Edmonton community garden turns to fundraising for new equipment
Posted May 13, 2026 6:14 pm.
Gardening is often a hobby that requires great patience. What looks like rows of empty soil during planting season in April and May can turn into homegrown food and flowers in a matter of weeks or months.
The Green and Gold Community Garden has been growing sunflowers and dozens of types of food since 2008. It sits on donated land at the University of Alberta farm. Every Tuesday and Saturday, people make it their hobby to work on the garden and help grow food for customers during the summer.
It takes dozens of volunteers to run the garden, and it doesn’t make money. Instead, all proceeds go to the “Tubahumurize”, a non-profit in Rwanda helping women with education and work. Tens of thousands of dollars are sent every year by this little community garden.
“I retired four years ago, and if I didn’t have this garden, I don’t know what I would’ve done,” said Margaret Mulner, who has volunteered since 2011. “It gives me purpose and meaning in life to be able to volunteer here.”
After 18 years of operating the garden mostly by hand, eyes are set on an expansion of operations. The goal is to buy multiple pieces of equipment, including a Walking Tractor with an attachable plough, tiller, and mower.
The garden’s manager, Dion Bews, says this equipment would make work easier and more efficient. He says what could take six to seven hours to go through a field of garlic would take about an hour with machines, while not disturbing the soil as much.
“Year after year, we have to form these [plant] beds; right now, we do that with a rake, a shovel, and a fork. These machines will allow us to form our beds to flatten the tops for planting without going too deep,” said Bews.
The total cost of all this is expected to be $25,000. This is forcing the community garden to turn to fundraising from the public to make this happen.
“Our bylaws say that we can not spend any money from the sales on operations. So we rely on grants,” said Milner.
But those grants, totalling thousands of dollars, including one from the City of Edmonton, have run out. This, on top of volunteers aging and not being able to put in as much elbow grease as they used to.
“Many of us that volunteer are aging. We’re all finding the physical labour of the garden is really getting to be a challenge for many of us,” said Milner. “We have quite a team that comes out here and does a lot of bending and leaning over. But the actual physical work of preparing the beds is a lot.”
In the month since launching the fundraiser, about $16,000 have been raised as of Tuesday. It’s still wait and see for the garden if this fundraiser fully blooms so it can enter a new, mechanized age.
“This equipment is necessary for us to do this in the long term. We won’t be able to sustain this sort of level of production over that time without some new equipment.”
