Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

City Living: Art school grad gardens for Victory

Love of gardening implanted by her parents

If you ever had to care for an egg in school as a lesson in parental responsibility, you might have found you’d have learned more looking after tomatoes.

The seedlings start indoors right around now. When the plants reach toddler stage, between eight to 12 inches tall, or when the nighttime temperature doesn’t drop lower than 16 Celsius, they can go outside, but only for an hour a day for the first week.

For the next two weeks, they can be carted outside for half a day before being moved into a greenhouse or under a cold frame for another handful of weeks, like a teenager moving into the basement.

After that time, called hardening off in gardening language, they’re allowed to grow on their own and have the keys to dad’s car.

“Tomatoes are the real babies of the vegetable world,” said gardener Sam Philips of Victory Gardens. “They need a lot of care and love.”

Victory Gardens is three women who love urban gardening and want to show people that starting and maintaining a vegetable garden is not a complicated chore, tomatoes notwithstanding. Philips, along with Lisa Giroday and Sandra Lopuch, had the idea of starting the company that also works on transforming underused city spaces into gardens while working in Giroday’s East Vancouver garden collective three years ago.

“I feel that gardening is a lost skill. I mean, it’s hard to pinpoint why people don’t inherently know how to do it but I think it’s a generational thing. I think the convenience of food in the last few decades has something to do with it,” said Philips. “It makes me sad.”

Victory Gardens held its first workshop of the season at Chalk this past Saturday which, coincidentally given the company name, also happened to be International Women’s Day. Philips’ mother had told her that there was a campaign during the world wars for women to grow their own food in their front yards to show their sense of community and patriotism, so the company name was planted.

“While it was a different time and for different reasons, we still saw a lot of similarities to growing your food back then and growing your food today in the sense of community and empowerment,” said Philips. “It was definitely a large women’s movement back in the day. The women that stayed at home were the ones that had to garden.”

It was Philips’ father, however, who introduced his daughter to vegetable gardening. As a young girl, she often helped her dad in his garden plot at their Langley home, watching him grow his seeds indoors and keep to a planting schedule. Even when she hit her teens, she was still drawn to spending time with her father in the garden, and at the hint of a surly mood from her, she remembers him threatening to send her off to work on a broccoli farm. But she remained in the garden with her dad.

When she turned 16, he gave her Steve Solomon’s gardening bible Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades. After fruitless attempts to get her to read Tolkien’s The Hobbit, it seems he hit pay dirt with garden lit. Yet, still, it wasn’t until after graduating from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and running her own art gallery collective (Lopuch is also an Emily Carr graduate while Giroday ran the L.E.S. art gallery) that gardening overtook her life.

“When I went off to art school I found myself always wanting to garden and when I finished school it became an obsession,” Philips said. Aside from the love of growing a garden there is also the savings for those whose dinner plates are filled with vegetables.

Succession planting, which is following one crop with another, is a necessary part of a well-run garden, said Philips, who estimates her own garden saves her about $2,000 a year on grocery bills.

“Once you have your infrastructure and a little know-how, for years to come it will save you money. I don’t buy produce for a large portion of the year,” she said.

“I figure that if I went to the farmers market to buy produce, I would probably spend 50 dollars a week… When people tell me, ‘I don’t have time to garden,’ I ask them, how many hours do you spend at the grocery store’?”

Check out Victory Gardens website victorygardensvancouver.ca for more information on upcoming gardening workshops.

rblissett@telus.net