community nursery

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Community Nursery Background

The Community Nursery exists to provide underserved communities with free garden advice and food plants. We work with: neighbourhood houses, community kitchens, school communities, supportive housing facilities, public health workers, food banks, community centres and community gardens to provide individuals and communities with the information and materials necessary to grow a healthy, diverse and sustainable food garden.

With two greenhouses in the Cottonwood and Strathcona Community Gardens and a team of passionate youth interns to work there, the Community Nursery is able to grow thousands of climate adapted vegetables and herbs. All of these plants are grown by youth participating in our Community Nursery Youth Internship (see link above for more details) and are distributed within the communities in which we work.

Each community we work in is unique and requires slightly different support. Some communities that are beginning to establish their own small food production garden require ongoing support through the growing season to learn the seasonal rhythms and needs of their space. Other communities just need plants, and so we can drop in one or two times through the growing season to provide several hundred free seedlings for gardeners to care for through to maturity.

The Community Nursery offers free or reduced fee workshops to the communities we work with. To get a sense of the kinds of workshops we can offer, look at the "workshops" tab at the top of your screen.

If you think your community could benefit from the services of the Community Nursery, contact our project coordinator Matthew Kemshaw to discuss your needs - matthewk@eya.ca. We will work with new communities whenever sufficient capacity allows, given that the community can demonstrate a need for our services.
 

The Community Nursery project is currently funded by: Sunrise Tofu, The Garden Club of Vancouver, The Chris Spencer Foundation, Boeing Co. and numerous generous individuals.

This project was originally funded by: Partners for Economic and Community Help, the United Way, The Vancouver Foundation, The Neighbourhood Matching Fund, & HRDC.