Food for Thought with Alex Bielak - How Green Does Your Garden Grow?

Dean Hall of Growing Green Hamilton

How Green does your Garden Grow?

Space in my last round-up column precluded going into detail about a serendipitous meeting with two food-related entrepreneurs at the Innovation Factory’s recent pitch contest. Since then I’ve interviewed each of these go-getting Hamiltonians, and this week am pleased to tell you about Growing Green Hamilton’s Dean Hale. (Look for my piece on Menusonly.com’s Marie Pavone in the next column).

Dean is a passionate believer in the square foot garden. As the name suggests, this concept, developed by Mel Bartholemew, is an intensive, compact grid-based system that can produce 5 times the yield of a conventional row garden. “A 4 x 4 square foot garden
gives you 16 squares to work with… and there are recommended plantings already worked out to maximise yields depending on what you want to grow,” he says. 

With a warm chuckle, Dean tells me about his journey from military communications specialist to nascent chicken farmer, and now builder of what are essentially tiny urban food factories. He first became interested in gardening while serving for six years at CFB Petawawa where he also tended his two acre garden, and raised a flock 25 or so chickens.

After trying various approaches to growing food on this hobby farm Dale discovered two things, both of which he’s carried over into his new business. Success requires 80% planning and 20% implementation, and the square foot approach is by far the easiest and most productive method, particularly for a neophyte. As a Board member of the Ottawa Valley Food Co-operative, an online ordering system for consumers, he met and learned from a lot of farmers, and, with the help of the military, took business courses.

This experience come together at the time of his wife’s acceptance into the medical program at McMaster: With their move to Hamilton, Dean developed a business plan last February, formed his company in March, and began his first installations in April. About $250 gets you started with a basic lined 4’ x 4’ box frame filled with the appropriate soil and compost mix. If you have the space and cash, $400 will get you a 4’ x 8’ box. Add roughly $50 for plants for the larger box and away you go. Before things slowed down a bit in mid-June he’d got about 60 projects under his belt, many downtown.

He says he was helped tremendously by being accepted into the Summer Company Student Program that provided him with a small grant as well as access to mentors. “At 29 I just made the cutoff,” he said. “Dean has done so well and is such an ambassador for the program” said Kristin Huigenbos, coordinator of the Small Business Enterprise Centre, the arm of the Economic Development Division of the City of Hamilton which delivers the Summer Company Program on behalf of the Ontario Government. She told me that each year 20 students get funding and ongoing advice from local mentors who volunteer with the program.

Dean and his wife are currently in a rental property on Hamilton Mountain, but, with the landlord’s permission, he has installed four 4 x 8 garden boxes out back (see photos) and is pretty well feeding the whole street with fresh greens! He is also working with a couple of community gardens and loves it when local children stop by to see what’s ready to harvest.

The longer term plan is to take business and entrepreneurship courses at Mohawk, become a certified master gardener and find a ten-acre property in rural Hamilton. There Dean will be able to develop and implement some of his ideas about permaculture, a system to produce agriculturally-productive landscapes that mimic ecological design, with a natural balance of energetic inputs and outputs. He’s interested in forming a group of like-minded individuals to discuss and pursue these concepts and invites interested parties to contact him by email (GrowingGreenHamilton@gmail.com).

My wife perks up at this. “Does that mean we could get rid of our lawn?” “Yah… They’re such a waste of valuable space,” he laughs. “But some people do love their lawns so you have to be careful... you can replace parts with attractive edible plants, Swiss chard, purple cabbage, red frilly Kale…”

That sounds like a green garden to me…

To see more pictures, click here.

Alex (Alex can be reached at fft@thehamiltonian.info ) or on twitter @AlexBielak

Food for Thought logo, designed and kindly donated by Ninka Bielak. Ninka can be reached at ninka.bielak@gmail.com.