the signs and ask and then just kind of hope and pray. But I know that engagement definitely took a tumble, and then it kind of coincided with the graduation of a lot of those board members and the turning over of staff at the tail end of it, around 2022, right around there. And so what I noticed when we got in was that I felt bad asking people to volunteer their time, because I see volunteering as something that is only capable with privilege or possible with privilege, because of being able to have any time that you can work without getting paid, basically and as someone paid by student wages, it feels a little tough to ask people to come and work for free.When the reality is it's a garden that was started by volunteers, and it's such a giant physical space that it's necessary for volunteers to help maintain it. We don't have enough staff to maintain it.
Sydney Lobe: That's always been the infrastructure.
Juls Macdonell: Yeah, absolutely. So it was a difficult thing, I think, in 2022, 2023 when everyone was kind of getting back to, quote, “some new normal,” to kind of get people out and invested and caring. But I've seen in just the last year it's felt completely different. This 2024 has felt completely different with the level of engagement and the way people, I think, are desperate to get back to old normal of just being more involved and getting out there and being able to volunteer because they have a little bit more free time. I don't know, it's definitely –– it hasn't necessarily changed any like big facets of our work, but it made us realize how different, like how different world layers, societal things will affect whether or not people are are physically capable, mentally capable of spending their free time in the ground, even if it is a beneficial thing for your mental health, it's still work.
Sydney Lobe: Yeah, I can think of a lot of things that are beneficial for mental health that totally fall by the wayside when there's any sort of tension in life, whether that be external pressure or, you know, internal conflicts in life. Yeah, I think it is often those things that we most want to do that we just can't. Yeah, that's, that's hard. It's also –– what a long recovery time, for the Campus Community Garden.
Juls Macdonell: Yeah, definitely. And, I mean, they did some cool stuff during COVID even. There was a video tour, staff were still in the garden plot. Renters were still in the garden. It was still trucking along. From what I can see, I think it was just the student engagement and the volunteer engagement that really took a dive, and I don't think that there was any way to avoid that because of how much of it is physical, and then all of it –– obviously our events are physical. So yeah, it was kind of hard to get away from.
Sydney Lobe: Yeah, I imagine. I'm hearing you talk a little bit about expecting volunteers to volunteer their time and that challenge, but I'm wondering if there are other obstacles that come to mind that have consistently come up for your organization in trying to make your project happen?
Juls Macdonell: Yeah, I think most of it is relating to staff, staff capacities. Most of the time it's whether or not we have enough people to get anything done, or get the main things done. And so it's one of those things where, when we do have volunteers come in –– like, we had a class of grade three students, they got so much weeding done. It was crazy, because they get competitive, they have endless energy. [laughter] And it was like, it would have taken –– like the staff, we were just standing there looking at –– this patch would have taken us hours, and they did it in half an hour, because there was 25 of them.
And so when we do have large numbers of people come in, they can get a lot done really fast but at the same time we have to sacrifice some stuff, like best practices. So definitely, they ripped up some stuff they maybe shouldn't have. They went a little crazy with the dirt, and dirt that's been weeded is perfectly ripe for new weeds. And so it's like, okay, now what do we do kind of thing. But some of it, I think, is almost sacrificial in the realm of, at least we got these kids in the dirt, to enjoy weeding. It can absolutely be therapeutic for people, it can be fun if it's competitive. But having to get to be able to frame it that way can be tough. And so with the volunteer thing it was like, well, instead of asking for help, let's frame it as “here's an opportunity to volunteer,” because people –– some people, are always looking for that.
Other struggles we've had? I think that's mostly it. One main struggle last year was when we were hiring, we had a lot of really good applicants. And so that was hard, to figure out who to hire. I wish we could hire everyone!
Sydney Lobe: A good problem to have.
Juls Macdonell: It was a nice problem to have. And then budgets, budgets are an issue. We got a really nice trust fund during COVID, but we're going to be dipping into that next year. And so we need to look at solutions for how to pay our staff wages. Basically when the union negotiations finish, we get a raise which is cool, but we pay ourselves that rage ––– raise. Sorry, not rage. [laughter] So, yeah, that's kind of a special thing where none of us are here because we're good at math, but we have to do budget sheets, trackers.
Sydney Lobe: That's relatable, yeah. Also, I heard you say it can definitely be therapeutic to do this work, and I was thinking back to what you were talking about, kind of getting back to the normal, or “new normal,” post COVID. And in the context of those two ideas, why do you think it is that people are so interested in using gardening as a tool to get back to the normal or new normal?
Juls Macdonell: Yeah, there's a few cultural facets that might come into that. I say cultural, really what I mean is just what I see on Instagram sometimes, which is people –– the homesteading idea. A lot of people have just wanted to get their own little corner of the world to grow their food in. Grow their own food, know what's in their food, where it's coming from, what sort of labour went into it, how that labour was treated. There's a lot of different aspects that go into having it be beneficial to be able to grow your own food, or at least supplement your grocery shopping with food that you've grown. It's financially a lot better, especially if you start saving seeds, which is something that we've started to do, or if you get your seeds for free or in a trade.
