A group of interested neighbours on Garden Street, with the support of the Compost Education Centre are making efforts to have 2518 Garden Street listed officially as a community garden and obtain an official license of occupation with the city of Victoria. We are conducting a survey to ensure that the community is consulted.
The vision for the Garden Street Food Forest, which currently is an existing unique garden space that is managed by neighbours, is to improve upon this already well established urban oasis green space, with a magic “secret garden” ambiance as a powerful and alluring quality of the unique space for immediate neighbours and the broader community (of human and non-human beings, think birds and bees) to come together for relaxation, sanctuary, education, food security, and to build social connection and community.
If you have any questions about this project, please reach out to Kayla at the Compost Education Centre at 250-386-9676. Thank you for your input, it’s appreciated.
We are excited to once again stock seeds from Full Circle Seeds in Sooke. Since 1993, Full Circle Seeds has grown many heritage varieties selected by generations for their excellent flavour and pest resistance. More than 99% of Full Circle Seeds are grown at our farm, ALM Organic Farm in Sooke and are certified by Islands Organic Producers Association. They have been offering open-pollinated, untreated seed grown without herbicides, pesticides or synthetic fertilizers since 1993.
If you’ve walked past the Compost Education Centre demonstration site at 1216 North Park Street in the past couple months, you’ve likely noticed tree removal on the north side, temporary fencing at different places and road work on North Park!
For the past 4 years since the Caledonia Housing Development was in its consultation phase, the CEC has known that our site footprint would be impacted.
That all came to reality starting October 1 here at the CEC demonstration site. Because of needs for specific access points into the housing development, Vining is in the process of being widened (between Chambers St and the development), and in exchange for the lost demonstration site space and allotment garden space, the demonstration stie is expanding into North Park St between Chambers St and the development.
The wonderful folks at Hatchet and Seed have been sub-contracted by the construction company to build out new demonstration areas on North Park, rebuild the greenhouse and coldframe, and reconfigure some impacted allotment garden beds. We’ll be replanting some fruit trees on the south side of the site to try to make up for the loss of the two mature apple trees we had along the back fence. The CEC recognizes the impact of removing large trees like the apples and eucalyptus, and so we held a special tree ceremony for those trees in advance of them being removed. Small trees are not a replacement for mature trees in terms of the ecosystem services they provide, so we were very sad to see these mature trees go.
On the positive side, much of the eucalyptus was chipped and we’ve spread those chips around the site, and they will continue their life as they decompose and build soil. Additionally, larger, straight logs from the eucalyptus were milled up beautifully, and we are now selling them as a fundraiser for the CEC! Please consider purchasing a memento from the eucalyptus tree for your next project. Details and inventory of the wood can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/share/15W9fDvQAi/ or here: https://www.usedvictoria.com/miscellaneous-for-sale/40983950
The Compost Education Centre (CEC) is hosting our annual all-organic Fall plant sale! August 10, 10am-12pm!
The plant sale will take place in our site at 1216 North Park street. Stay for a while and enjoy bike pedal-powered music in the garden. Entry by donation or free for CEC members. Dogs welcome.
The Fall Organic Plant sale features veggie starts that are perfect for your overwintering vegetable garden.
What you can look forward to:
• A selection of annual vegetables suitable for fall and winter growing
• Native plants for your low maintenance garden
• Perennial edibles like berry bushes and other fruiting shrubs
• Medicinal herbs like English lavender, chamomile and yarrow
• Live bicycle powered music!
The Compost Education Centre is located on unceded and occupied Indigenous territories, specifically the land of the Lekwungen speaking people—the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations. These nations are two of many, made up of individuals who have lived within the porous boundaries of what is considered Coast Salish, Nuu-Chah-Nulth and Kwakwa’wakw Territory (Vancouver Island) since time immemorial. At the CEC we seek to respect, honour and continually grow our own understandings of Indigenous rights and history, and to fulfill our responsibilities as settlers, who live and work directly with the land and its complex, vital ecologies and our diverse, evolving communities.
Compost Education Centre memberships get you free workshops, discounts at garden centres around town and more great perks! Sign up or learn more on our website.
Accessibility Information
The Compost Education Centre is committed to creating a welcoming and inclusive experience for all our community members.
