McGill Education Community Garden: June 2023 Calendar

The McGill Education Community Garden is a small urban green space adjacent to the Education building, where we seek to experiment with permaculture and outdoor- and garden-based learning, while creating a space for creativity, community-building, collective action and well-being. In the month of June, the Garden team is organizing a series of exciting events, such as weekly gardening sessions and workshops. Please find more info about the programmation in the attached calendar.

Located on the terrace adjacent to the Education building and accessible via Peel Street, the garden is a small but cozy space with outdoor seating, a few planters and a couple of in-ground garden beds. Our vision is to make the garden into a green oasis in an urbanized university campus; a space for vegetation, community and learning opportunities to flourish.

The story of the garden:

The McGill Education Garden was established in 2015 as an outdoor learning space, located between the McGill Coach House and Duggan House. The objective of the garden was to promote sustainable development through garden-based learning, and a lot of cool stuff happened, such as herbalism and food production workshops, art-making events and film screenings.

But then … Covid-19, a turnover in leadership and construction plans happened. In 2022, Prof. Blane Harvey and his lab were approached to transition the space to its current location, giving us an exciting opportunity to reinvent and reimagine the McGill Education Garden.

Plans for the garden:

Our objective with the garden is to design an outdoor learning space, where we can experiment together with nature- and garden-based pedagogies while creating opportunities for food production, creativity, community-building, collective action and well-being.

Examples of plants cultivated in the garden include both perennials (such as raspberries, blueberries, rhubarb, mint, etc.) and annuals (such as spinach, peas, tomatoes, peppers, etc.). The food produced (not in very big quantities since the garden space is mostly experimental) is available to the community of gardeners that make this place thrive, but also to anyone curious to taste the fruits of the garden.

Interested in getting involved with the community garden? Everyone is welcome!

Things you can help with:

• Watering, weeding, pruning, building, and any other gardening tasks → check out our Gardening sessions
• Hosting workshops
• Creating garden-based teaching and learning materials
• Connecting us with campus- and beyond-campus communities
• Talk about the garden with you friends and share
• Photography & social media content creation
• Your good company, inspiration and ideas

For more information about the McGill Education Community Garden:

• Follow on Instagram at: mcgill_education_garden
• Join the McGillEducationGarden_Group on Microsoft Teams