Skip to content

Food bank veggies victims of herbicide

It's been a disappointing end of the season for the food bank community garden.

It's been a disappointing end of the season for the food bank community garden.

The Okotoks Community Garden, run by the Healthy Okotoks Coalition (HOC), expanded its footprint in the spring, doubling the size of the garden and adding 27 new plots at one end, with a 20-metre by 10-metre section for the Okotoks Food Bank.

Food bank executive director Sheila Hughes was excited about the possibility of providing fresh produce from a local garden for families in need, but the excitement was dashed when some plants started showing signs of herbicide impact in mid-June. Leaves on potato and bean plants began curling and drying up.

“It's very disheartening,” said Hughes. “The food bank decided, because there's no Health Canada guidelines for what happens when there's a pesticide or herbicide, we want to make sure we're safe. We don't feel comfortable making the decision for our families to eat the food.”

HOC community garden co-ordinator Lori Neufeld said the new section of the community garden was affected by residual herbicide from the Town's use of ClearView, which contains aminopyralids. The herbicide was sprayed years ago, but because Okotoks doesn't get a lot of moisture and heat year-round, it hasn't worked its way out of the soil, she said.

When the new section of the garden was built, some new soil was brought in for the new plots, and they were topped up with some of the oil soil that had been scraped away to level the ground, she said.

Anywhere old soil was used, certain plants began to show the effects of residual herbicide, she said.

“When you start doing research into it, aminopyralid really affects potatoes, tomatoes, beans, peas and sunflowers, and in very low concentrations,” said Neufeld.

In fact, a soil test conducted in London, Ont. revealed the levels of aminopyralids were below detection limits, but Neufeld was told by Alberta Agriculture that even one part per billion will affect species sensitive to it.

The only way to solve the issue is to continue to grow plants – and water them – to draw the remaining herbicide out of the ground. Neufeld said next year they'll likely plant flowers in the affected areas until they can successfully grow three bean plants in the soil without any sign of aminopyralid impact.

There is some good news for the Okotoks Food Bank – part of their garden plot is within the perimeter outside the original community garden that was never sprayed by the Town – there is no spraying within five metres of the garden.

“We are harvesting five metres out from the original fence,” said Hughes. “We're harvesting from the two boxes we built that had all new soil, and we're harvesting from two boxes the HOC let us use from the existing garden.”

That will provide the food bank with some peas, zucchini, onions, leeks, some tomatoes and cabbage, and potentially one row of beans. They will not be able to harvest their potatoes, lettuce, carrots or spinach, she said.

Most of the plants are outside the affected species, but Hughes said the food bank isn't willing to take the chance and serve families the produce.

“We're not giving up though,” said Hughes. “We still think it was a successful project as far as the community involvement and we've learned a lot of lessons, which are going to help us go forward and be more successful next year.”

She said the garden helped a lot of people learn more about the food bank and get involved. The education portion of the garden will still continue as well, she said, with totes for classes or groups to learn about composting, pollinator plants, and gardening.

For this year, she said the food bank was pleased to take any donations of produce to help offset costs of providing fresh food for families.

“We do buy a lot of fresh food every week, and we do have people drop produce off right now, people who maybe plant too much and show up with extras,” said Hughes. “So anybody who has any extra produce at all they'd like to drop off, we'd be really happy to accept it.”

push icon
Be the first to read breaking stories. Enable push notifications on your device. Disable anytime.
No thanks