Making Home and Corporate Vegetable Gardens

Shawn Manning from Urban Seedling talks about helping people grow vegetable gardens and using corporate gardens to foster food security.

Today on the podcast we head to Montreal to hang out with Shawn Manning from Urban Seedling. He tells us how, 10 years ago, he channelled his love of growing vegetables into a business specialized in creating vegetable gardens.

Along with helping people create and grow vegetable gardens, another goal was to improve food security in the city. He realized that installing gardens for people who can afford a gardener probably doesn’t move the needle much on food security…but he’s tweaked the business to include corporate gardens—and use that as a way to improve food security in Montreal.

The Business of Vegetable Gardens

The business has evolved to include home vegetable-garden installation, planting, a garden centre, seedling sales, and corporate gardens.

Manning says that when he started, he created, planted, and cared for home vegetable gardens. But he found that some people are not interested in gardening—they only want fresh produce. “They didn’t really care about the vegetable garden, they just wanted the vegetables,” he explains.

He decided this wasn’t what he wanted. He tells people who are not interested in gardening that it’s best to order a produce basket from a farm of a CSA. “What I want is people that will actually appreciate their garden,” he says.

As well as focusing on clients who want to garden, he now teaches clients how to care for the garden. Initially, he cared for gardens through the season. But he grew to believe that clients would have the best results if they checked their gardens daily. As a result, he stopped offering maintenance service.

Customers also receive videos and a newsletter with guidance about how to care for the garden.

Corporate Gardens

Last year he was involved in 45 corporate gardens. Manning says that food security has always been a central tenet of the business, but corporate gardens have proven the best way to contribute to food security in the Montreal.

There are a couple of different corporate-garden models. In one model, Urban Seedling installs the garden and helps to get it going—and then employees or volunteers tend the garden and donate the harvest to food banks. “It’s definitely a really, really well received concept,” he says.

In another model, the garden is for employees. “It gives them another reason to want to go to work,” he says.