There is a farmer in each and everyone of us

The next big thing for urban dwellers is… gardening. We already knew about community and rooftop gardens, but recently, journalist and New York Times blogger Allison Arieff wrote about her experiment with vegetables in her own home. “It is truly growing into something that is wholly about collaboration, community and connection to food, to neighbors, to land,” she wrote. In Montreal, where I live, the neighbourhood committee Greening Duluth is organizing monthly markets where neighbours can sell the vegetables that they’re growing in their own garden. And an architecture firm is building an eco-project called Productive House where apartments and town house include a space to grow vegetables. Urban gardening is not just a trend born out of concerns about the environment, it is a movement in reaction to the lack of social interaction in cities.