Getting to the Compost Education Centre
The Compost Education Centre is located at 1216 North Park St. The closest bus stops are:
Pandora Ave at Chambers St (Stop ID: 100169) (300 meters away) served by Routes 2, 5, 27, and 28;
Cook St at Balmoral Rd (Stop ID: 100160) (350 meters away) served by Routes 24 and 25;
Fernwood Rd at Grant St (Stop ID: 100227) (450 meters away) served by Route 22; and
Bay St at Cedar Hill (Stop ID: 103733) (750 meters away) served by Route 10.
Parking is very limited. The closest parking options during the week are:
Two 2-hour parking spots at the corner of North Park St and Chambers St (50 meters away);
Three 2-hour parking spots at Haegert Park (100 meters away);
One 1-hour parking spot at the corner of North Park St and Cook St (250 meters away);
Multiple 1-hour parking spots on Gladstone Ave opposite the Fernwood Community Centre (300 meters away); and
One 1-hour parking spot at the corner of Caledonia Ave and Cook St (350 meters away).
All other parking within 400 meters of the Compost Education Centre is residential-only. While construction is occurring adjacent to the Compost Education Centre at 1211 Gladstone Ave (projected to be complete in June 2025), parking is even more limited.
On Saturdays, parking is available in the Victoria High School parking lots that are accessible off Grant St and Gladstone Ave. From these parking lots, it is less than a 300 meter walk to the Compost Education Centre.
Site Accessibility
The Compost Education Centre site has paths made of wood chips. Mobility devices with wheels (such as wheelchairs, walkers etc.) are sometimes difficult to use on site. The Strawbale learning classroom is accessed via a wooden ramp, and it has a wide double door and a ramp leading up to it. Once inside the Strawbale, the floor is a level hard surface. There is a single-stall gender-neutral washroom on site. The washroom is not wheelchair accessible. There is a wooden ramp up to the washroom door and a small step over the doorframe into the washroom. The retail space is not wheelchair accessible; there are four steps up into our retail space.
The Compost Education Centre connects with and positively impacts children and youth in our region. A recent study published by the Capital Regional District reports that 56% of grade 7-12 youth in the region don’t feel connected to land and nature. This disconnect is representative of how many children and youth of all ages feel. Elora Adamson, the Child and Youth Education Program Manager, and Jeffrey Ellom, the Child and Youth Education Program Coordinator, address this disconnect by providing accessible and inclusive education.
Over the past year, Elora and Jeffrey have delivered 286 in-person educational workshops featuring soil science, food waste reduction and diversion, resource conservation, and composting to 4552 students and 789 adults. Elora and Jeffrey create and deliver workshop content that’s tied into British Columbia’s provincial science and social studies curriculum on topics including energy transfer, organism life cycles, chemical and physical changes, and sustainable practices. At the same time, Elora and Jeffrey connect students to the natural processes in their own neighborhoods rather than educating about nature in the abstract. To best help students engage with big ideas like climate change, our programs are regionally specific, solution-driven, and hands-on.
One workshop participant shared that “staff and children greatly enjoyed this workshop. They enjoyed the puppets and the storytelling. Many of the children were telling their parents about what they learned when they arrived at a pick up time. Even a week later, some of the children are still talking about how pollinators are helping our gardens.”
Elora and Jeffrey build and maintain relationships with teachers, administrators, and education organizations throughout the CRD. To ensure cost is never a barrier, we offer free or discounted workshops to under-resourced classrooms. We have also had success adapting workshops to a variety of student access needs whether physical, behavioral, social, linguistic, or developmental. We also email teachers after workshops to invite feedback. To maintain accessibility to underserved rural communities, we bring workshops to any location in the CRD at no additional travel cost. Our aim is to reduce as many barriers to engaging and nature-based education as possible.
We are able to provide this low-barrier education with the support of donors and funders. We are grateful to the Rotary Club of Victoria for supporting our 2024 children and youth educational programming.
The Compost Education Centre launched Let It Rot! (LIR) in collaboration with a group of students at SJ Burnside Alternative Secondary School (SJ Burnside). LIR is an experiential learning program through which high school-aged youth acquire skills and knowledge on topics including composting, waste reduction, soil science, permaculture, and ecological stewardship. Now in its third year of operation, Elora Adamson, the CEC’s Child and Youth Education Program Manager, delivers lessons weekly to two cohorts of students at SJ Burnside and Mount Douglas Secondary School (Mount Doug).
We had launched the program because we had received feedback from student learners and teachers that teens need longer periods of time and relationship-building to more fulsomely connect with the resources that the Compost Ed Centre offers. We heard that students want to get their hands dirty, apply knowledge and skills in a tangible way, and build community around the intersection of food and climate justice. I’ve been so excited to see how Elora manages this program in a way that has had rippling effects. For example, upon graduating from SJ Burnside, an LIR alumni immediately found employment in the food security and food waste sector, which she was inspired to seek out after her experience in the program.
