The fate of a learning farm at Vic High growing thousands of dollars’ worth of beans, peas, greens, kale, squash and other vegetables is up in the air as the high school goes through a major reconstruction.
Garden co-ordinator Jesse Brown, who also owns Mason Street Farm, said he was notified in March that the Greater Victoria School District needed to dig a trench through a portion of the farm to install a storm drain.
But Brown had already pre-sold the farm’s produce to local restaurants, grocers and about 100 local families who subscribe to weekly produce boxes.
Those orders — made between February and April — are the only profits that come in, and the seeds were already sown by March in preparation for an end-of-summer harvest, Brown said.
If the garden is destroyed before September, the company’s losses could be between $17,000 and $20,000 — about half of the total operating budget.
“We need that produce in order to recuperate that debt,” Brown said. “We’re asking them to delay [the digging] for 2.5 months. Otherwise the financial and moral burden will be so extreme that I don’t think we’ll be able to continue with the project.”
The construction comes during a $79.7-million expansion and upgrading project at the school that began in 2020 and is set to be complete by September 2023 — a year later than planned.
The district did not respond to requests from the Times Colonist for comment.
The Learning Farm was created in 2017 as a joint operation between Mason Street Farm and Farm to School B.C. Along with vegetables, the garden contains a small Garry oak meadow and Indigenous plant and medicine garden.
Located near the Belfry Theatre, it’s been used as an educational resource in exchange for free rent on the Vic High property. That relationship has allowed Brown to expand his company’s profitable crops, and Vic High to offer agricultural education to students, while not having to be responsible for year-round garden maintenance.
“Our lease payment is educating students,” Brown said. “We’ve never asked for money. We service 100 subscriptions, 15 restaurants, five grocery stores and we have our own farm stand. But the only way we can do this … is to sell that produce.”
Brown and the school district tried to come to a compromise, even investigating the option of moving a portion of the farm to an adjacent field. But Brown said it would cost thousands of dollars in labour and time that his staff don’t have in the middle of the growing season.
“The number of labour hours spent on that site to keep it in good shape and beautiful and functional is astronomical, and the school district doesn’t really know that,” Brown said. “Having this so last minute in the middle of our season is unreasonable.”
Jessica McDiarmid, a Vic High teacher and volunteer co-ordinator for the learning farm, said the program has been beneficial for students, especially those who learn best from experience.
“So often youth have a difficult time finding productive places for their energy,” she said. “There’s limited students in the world who thrive fully on sitting in classrooms under fluorescent lights.”
McDiarmid said her students often remark on the positive emotional and mental-health impacts of working in the garden. “It’s a creative outlet, but it also connects us with the way this planet provides for us,” she said. “It gives students a sense of time and seasonality and seeing how these things develop over the years. It really helps put things into perspective.”
Brown said he continues to negotiate with the Greater Victoria School District.
