If you’re out and about and looking for a new place to visit on your walks through Hawkwood, check out the Hawkwood Community Garden.

The garden is located on a former baseball diamond off Hawkwood Hill.  The site includes more than 30 raised garden beds, a cedar garden shed and a beautiful pergola. Artwork by students at Hawkwood School and St. Maria Goretti School transforms the one-time backstop.

The site opened in 2017 and all the garden beds have been rented ever since. The garden is popular with neighbourhood dog walkers. Please remember that the garden and its perimeter beds are off-limits to our four-legged friends, and if you didn’t plant it, don’t touch it, or pick it! The garden area is easily accessed by foot off Hawkwood Hill, The Uplands and via the alley near the Hawkwood Village Shopping Mall.

Building on the first-year’s success, seven new rectangular beds were added at the beginning of 2018. That same year, volunteers built raised beds near the backstop, added ground-level beds and started a “food forest” between the backstop and garden shed.

The food forest includes apple, pear and cherry trees, plus cherry bushes, saskatoons and Haskap shrubs. Food grown in the forest and in the ground-level beds (rhubarb, walking onion, chives, strawberries) are available for the picking! (Again, the raised beds are rented, and food grown in these beds belongs to the renter.)