It is clear that LIR has deep impact on the participant students and their communities. Earlier this year, we started to wonder about all the other student communities at the nine other secondary schools in School District 61. How can we scale up our engagement of youth in gardening, composting, and conservation activities in educational gardens? Educational gardens are powerful outdoor learning environments for fostering climate action. How can we effect more climate change mitigation and adaptation by growing our Let It Rot! community?
To answer these questions, we started talking to longstanding food security organizations like CRFAIR, exciting new initiatives like Flourish School Food Society, long-time friends like Lifecycles, passionate teachers like Annalee Tyler at Reynolds Secondary School, and progressive funders like the Victoria Foundation. What we found is that we all care about transforming disconnected youth into engaged stewards of our world – and that there is an opportunity to progress towards greater collaboration and integration. By aligning our program delivery and participating in ongoing strategic discussions, we can focus more on impact and less on duplicating efforts with regards to funding, community focus, and capacity.
With the generous support of the Victoria Foundation, we’ve started exploring these questions and implementing strong collaborative practices. The latest (and so exciting!) update is that the Compost Ed Centre and Flourish have co-hired a garden coordinator to manage multiple school garden spaces. It’s exciting to think that we’ve managed to avoid some redundant administrative work and pool resources together to create a new job in the food literacy sector.
We aspire to connect students first to local natural processes and then second to big ideas like climate change. By demonstrating hands-on, regionally specific, and solution-driven practices through our educational approach, we try to reconnect youth to land and nature in a meaningful and productive way. By educating youth about the importance of sustainable agricultural systems, the science of compost, the benefits of native plants, and the importance of waste reduction and conservation, we are equipping them with the skills and knowledge needed to build healthy communities with resilient local food systems.
We are so grateful to find ourselves in community with a growing number passionate student learners, dedicated teachers, and nimble organizations. We’re looking forward to even more!
The Compost Education Centre is on a continued mission to see as many boulevard gardens growing in your neighbourhood as possible! We’re hoping to help some folks on this journey in November – by sheet mulching a boulevard together!
If you have an adjacent boulevard to where you live and are able to obtain permission to start a garden on that boulevard from the homeowner, or you have a neighbour who’s into it, please reach out! We’d love to host an onsite workshop to sheet mulch your boulevard (creating an in-situ compost pile) so that it’s ready to plant into come spring! Reach out to Kayla at [email protected] for more info and to tell us a little bit about your situation!
By Kayla Siefried, Site Manager and Community Education Coordinator
Seven Years of Success with the Healing City Soils Program
October 1, 2023
The Healing City Soils (HCS) program dismantles barriers to people growing their own food; educates on how soil health is vital to local ecosystems, community wellbeing, and climate change mitigation; and builds community around restoring damaged soils. The program is a partnership between the Compost Education Centre (CEC) and Royal Roads University (RRU). On August 28th, the HCS community came together at Hatley Castle on the RRU campus to watch – and celebrate – undergraduate environmental science students present the results from the program’s seventh successful year of implementation.
Soil testing can be expensive, and the results are often complex, confusing, and disheartening. The uncertainty of soil contamination, the expense of soil testing, and the opaqueness of soil testing results are all barriers that prevent people from growing their own food. The RRU students addressed these barriers and furthermore, they educated on the importance of soil health. There were other environmental science students, Capital Regional District (CRD) growers and gatherers, CEC staff, RRU professors and staff, and friends and family in attendance; and the audience walked away with an improved understanding and appreciation for soil health.
Have questions about your soil quality? Stay connected!
Over the course of eight months, two student groups in Professor Matt Dodd’s environmental science major project course performed literature reviews, designed research questions, learned new laboratory protocols, and engaged in hands-on environmental science.
Both student groups competently explained their science, shared their challenges, provided recommendations for next year’s crop of students, and tackled critical barriers to scaling up sustainable food systems in the CRD.
The first student group focused on providing free heavy metal soil testing of backyards, community gardens, boulevard gardens, and traditional harvesting sites in the Capital Regional District (CRD) to 100 food grower and gatherer program participants; this is part of the CEC’s long-term HCS program. All participants received the results of their heavy metal soil tests alongside easy-to-understand educational materials like the CEC’s factsheet on soil contamination. The results will be incorporated into an interactive online map.
