Fresh food in the city: Radical Gardens bringing new approach to farming.

AuthorKelly, Lindsay
PositionTimmins

Surveying her burgeoning acreage, where newly planted bean shoots are poking their heads out of freshly turned furrows, Brianna Humphrey chuckles about her luck.

"I have the worst soil known to man," she laughs. "I should really be selling bricks of clay and not food."

When she decided last year to cultivate a 100-foot food plot on her parents' property in the south part of Timmins, the poor quality of soil became her first challenge. But she planted crops anyway.

Some failed, but some flourished. She sold everything she had, and customers were clamouring for more.

Radical Gardens has since become Humphrey's passion project. Tomatoes, basil, peppers, lettuce, carrots, and beans are among the offerings here. Humphrey's learned to plant potatoes as a compost crop, which, when left unharvested, will decompose in the ground, enriching the soil.

Unique to her operation is an online farmers market. Customers can order locally grown items and imports from around the province through her website, which Humphrey delivers to their doors. Timmins had never had anything like it.

"All the farmers thought I was nuts," says Humphrey, now in her second year of operation.

Easily Timmins' youngest producer, Humphrey isn't the picture of a traditional farmer. Adorned in tattoos, her bright-red dyed hair folded into a messy braid, Humphrey laughs a lot, irreverent and good-natured in her demeanour. Her fly-by-the-seat-ofyour-pants approach to farming is pretty much on par with the rest of her life.

Trained as a pastry chef, Humphrey's career came to an abrupt halt when she became severely ill with C. difficile, which was exacerbated by a serious unchecked case of celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder characterized by an intolerance to gluten. She had to find a new livelihood.

Coming from a family of gardeners, she had worked with the soil her entire life, but farming was something new. She decided to start small.

"I got 535 tomato plants, and it was the worst harvest I've ever seen in my life," she laughs. "I had no idea what I was doing, but the demand was already there."

Undaunted, she planted more crops and kept going, recruiting friends to help her till soil, culture seeds, and cultivate sprouts. This year, she's expanded the development to a full acre.

Radical Gardens operates by the tenet of using everything it creates: Humphrey is planning an apiary so the bees can pollinate her crops, and the honey will be harvested and sold; flowers are grown as...

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