Permaculture Garden
Under the guidance of Permaculture Ste-Anne, a team of community volunteers lovingly tends the gardens of our church. They strive to inspire and teach others to adopt permaculture techniques that will increase local food production, save potable water, and provide habitat for birds and pollinators so we can move together as a community to enhance the sustainability of our town.
Permaculture emphasizes patterns of landscape, function, and species assemblies. It determines where these elements should be placed so they can provide maximum benefit to the local environment. Permaculture maximizes useful connections between components and synergy of the final design. The focus of permaculture, therefore, is not on individual elements, but rather on the relationships among them. Properly done, the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. Permaculture seeks to minimize waste, human labor, and energy input and maximize benefits through synergy.
The ethics on which permaculture builds are:
Earth care: Provision for all life systems to continue and multiply.
People care: Provision for people to access those resources necessary for their existence.
Fair share: Setting limits to population and consumption so that people do not take more than what is needed. By governing our own needs, we can set resources aside to further the above principles. This principle is also described as share the surplus.
Our goals for 2023 include converting raised beds to greenhouses to increase the growing season, increasing climbing crops, adding fruit trees with medicinal and ornamental flower patches, mushroom cultivation, rearrangement of trees, adding a fruit garden and adding more native plants.
With the financial assistance of the Anglican Foundation of Canada, we are confident that we can achieve all of these goals and more.
For more information or to volunteer in the garden, please contact the church office at 514-457-6934 and we will connect you with the right people.