The second student group was drawn in by the questions of the Ground Beneath Our Feet (GBOF) pilot that the CEC started in 2020; the GBOF group analyzed the potential of using plants, compost, and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) to remediate soils contaminated with heavy metals. AMF naturally occur in many habitats, and they improve plant nutrition, stress resistance and tolerance, soil structure and fertility. The students maintained three different pilot sites where they tested soil quality and plant tissue for heavy metals, planted and maintained plants hypothesized to be bioaccumulators, and applied compost and AMF. The students found the combination of woolly sunflower, compost, and AMF to be effective in remediating contaminated soils.
We are so grateful to the First West Foundation’s for making this work possible!
The Compost Education Centre will be hosting the first Red Wriggler Revue on September 28th from 6:30-9. Come by for a screening of the 1998 Pixar classic, A Bug’s Life! Admission is by donation and there will be popcorn for sale. We invite you to bring other snacks and wear something cozy.
Accessibility: The pathways of the garden are comprised of woodchips. There is also about a 1″ step between the bathroom platform and the bathroom. There is wheelchair-accessible parking located directly outside of the Centre along North Park Street. There are three hoses with potable water located on site. There is a ramp into the strawbale building, chairs will be provided.
The fall is a time for fresh starts. As students head back to school and our child and youth programming kicks off, we’re laying the foundation for our three-year strategic plan. So much has happened in the past three years that we’re taking a moment to reflect on the challenges and successes, gather insights from our community, and come together and connect.
The CEC’s staff, board, and volunteers met the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic with innovation, commitment, and care. External demand for the educational services offered by the CEC increased significantly in the first two years of the pandemic. COVID-19 greatly impacted supply chains and availability of food, and, in parallel, lockdowns and social distancing protocols offered a moment for community members to begin gardening and composting. The CEC was able to provide educational resources that were extremely popular and led to more people growing food and making compost. We observed a significant increase in our membership, retail sales, web hits, and phone calls.
The increase in demand for CEC’s services stretched the organization’s internal resources and capacity. The CEC’s five-person staff rapidly responded to the pandemic by teaching workshops over Zoom, creating take-home educational kits, and modifying the demonstration site’s visiting hours.
As a whole, the organization continues to adapt and grow, and in February 2023, the CEC hired me (hello!) as the new Executive Director.
Last week, we went out to Shirley, BC for our staff retreat. It was wonderful to take time for nature, snacking, and intentional conversations. We spent some time on Muir Creek Beach and French Beach: Elora wandered off looking at all the mosses and flowers; Zoe-Blue identified loons and sea lions through her binoculars; Kayla facilitated some funny team-building games; and Jeffrey and Claire almost lost a Frisbee to the ocean waves. We talked about our strengths and areas of growth, both as individuals and as an organization. We discussed how power works in our organization and how we hold ourselves accountable for how the organization wields its powers. Overall, we came away with a greater feeling of connection to each other and more clarity on how we might be more impactful as an organization moving forward.
We’re going to be taking those thoughts with us into the strategic planning days that we’re having with our board at the end of September. To help contextualize our conversations, we have been surveying our community via an online questionnaire.
Interested in helping shape our 3-year strategic plan?
Fill out this form here – and enter in your email to win a prize!
We’ve already received such wonderful feedback from you all. In response to the question, “How will we know we are succeeding?” one respondent shared,
We have a team of staff who feel supported, thriving programs and services, connections with many partners in the community, and we are working in alignment with our organizational values and principles.
We’re so grateful for you all – and we do feel supported! We know that the next three years will be full of challenges, and we are confident in our ability as an organization to strengthen our community’s resilience and ability to adapt to those challenges.
Excited to hear about what happens behind the scenes?
We are so grateful to have received funding through the Government of Canada’s Community Services Recovery Fund (CSRF). The Community Services Recovery Fund is a one-time $400 million investment from the Government of Canada to support community service organizations, including charities, non-profits and Indigenous governing bodies, as they adapt and modernize their organizations. We have been able to engage in the staff retreat and other strategic planning activities with the support of the CSRF.
“I am continually impressed by the passion, dedication, and creativity of community service organizations, like the Compost and Education Centre. I am equally proud the Government of Canada has supported their important work through the Community Services Recovery Fund. By investing in these organizations and their projects we can help to create a more just and equitable society, where everyone has opportunities to succeed. I look forward to seeing the positive impact of this investment in (community name) over the years to come.”
– Jenna Sudds, Minister of Families, Children and Social Development
