Fresh Roots Urban Farm Society (FRUF) enhances urban food sovereignty by creating equitable access to healthy food and educating communities through engaging, innovative neighborhood farms, and most recently through schoolyard market gardens.
Our vision is neighborhood market gardens that create places for inter-generational, cross cultural, and multilingual opportunities for sharing knowledge, environmental stewardship, where fresh foods, health, and well being abound.
Food Production
We produce organically grown food in our neighborhood market gardens and distritube it through our Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) program, school cafeterias, farmers markets, and restaurant sales, using urban land to nourish Vancouver residents.
We grow our gardens to be aesthetically inspiring spaces for schools and community members maintained by local urban farmers.
Education
Fresh Roots neighborhood market gardens host classes, workshops, an urban farmer training program, and community celebrations. Our gardens provide opportunities to meet BC curriculum objectives in creative and engaging ways.
We partner with community organizations and schools that use our market gardens as outdoor, hands-on learning classrooms; engaging neighborhoods in addressing food sovereignty, community health, and vocational skills development. Our fields host community gatherings and celebrations.
Using multiple sites, Fresh Roots exemplifies an effective way Vancouver can confront global challenges of pollution, land degradation, and poor nutrition within our society.
Our goal is to become a self-sustaining institutional garden program that, in partnership, reconstructs an equitable urban food system for all.
Fresh Roots Schoolyard Market Gardens:
Create an outdoor, hands-on, experiential classroom for the school community, after school programs, summer school programs, and greater neighbourhood.- Support urban farmers with access to land and the opportunity to earn a living wage.
- Enable the school and surrounding community to build a relationship to growing and consuming food.
- Facilitate and educate urban people in sustainable, small-scale intensive farming practices.
- Create and implement a transferable model for community-engaged urban agriculture that can be replicated by institutions, municipalities, cities, and grass-roots organizations across Canada.
Fresh Roots Urban Farm actualizes resilient neighbourhood food systems and food literacy.
As Local As It Gets
Fresh Roots grows delicious varieties of produce, reclaiming previously unused lots in urban spaces. Joining our CSA, or buying from us at a farmers market means you are eating food grown just blocks away from your table!
We strive to offer our community virtually zero carbon emissions food, through bike-trailer logistics; grown in Vancouver compost, by Vancouver farmers, with Vancouver love.
Why join our Urban CSA?
- Support locally grown food and organic growing methods
- Know where your food grows and the people growing it!
- Eat healthier meals
- Connect to the seasons through the food you eat
- Partner with your farmer
- Keep money in the local economy and engage in an innovative, truly sustainable, urban food system
- Are a part of creating access to healthy, safe, affordable food .
- Support the first Schoolyard Market Gardens in Canada
Connect to a wider community within Vancouver that is interested in a healthy food system. We share seasonal recipes, preserving tips, and local community food happenings through our blog and monthly newsletter.
Throughout the season there will be opportunities to visit the gardens, take part in a harvest celebration, and get to know our East Van locavore community at the weekly veggie box pick-up.
Wow!
You guys rock!
Who came up with this brilliant idea? Who are the awesome people running and maintaining it?
Hi,
I live at 13th and Main and would like to offer my services in weeding, watering or helping out with someones garden that needs it in exchange for the privilge of sharing in the harvest. If you know of anyone that needs a gardening partner in the neighbourhood pls contact.
Thanks,
Noreen
Yes! What a brilliant, beautiful, wonderfully glorious project of transformational revolutionary love-lifted spirit-filled joy! Blessings for it all!
haha! the road ahead in vancouver is long enough as is. and.. it’s covered in delicious edibles, warmth, and summer sunlight.
Yes yes yes!
Lovin you and all you contribute.
Thanks for all of this, I may be joining you next year!
From the islands,
oh boy! when I remember rolling past Discovery Organics and filling up glutinously with fresh compost with a sense of righteous entitlement. When I remember the dumpsters filled with wood planks and odd sized plywood…when I remember the abundance of our world standing in sharp contrast with the stark nakedness, bareness that I am now surrounded with. The logical and tangible challenges of urban agriculture here in Dakar also stand in sharp contrast with the human receptiveness, openness, the need for it. Here everything has a dollar value even from the sightliest little piece of rusted nail to the half rotten piece of wood. A price that is staggeringly high. In a city where agriculture has been pushed back by rampant urbanization, most people can’t afford vegetables. My compost can’t survive the onslaught of a diet consisting entirely of fish and rice. Beds will be built out of broken pieces of cement (in abundance everywhere) and sand. More cement to make it stick. Old plastic linings. I’ve been picking goat shit off the street to add precious Nitrogen. But hey! It’s Africa where everything goes. I can wear pink pants and a a bright orange and yellow puffy shirt and perform deep throat chants while I pick the shit off the street and no one will think twice about it!!
Wow! Learning about Fresh Roots, I have tremendous awe and gratitude for the work you are doing: from the rows you hoe to the seeds you sow. This venture sounds like a hugh undertaking and just a fantastic combo of elements needed to help our urban communities flourish. How awesome, to be farming in a climate that springs swiss chard ’round the calendar.
In case you were missing it, the sun has returned to the Middle West USA, so in not too long I’ll be sending you good wishes from atop a truckload of bricks and bed-worthy compost. Hoping to get my hands in the dirt when I come Van-side at the end of May!
May there always be rain on your fields and microbes in your soil.
Hi,
You have a nice website, which need a little bit of TLC. In Mozilla 3.0.19 it’s menu, and form , in Opera 10.62 and Google Chrome 8.0.522.215 and in IE only it’s menu falls a part. Makes a bit difficult to navigate through the pages.
Fresh Roots makes me proud to live in East Van! Looking forward to planting season!
You fuel our fire!
Great website. I like how you both feed and educate at the same time. Local, sustainable environmentally friendly is the way to go! Thanks for making this all possible.
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hey im in calgary if theres any projects here i would love to be involved
Hey JP,
I don’t know of any, but if I come across any we’ll be sure and try and post them this way..
Hey JP,
We don’t know of any, but if word comes this way we’ll try and reply to this comment with it!