It took a community to make this book

This litte book started out as a smaller pamphlet that I put together in 2010 for a project at Growing Together in St. James Town - stapled pages, lots of illustrations, simplified information and instructions.

I had been working there in St. James Town for a number of years organizing balcony garden workshops for people who didn’t have access to a garden otherwise. Usually at each workshop garden supplies, pots and plants were given out to get people started. The first season it was all tomatoes, and there were mixed results... Part of my job at that time was to follow up and find out how successful people’s gardens were. One question I got a lot was “why do my tomato plants have so many leaves but no fruits?” The tomato, though such a popular plant, did not in fact work for everyone! But then, what would be more satisfying to grow on more different balconies?

Through listening to many balcony gardening stories, I learned about the trials and triumphs. High-rises are tough places for plants! People are dealing with any number of difficulties like wind, blasting sun and heat or too much shade and shadow from nearby buildings, hungry squirrels and destructive pigeons, you name it! …and coming up with solutions to all of them.

The GT “Healthy Garden and Healthy Food” workshops began in a basement classroom at 240 Wellesley, and grew into a full season of gardening at multiple sites. Growing the seedlings for container gardens and sharing them with high-rise gardeners at workshops and events was a really popular project in the community. It became a way for people to grow together, share gardening tips back and forth. I also started working at Green Thumbs Growing Kids during that time, which was totally instrumental in building my confidence with small space growing and teaching people about it.

Through hearing from so many workshop participants I actually got exposed to much larger range of experience than just my own. That’s what motivated the book.

It was really important to me to figure out how to share back a lot of what I had learned.

I also wanted to bring together the art side of my life with the gardening side. So in 2011 my balcony gardening booklet became a project of its own. I started adding more pages to that first shorter pamphlet and kind of couldn’t stop! …until I had over 50 pages written and illustrated. I used an idea I learned about at the Beehive Design Collective, called a print run collaboration, where you gather supporters ahead of time to pre-paid for bulk orders of books. There was a huge interest from local gardening and environmental groups! For that first printing Toronto Green Community together with Access Alliance Multicultural Health & Community Services distributed 2,500 copies free of charge as part of training programs. There were different supporters for all the other print runs too, mostly non profits and some other steady small business sponsors like Urban Harvest, my favourite seed supplier in town.

At the time of the first printing, crowd funding on the internet had come around, so I launched a campaign there too for another portion of the print run costs. 315 individual backers supported it! In 2011 I printed 5,000 copies and they were already all sold and distributed before the end of the year. Since then I’ve done three more print runs, with over 12,000 books sold - that’s more than books on the bestseller list!

The printing partners and all the contributions from community groups are what made it possible, and what continue to support the very large distribution network for this very small book.

Other exciting milestores included getting a grant from Carrot Cache to translate a 10-page excerpt into Spanish, Farsi, Arabic and Bengali in 2012. And a year later Centre Francophone Toronto generously translated the entire book into French!! Distribution continues to be community-focused.