And in terms of therapeutic specifically, I mean, after COVID, I know we all had our little mental health walks in the afternoon or whatever it was. But something about –– I think there's been studies where it's like, when you get dirt on your hands, it literally makes you happier. Or if you spend time around a lot of green, it makes you happier. And I think it's also just a sense of community, there are other people in there. Most of the people who come to volunteer at the garden or who get plots recently have –– they’re new gardeners. And so it's very low stakes. You don't have to be perfect at it right away. No one is expecting you to be perfect at it right away. And you get to be around people who are different ages, who have different knowledge sets. And so in a way, it's almost just another new hobby, if you look at it that way.
Sydney Lobe: Yeah, totally. I also know there are a lot of other –– or not, maybe not a lot, but a few other community gardens in the area, and I'm curious what is different about this one?
Juls Macdonell: Yeah. I mean, the main thing is just our connection with UVic. So, we only rent to UVic staff, students and faculty, but our events and the garden physical space is open to anyone. It's totally like for community members.
Sydney Lobe: So those community plots, are those also exclusively for faculty, staff and students?
Juls Macdonell: No, those can be for anyone. Yeah, so one of our longest term volunteers actually is not affiliated with UVic anymore, but she's an amazing resource –– Peggy. She probably might hear this, so I'll just make sure she knows I'm talking about her! [laughter]
Sydney Lobe: [laughter] Hi Peggy!
Juls Macdonell: Yeah. Takes fantastic care of some of the communal plots, and also just helps to look after plots of other plot renters. Most of our communal spaces too, like the hedgerow, our food forest, are great foraging opportunities. And one of these days, we'd like to put out a little map of where to find different things. And it absolutely wouldn't be –– no one's there to check if you have a UVic ID. And we're connected with a couple groups in town, like Camas Books and the Anarchist Network Victoria on Instagram. They like to share our events, and that's really nice, because they're reaching out to people who could get some sort of benefit from it. There are –– I think the main difference with other community gardens in town is just the fact that we're run through the school, yeah. But I also think we're one of the bigger community gardens in town. If I'm thinking about the one in Fernwood or Yates Street, they're pretty small. We have a nice big, big triangle of land to look after.
Sydney Lobe: I'm also a little bit curious about scale. I know you mentioned this plot is bigger than the plot you started –– or Campus Community Garden started with. Would Campus Community Gardens consider moving to an even larger plot? Are you looking to grow? Or is that not in the realm of what your goals are in the near future?
Juls Macdonell: Yeah, definitely not possible in the near future. I think the biggest thing is there would have to be a major restructuring of staff capacity, and volunteer, concerted volunteer efforts to take any sort of a bigger spot. Technically, our contract means that we can't put anything permanent into the ground. We definitely have, and UVic Facilities is the one doing it, so I don't feel too –– it's not like we're being sneaky about pouring cement for a sign post or anything like that. But I think any bigger space would be very difficult to manage and would require a lot more people, and therefore a lot more student fees, and it might get to a point where it's not as sustainable. I mean, it's already not super sustainable, but we're getting there. But what I would like to see eventually would be –– UVic does not have their own campus community garden, and they don't have their own food bank. They do have their own Sustainability Committee, and different facets that mirror the student groups at the SUB, but they definitely have the land for more community gardening and it would be very cool to at least maybe consult with them in terms of making their own community garden. Especially in places like residences or family housing where they have grass and lawns. That would make total sense to have raised beds, even if they're fully volunteer run –– people look after things like that, if they get the chance, they're happy to. And that would be a place where I would love some kind of, what's the word for it? Like, not growth for us, but satellite spots, basically, to kind of help inspire more community gardening.
Sydney Lobe: Yeah, you've been around since 1996, what would have to change in order for UVic to consider doing something like that? I mean, I'm saying it's not like you're new. It's not like it would be, you know, it's a brand new idea that this kind of thing could be implemented at UVic, and not in the way that you're operating, which is independently from but sort of at UVic. I'm curious, if it hasn't happened already, why not? What would have to change?
Juls Macdonell: God, I really don't know. It's unfortunate, but I think it would just have to be –– so much of an institution and it's running, or a business and it's running is policy and meetings. And even stuff like us putting in a sign board takes months and months. Our compost toilet took eight years from planning to –– [laughter] I know.
Sydney Lobe: [laughter] Sorry, it’s a little funny.
Juls Macdonell: It is! And I mean, part of that was COVID, but like, COVID was only two years of that really. It just takes so long to send emails and then wait for those emails to come back.
Sydney Lobe: Yeah, I hear that.
