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The Common Table Farm connects those living in poverty within a few kilometres with healthy, locally grown food and a bustling community.
A little patch of paradise — that’s the best way to describe Common Table Farm. This half acre, urban farm features orderly rows stuffed with the likes of Swiss chard, sweet peppers, and corn, all labelled in multiple languages. Adjacent, there’s a lush pollinator garden of sunflowers, savory and asters, punctuated with painted bee houses. A low-slung elementary school borders the farm on one side, there’s a church on the other, and towering old trees make up the back border.
The farm is run by the Flemingdon Park Ministry (FPM) on land rented since 2017 from the Church of Our Saviour, Don Mills — both organizations are affiliated with the Anglican Church of Canada.
The farm and the community it serves are 7 km apart, and in two different worlds. “There is nothing more far removed from our reality,” says FPM executive director Maria Reolin of this gap. Flemingdon Park, the ministry’s home base, is a noisy, concrete jungle of brutalist highrises where many newcomer families reside, usually in poverty and desperately needing services they must go find on their own.
“The need is palpable,” Reolin says of the community she serves. The farm helps FPM feed 60 families a week who receive produce boxes and 80 seniors getting a similar box. Its 25 or so different crops get used in meals for the community fridge and community dinners, with anything left being donated to the food bank operating a few doors down from the ministry’s basement digs, the lineup for which often wends past the door to FPM. Since it opened, the farm has provided over seven thousand pounds of food for this community where hunger is real.
Helping with food insecurity is only one of FPM’s missions. Its headquarters are always a busy hive of activity with people having sips of homemade lentil soup, knitting, doing exercises to a video and getting haircuts — it’s difficult to hear the multiple languages spoken at any given time once the blow dryer gets going.
So too does the farm offer more than just squash and sweet peppers. “The farm serves multiple purposes aside from the food that gets brought to the community,” says farm manager Melodie Ng, including school visits, pizza-making workshops, and pop-up markets.
The team — which includes Ng, a seasonal farm educator and a small crew of volunteers — often uses the farm to teach about food and healthy ecosystems. “It's like a little pocket of trying to do something different in a bigger food system where there's a lot of damage to the environment,” says Ng.
The pollinator garden shows how an urban farm can have a bigger impact — it’s not just pretty. It was built with a City of Toronto grant in 2011, and it attracts moths, butterflies and bees to pollinate the garden, but also the greenery beyond its small boundaries. (The city is accepting applications for this year’s grants until the October 21 deadline.)
Looking ahead, Reolin hopes she and Ng can continue to come up with good ideas to keep the farm busy, and ideally attract more donors to help it flourish, and even grow. Dreaming, Reolin says she’d like to make the farm bigger, perhaps into a patch of lawn behind the church. “If we had the money,” she says, “ we could expand into something that produces enough to feed a lot of people.” Visit the Common Table Farm website to learn more and to donate.
Want to grow more inspiration? Check out this rain garden that fights flooding beautifully.
