Corey Pierce

Now that spring has sprung and summer is around the corner — and every green-thumb-inclined Calgarian knows what that means — it’s time to start digging up the backyard and get planting. Those who make the investment of gardening in our rich prairie soil will reap the reward of decreased reliance on imported foods for months to come. But what about those who are living the dream of high-density dwelling, the inhabitants of apartments and condos with no yard space? While the City of Calgary has a community garden initiative, there’s little chance that every occupant of the 93,000-plus condos and apartments recorded in the latest civic census will get their own plot.

This schism between the urban garden haves and have-nots was acknowledged by a small community non-profit agency called LifeCycles in Victoria, B.C. almost a decade ago. It came up with a unique solution: a public forum where people with under-used land could offer to share their backyard space with their apartment-bound neighbours. Lists with people’s contact information and yard descriptions appeared at the LifeCycles office — neighbourly connections were made, food was grown and savoured, 100-mile diet requirements were met and a movement was born.

A few years later, the digital age hit like a tidal wave, and, with the help of Patrick Hayes, the Sharing Backyards model made the leap from reams of paper to geotags on a user-friendly Google Maps-based website. The medium has changed, but the messages (“Looking for space” and “Space to share”) remains the same — even when implemented in other urban centres.

“We’re trying to make Sharing Backyards a free, global phenomenon,” says Hayes, an online mapping specialist and Sharing Backyards’ technical director. “But with limited funding, it’s been difficult for us to do that on our own.” Program co-ordinator Chris Hawkins has taken on the challenge of forging partnerships with local sustainability organizations in each Sharing Backyards city. The model allows the part-time, two-person team in Victoria to tackle website maintenance and expansion while local partners handle public outreach in their cities (they also spread the word to the gardening communities and find sponsors who are a good match). Hawkins hopes that with this system, one day “we’ll be in every city in the world.”

It’s not there yet, but Sharing Backyards is currently connecting users with 380 offered garden plots in nine North American communities, and is slowly expanding into dozens more, including Calgary.

The local partner for Sharing Backyards Calgary is Greener Calgary, a recently launched blog that founder Pete Van Thiel is hoping will provide Calgarians with a do-it-yourself guide for ideas and information on sustainable living. “The goal is to motivate people in a small-scale way, things that might make a healthier environment for Calgarians,” says Van Thiel, better known as the pedalling force behind unicycle.com, an online business that sells — you guessed it — unicycles.

Van Thiel was initially inspired by the British website landshare.net, which is effectively a funded version of Sharing Backyards (and has a user count of 48,651 and growing). “I was actually thinking about setting up a landshare website here to connect those with land to those without,” but in the course of his research, he discovered Sharing Backyards and decided to collaborate. Van Thiel noticed many similar goals and ideas, and after speaking with Hawkins, it became clear that establishing Sharing Backyards Calgary was the way to go.

Visitors to the Calgary site are presented with a map of the city with icons of people who have posted a message. Users can choose to position the “looking for space” binoculars icon or the “sharing space” tree icon on their backyards, making it easy to find neighbours close to home. Each user leaves a message about what they are looking for or what they have to offer — anything from four square metres to an acre available for planting. Interested parties can send users a site message or an email. Once the connection is made, it’s up to the users to decide how to proceed — some garden hosts may set reasonable gardening hours or ask for a small share of the harvest. Hayes and Hawkins are busy working on site upgrades, which will provide a space for users to share success stories and to create events like harvest potlucks where the fruits (and vegetables) of their labour can be enjoyed.

Sharingbackyards is free of charge.