Airdrie’s Hannah Cameron said she’s had a plot at the Community Garden at Monklands Park in the city’s northwest for four years and this is the first time the deposit she paid at the beginning of the year has not been returned to her at the end of the growing season.
The Community Garden, that includes 123 plots, is administered by the Airdrie Horticultural Society (AHS). Fencing and access to water are provided by the City of Airdrie. The cost to rent a plot is $30 per year plus a $20 deposit and Co-Manager Tyler Bradbury said there are currently more than 70 names on the waiting list.
Cameron said she was pregnant and not feeling well and told the co-managers of the Community Garden, Bradbury and Alicia Jefferson, she would be unable to complete the clean-up.
“The bylaws state that you’re supposed to clean your plot at the end of the year and weed the pathways around your plot,” Cameron said. “I wasn’t able to weed the pathways around my plot but I kept my garden weeded and beautiful all year.”
Bradbury said neither he nor Jefferson received any correspondence from Cameron indicating she would be unable to clean-up her pathways due to illness.
“If I wasn’t going to get my deposit back, why would I even have come and cleaned up? I made an effort,” Cameron said. “At the time I didn’t even know that cleaning the pathways was part of the deal, because I’ve never had this issue. I didn’t know it was supposed to be done.”
“I told Hannah, ‘If you’d told us you’d had this issue, we would have done something about it,’ but I’ve seen the emails she sent and the email only said she’d get to it,” Bradbury said. “If she had said something and we had a record of it, we would have given her deposit back but we couldn’t find anything.” In an email forwarded to the Airdrie City View by Cameron, correspondence between Jefferson and Bradbury, which appears to be unintentionally sent, in a response from the co-managers to Cameron show Jefferson writing to Bradbury,
“I forwarded you her (Cameron’s) two responses to my clean up e-mails and both say nothing at all about her condition. I think this is a lie and she shouldn’t receive her deposit back.”
Jefferson also refers to Cameron’s assertion that she was feeling unwell from her pregnancy as a “sob story.” Cameron objects strongly to being called a liar. Bradbury said he just recently started using a new email program and didn’t realize his correspondence with Jefferson would be included in the response he sent to Cameron.
“I didn’t realize that happened. It was a little unfortunate,” he said. “My screw-up hasn’t helped anything.”
Bradbury said a change in the way renters access the gardens lets AHS better enforce the bylaws.
“In previous years it was called a ‘key deposit,” he said. “When we went from 60 plots to 123 plots, issuing keys was mayhem. We went to a combination lock instead of issuing keys. When we had keys, we had to verify they’d cleaned-up their plot and they’d give us back their key.”
“This year we sent out an email before the fall clean-up stating they had to make sure their pathways were cleaned-up in order to get their deposit back. When the fall clean-up came, there were still a lot of plots and pathways that weren’t cleaned out.”
According to Bradbury, those who had made an effort to clean-up their plots but ignored their pathways won’t receive their deposit back, while those who had ignored both their plots and pathways will lose their deposit and also won’t be allowed to have a plot next year.
“I feel like I’m being penalized not for a very good reason,” Cameron said. “I feel like they are policing it to an extreme because they know there are other people who can take a plot, so I’m disposable.” The money collected through non-refunded deposits will be used to purchase pea gravel for the Community Garden pathways, according to Bradbury.
