Toronto Green Community helped to establish two other community gardens in Toronto: Champlain Place and the Canadian Film Centre Butterfly Garden. In 2009 we also ran a Stormwater Management program at our Eglinton Park Community Garden and the San Lorenzo Community Garden.

Champlain Place 

Champlain Place is a Toronto Community housing building where we have partnered with the management and the nearby Seniors centre to create intergenerational programming where the youth from the building and the seniors from the seniors centre come together to garden ecologically. We have created a butterfly and a peace garden and in the summer we run a weekly youth program.

Canadian Film Centre

Through a partnership with the Canadian Film Centre, we have created a butterfly garden and tended the gardens on the 21acre former property of famous horse breeder, E.P. Taylor. We are looking at a more long term ecological plan for the property and bringing the gardens back to their former glory.

Stormwater Management 

The Greening Toronto's Gardens (GTG) Program, Phase 2 (2008-9) was funded by the City of Toronto's Community Program for Stormwater Management in partnership with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority.

The Greening Toronto's Gardens Program was a water and stormwater-focused program involving two community gardens in diverse neighbourhoods.  The first community garden was located at 22 Wenderly Drive (Lawrence and Dufferin) at the San Lorenzo Latin American Community Centre, which was in its fifth year in 2009. The second garden was the Toronto Green Community's (TGC's) Eglinton Park Community garden at 200 Eglinton Avenue West (Yonge and Eglinton), which celebrated its 12th year in 2009.

Funds received from the Community Program for Stormwater Management (CPSWM), a city-funded program that provides funds for projects that reduced the adverse effects of wet weather flow, allowed for expansion of the San Lorenzo garden. With the help of a volunteer landscape architect, as well as with community input, a professional garden design was created. Sixty square metres of turf were removed and replaced with native plants and food. Paths were mulched and five trees on the property that had been neglected were tended to. A community composter was installed, and using kitchen waste from the on-site community kitchen, $500 worth of compost was harvested. They also installed three rain barrels and a bike rack.

Garden work sessions were held up to five times a week, and 70 diverse volunteers worked 3,000 hours in the garden. They included amateurs and experts and mostly new Canadians with a Latin American background. They not only gained valuable gardening experience, but language skills as well. The San Lorenzo Community Centre also has an on-site Spanish Radio Station. As part of the CPSWM funding, the radio station, Voces de la Tierra was able to broadcast five Spanish radio shows on the topic of water. Some of the topics ofthe radio shows included; the benefits of collecting rain water, preventing basement floods, preventing stormwater from entering the lake and the issue of bottled water. The Toronto Green Community had a water module in its train-the-trainer garden manual, which was translated into Spanish, and broadcast on the Voces Latines 1610 am radio station.

Although the Eglinton Park Community Garden has a large number of volunteers from year to year, during 2009, with the help from CPSWM funding, many more volunteers were recruited,including many new Canadians and students who came to learn English. Weekly garden work bees were held at the garden. They allowed participants to gain a better understanding of the importance of the many heritage and native species that thrive in the garden, as well as help the many new volunteers practice their language skills.

Two garden workshops were held: the Basics of Composting and Native Plant Gardening. Toronto Green Community (TGC) also held its Great Garden Adventure children's gardening program at four locations; at the garden, downtown at University of Toronto's family housing, in North York, near Lawrence Heights and in Scarborough. A total of about 80 children learned about water issues through the program.

As part of its Apartment Greening program, TGC helped replace a conventional flower bed with a native butterfly garden at 12 Deerford Rd., an apartment building in North York. Thanks to funding from CPSWM, TGC was able to develop a partnership with San Lorenzo to help them develop their garden and volunteer program and also to run TGC's garden education and volunteer programs.