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December 12, 2008
A heartbreaking sight
Food bank is deprived of produce due to theft.
SARA NEWHAM
It was a heartbreaking sight to behold, but there it was: 20 holes in the ground where fruit trees once grew. All Tricia Sedgwick could think of was the work that had gone into making her vision of a community garden come true.
Sedgwick had just returned from a month-long sojourn to Africa when she discovered, on Nov. 30, that 20 fruit trees had been stolen from the Jewish Family Service Agency's community garden at West 57th Avenue and East Boulevard.
Like much of the other produce grown in the garden, the fruit the trees would bear was destined for the Jewish Food Bank.
"What they stole was our edible fence," said Sedgwick, the community garden co-ordinator who developed the garden from its conception. "They cut a fence and pulled out the apple tree. We had a fig tree that they stole and they took all of our kiwi trees and we had different Asian pear trees and they're gone. They took them out of the ground. They left holes in the ground."
The value of the trees – including the hours of time it took to plant them – is estimated to be worth thousands of dollars.
"Yeah, it's money, but the first thing you think about is all the time and the people and the heart that goes into it in the community. That's the part that you can't replace. All the faces of the kids who helped plant it," said Sedgwick.
The 51-metre garden consists of four parts, including a children's garden and the "world in a garden," where produce from various countries is grown. While the main purpose of this multi-cultural project is to grow food for the food bank, it has the side benefit of connecting the community to nature and creating an awareness of where food comes from.
The garden began about a year ago and, already, 200 pounds of food was donated in the fall as a result of the work of the volunteers who run it.
"I think it's heartbreaking.... It's so greedy to steal trees that have been put there out of a labor of love and with such good intentions," said volunteer Gaetana Korbin. "It's a community garden so if this is a reflection of the community that it's in, that's pretty sad."
Both Korbin and Sedgwick said the theft sets the garden project back by a year because – while the fruit trees had not yet matured – the group has now lost out on a year of the growing process.
It will be the 300 families serviced by the Jewish Food Bank who will feel the greatest impact of the theft.
"I can't predict what the trees would have produced and what we got off that, but, in a food bank, where we try to provide nutritionally sound food and as many options related to that, it's just one less offering and it's one less way of integrating the community work out there with the food bank," said Lisa Ross, director of basic resources for JFSA.
"The concept of giving to people who couldn't feed themselves is such a learning experience for the children and they knew they were doing something good," added Korbin. "To have to explain to them that people stole the food that was going to the poor, it's heartbreaking to explain to them that people would actually do this. I think they [the thieves] should be ashamed of themselves."
Sedgwick does not believe the theft is an act of anti-Semitism. She said that this kind of theft has happened to other community gardens in the past. In one case she said she heard about, all of the trees were recovered at a local corner store.
"I think it was somebody who really knew what they were doing and wanted to resell the trees probably, but who knows. Maybe they had a really big yard and they wanted to plant them in their yard. It seems to me it was someone who knew what kind of trees they were because they're quite valuable trees and probably a gardener who knew what he was doing or somebody who was selling gardening stuff and different community garden stuff like this," said Sedgwick, adding that, for her, it means more time has to go back into rebuilding the infrastructure of the garden instead of focusing on the goal of providing for the food bank. She explained that the group hopes to raise $10,000 to build a proper – non-edible – fence for the garden. Donations can be made through JFSA's Friends of the Family campaign going on now. Sedgwick asked that anyone who would like to contribute do so by designating their donation to the community garden project.
On Sunday, a handful of volunteers were back at the garden, tending to the small plots to keep it going, despite the theft.
"Light overcomes darkness all the time," said Sedgwick. "It always does."
Sara Newham is a Vancouver freelance journalist.
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