I don’t own a car, and April through November, I tend to get around the city by bike, so last night’s unprecedented spike in gas prices doesn’t really affect me directly. But, of course, such spikes affect all of us indirectly and, if gas prices stay at inflated levels, as they’re expected to do, the cost of many other things will consequently rise. Especially food. Which is one reason that last night, while people lined up at gas stations across the GTA, I was meeting with someone to plan a vegetable garden. My fiance and I have a small house with a small yard, but this year we’ll be turning it over to someone who will help us transform it into a small farm. The Stop Community Food Centre, where I once worked, runs something called Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY), a yard-sharing program that connects people who have yards but don’t want to garden with those who don’t have yards but do want to garden. The two parties split the cost, the labour, and the harvest. The Stop, which this year matched about 40 families in the neighbourhoods around their two locations (low-income Davenport and Lansdowne; the much more affluent Wychwood Park), provides guidance, seedlings and a tool lending library. We were matched with a woman who lives in a townhouse a few blocks away. Dana once worked at The Stop herself and has years of gardening experience. While my fiance and I do want to garden ourselves, we’ll be away for part of the summer and, frankly, don’t have the greenest of thumbs. But with Dana’s help we’ll learn a bit more, sharpen our skills, and, fingers crossed, end up with a steady supply of organic produce right through the autumn. It’ll be as fresh and local as can be. And we’ll also, of course, get to know a neighbour who we might otherwise not meet. Backyard gardening is hardly a new phenomenon. As The Stop’s forthcoming Big Night at the Green Barn and its remarkable Global Roots Garden attest, growing food in your own yard has been a tradition in Toronto for decades. Our next door neighbours, an Italian family who’ve been in their house for 40 years, bury their fig trees every winter and unearth them every spring. A Trinidadian woman two houses down welcomed us to the neighbourhood with a bowl filled with her enormous tomatoes and zucchini. We’re not restricting ourselves to the backyard, however. We’re getting rid of the grass in the front (more sun there) and turning it into an edible lawn. The neighbours may not necessarily love that – front yards are usually reserved for ornamental plants and flowers – but we need room for the Swiss chard and dinosaur kale. Urban farming can occasionally seem like a panacea – a city like Toronto obviously needs vast amounts of land and water to feed itself – but on a microlevel like this, you can easily imagine entire neighbourhoods feeding themselves. You can grow a lot of food in a small amount of space. And, at the same time, the neighbourhood becomes closer, more physically active, and less reliant on food that’s been transported great distances at great cost. This is no guaranteed protection against the potential ravages of peak oil, but it’s a start. And not only will we not be lining up at the pump, we’ll be able to spend a lot less time at Sobey’s.