Why is there a community garden in Riley Park? This arose from public consultation by Vancouver Park Board in 2015 in which members of the community stated as a high priority that there be a community garden built here. Subsequently, Little Mountain Neighbourhood House was given the responsibility for stewarding this site and for improving access and welcoming the community while also giving good gardening knowledge and experience to new gardeners.

So, we invite you to take the time to stroll around the garden, find interpretive signs with QR codes to further provide details on plantings and sites in the community garden.

This is our Espalier Orchard. This means that the trees are pruned to a low height and make for easy harvesting and pruning and caring generally, and you can increase the amount of fruit that you get off the trees. We have apples, pears, cooking apples, cherries, and Asian pear, and also a grape vine and a couple of figs.

This is our West Beach Bed. We call it the west beach because it faces west, and it is the site of an ancient shoreline about fifteen thousand years ago. It’s our only bed in the garden which is the natural soil of the site, the glacial till, and it is a bit more challenging to grow in. It is xeriscaped, meaning it is all dry loving plants which do not require any water during the summer.

All of the vegetable beds here at Riley Park are shared among our gardeners. So, all of the work and all of the harvest goes towards our gardeners and the food programs at Little Mountain Neighbourhood House. It is hard to believe that the site here is the site of the former pool of the community center.

Sometimes it still does look like a pool because the garden is built over rubble and the drainage here is not great, but we have been able to work with it and improve it a lot over the years, and we grow a ton of food here.

There are three important locations in the Riley Park Community Garden in which we are growing a range of berry crops.

One is a bed that is totally devoted to blueberries with some understory strawberries, the second one is the caneberry bed, which has a number of berries that grow on canes, and the third would be berries that are growing in the food forest and are in fairly shady conditions.

So, here we’re standing under a super old oak tree. This area is in our native berry patch, and this is kind of a simulated mini Garry Oak Meadow. This ecosystem includes important indigenous plants like Camus and Red Columbine. And it finally had a really impressive bloom this year after five years of being planted. This is a great example of rewilding and patience in action.

Let’s talk about the composting set up at Riley Park. When I first arrived here about seven and a half years ago, we had some very tiny little boxes that had been gifted to us by a local school, and it turned out that these were totally inadequate with the amount of foliage that we have to process.

So, we had this wonderful three-bin system built with plans from the City of Vancouver. They're made of cedar, so they're long lasting, and the plan is that we put all the material that needs to be processed into the collection bay on the left. It is then chopped into Bin 1 and when we have got the bin full that composts away until it's come down a bit, and it's heated up, and cooled down, and heated up, and cooled down. And then we turn it into Bin 2 and subsequently into Bin 3 and after it is matured for a while, then it is put back onto the garden to replenish the energy in the beds.