Juls Macdonell: Yeah, and then it also –– when people are having those meetings, that costs money, and so they would need to find it worthy to have a meeting to talk about building some raised beds, and that's definitely not going to be just one meeting. And so I think theoretically, if people got together and kind of pushed it and said, “Hey, we live in family housing. We really want some raised beds so we can do our gardening. We want a mini community gardening, or a communal bed of some sort to look after.” Then they could try to eventually see some change from that. But I think the reality of community gardens starting as guerrilla gardens, for the most part, tells us that in the past, people have tried that, it didn't happen, and so they just built it. And I can't advocate for that, for sure, but that's kind of what I've seen historically, when people want a garden, you just put a bed somewhere, or you just plant flowers in the boulevard, right? And then if people get upset, again, it's –– what are they gonna do, tear down a bed full of lettuce and tomatoes? Probably not. They're just gonna make up paperwork that makes it okay by them, and then they get to skip all the meetings. And so, yeah, I would love to see more edible food places on campus. I know there are lots of reasons I'm sure that they don't want that. Maybe they'd have to help clean it up, maybe it would bring in pests, I don't know, but it would be cool if it would be something that would actually be feasible in the future.
Sydney Lobe: Yeah, definitely. Thank you, that was a great answer. This has just been such a lovely conversation, and to wrap up, I want to talk a little bit about getting involved. For people who are listening to this and they're curious, maybe they don't want to rent a plot. They maybe have other things on their plate, they just want to come by and be a part of what you're doing. Who can be involved in your community plots and how?
Juls Macdonell: Yeah, absolutely anyone. There's a few kind of easy ways to get involved. The first is that every Friday, we do work parties at the garden from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. – the time might change between semesters, but usually it's 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. We meet under the gazebo, we do a little intro thing, and then everyone splits off to work on some different tasks based on capacity, physical ability, and then we give some snacks. It's very low stakes. People can show up late, leave early, but that's a really easy way to get involved and come and garden, we often work in the communal plots. If the garden is open, the gate, people can come in on their own time and pop into the communal plots. They should have sign words on them, or if not, there's a map on our website, because some of the boards got knocked down in the wind.
And then another way of getting involved is becoming a board member. So that's a volunteer position, we meet every couple weeks, and board members get to make whatever they want of the positions, some of them have gotten really involved in our outreach and tabling, or in putting together our accessible bed, or helping us grow food over the summer, working with our journal, stuff like that. And that's really fun, because we have these little meetings and little holiday parties, they're doing a gift exchange after this today. It's really, really fun. So that's a great way of getting involved if people want some work experience and references and stuff like that.
Sydney Lobe: So, just show up.
Juls Macdonell: Yeah, pretty much. We usually post on Instagram when we have our board meetings, or it's on our website and they're in person or on Zoom. So board meetings, work parties. People are also welcome to just use the “contact us” form on our website to let us know that they want to get involved, if there's something specific they want to get involved in. And then we do have a new this year Garden Discord server. So it's really, really nice. There are specific channels for different communal tasks, which are something that plot renters have to agree to taking on one thing, just to kind of like – everyone does a little bit, no one does a lot. So we've got our compost squad and our invasive management team, and so people can kind of get together and work together on those and basically say, “Hey, I'm going to go to the garden at this time to do some mulching. Does someone want to join me?” And so that's a really nice way of getting involved too, without having it be necessarily like, if you can't make the Friday work parties or commit to being a board member, there's still ways. So you can find us @UVicCampusGarden on Instagram and then our website URL is ccgardenuvic.ca. Those are the two best places to find us online, and on our website is a link to the Discord. So if you don't have Instagram, we post all of our Instagram posts in Discord as well.
Sydney Lobe: Amazing. That sounds so lovely, I might see you on Friday!
Juls Macdonell: [laughter] Yeah, that would be awesome!
Sydney Lobe: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on The Nest and chat with us. We really appreciate it. It was really great to just get the chance to learn a little bit more about what you do.
Juls Macdonell: Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It was really fun, I love telling people about the garden and inviting everyone to join us.
Sydney Lobe: Amazing. That was Juls Macdonell, assistant coordinator of the Campus Community. Gardens at UVic. We spoke about the radical history of the community garden, what volunteers have to gain from both the process and the product of gardening with Campus Community Gardens, and how to get involved. Our December issue came out in print and online on December 12, and our January issue will be out on January 9. Happy Holidays, and we'll talk to you in the New Year.
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Rae Dawson: Thanks for tuning into The Nest, a podcast by UVic’s independent newspaper, the Martlet. You can read the latest edition of the Martlet’s publication on martlet.ca or find us on X, TikTok and LinkedIn as @theMartlet. Interested in getting involved? Email edit@martlet.ca to learn more about volunteer writer, editor and design positions.
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Rae Dawson: And now a note from the Martlet fact-checking team: At three minutes and forty-six seconds, Juls says, “And then coming soon, a new wheelchair accessible bed, which will be communal and probably be kicked off by the Society of Students with a Disability upstairs here.” The group referenced is actually called Society for Students with a Disability.
At eighteen minutes and thirty-nine seconds, Juls says, “The Long Moon is starting soon, which is a period of time where we don't disrupt the earth, the idea is to let it rest. And so from December 15 to 13, I think those dates are specific to this year, we won't be doing any work that disrupts the ground and the garden” The Martlet could not verify this fact.
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