In Their Kitchens

Urban Harvest

You heard it through the grapevine:  an Alberta consultant aims to maximize backyard food production

Story By Sally Johnston 

Ron Berezan peers out from under his battered straw hat and considers the beige stucco wall of my city home.

“It’s south-facing. Have you ever thought of growing vines there?” he asks.

Vines? As in grapevines? We’re standing in the heart of Edmonton, renowned for frigid winters and a short growing season. He can’t be serious.

But he is. Berezan is the owner-operator of the Urban Farmer, a gardening service that helps city dwellers and community groups grow sustainable, low-maintenance food crops.

In workshops, classes and backyard consultations, he explains how to nurture tomatoes among the tulips and rhubarb. Berezan, who charges about $100 to assess a typical urban yard, also offers a full range of services from planning to landscape construction and maintenance. He can also supply plants, compost, rainwater catchers and other gardening products.

His simple but effective strategies allow even the most fumbling of gardeners to transform their patch into an edible landscape. He recommends, for example, turning fall leaves into mulch and steeping lawn clippings in water to make a fertilizer.

Berezan, a master gardener who has been growing urban food in Alberta for more than 20 years, has a flourishing grapevine covering the side of his own garage. It’s one of the more than 70 species of fruits, vegetables and herbs that he grows around his house on a 6,000-square-foot, L-shaped inner city lot.

His horticultural efforts, which have expanded onto his neighbour’s property, result in a bonanza of salad greens to feed his family of five as well as grateful friends and neighbours from April to November. Each fall he fills his freezer with homegrown tomatoes, peas, beans, berries and herbs. A rich harvest of potatoes, carrots, onions, turnips and beets provides hearty soups and casseroles in the fall and winter. Mushrooms are plucked from a damp wooded corner.

“It’s wonderful in February to take some tomatoes and Swiss chard out of the freezer and make a stir-fry,” says Berezan. He also dries much of his produce in a food dehydrator. His connection to his own food is much stronger, he says, than to the produce he finds in a grocery store, where he has “no idea who grew it, how or where it was grown.”

I’ve invited Berezan to my yard to suggest how I might coax some culinary fare from it. As he explains, cultivating even a small amount of my own food saves money. It’s better for the environment than buying produce that’s been hauled thousands of miles in gas-guzzling trucks. And it doesn’t get any fresher.

I’m encouraged when he assures me that I don’t have to rip up my yard. “Start small,” he says. He cautions me against being too gung-ho. “Sometimes people clear a whole section of the backyard and it feels like a burden.”

Low-maintenance blueberries will thrive in the acidic soil left in a bare spot where our old spruce tree used to stand. Raspberries will thrive with minimal fuss in an out-of-sight niche. Swiss chard needs little attention.

Asparagus and rhubarb are perennials, meaning I can plant them once and they’ll come back each season. Others, such as arugula, are self-seeding and reappear each spring. “It’s a lazy man’s way to garden,” Berezan says with a chuckle.

Darren Nichols and his wife Shona, both vegetarians, will be harvesting lots of fare from their city yard this fall thanks to Berezan’s advice.

“We liked his ideas for interplanting vegetables with flowers. We now have lettuce, kale and Brussels sprouts growing beside the pansies. Plus we can eat the pansies,” says Darren, an Edmonton doctor and father of two. “Ron was able to pass on, in a brief amount of time, a whole lot of information about sustainable agriculture in a small backyard.”

Berezan’s passion took root as a child. Both sets of grandparents, immigrants from Poland and Ukraine, grew vegetables. Later, when he was a student at the University of Alberta, he planted some old spuds he discovered in the pantry.

“By the fall we had this great harvest of potatoes,” he says. He has grown food every year since.

Berezan helped start one of Edmonton’s first community gardens in the 1980s. Today there are more than 60 similar projects, a testimony to what he calls “an urban farming renaissance.”

Five years ago he quit his office job in the non-profit sector in order to garden full time. Now he thinks outside the box – literally. “A rectangular plot with rows of annual vegetables may make sense for a large mechanized farm but it’s not necessarily the best option for growing food in an urban environment,” he says.

Vegetables can be distributed throughout a city yard in smaller, intensively planted beds. They can be planted with flowers, like in the Nichols’ garden, a beneficial partnership since blooms attract bees, butterflies and other pollinators. Dwarf apple and pear trees and bushes such as saskatoons, gooseberries and currants, can do double-duty as hedging along a property line.

By the time Berezan leaves my place, my fingers are itching to get into the dirt. He offers a sun-tanned hand and smiles. “Be warned. Growing your own food can become pretty addictive.”

Click here for Ron Berezan's Backyard Harvest Pasta recipe.