Thank you for your interest in our urban agriculture educational programs! We are currently working the curriculum for the upcoming growing season.
If you would like to add yourself to the waitlist or to receive a heads up when registration is open please fill out the contact form.
Please note the upcoming course information will differ from the information that is currently on our website (see below) as we are constantly striving to improve our programming.
This urban agriculture course is offered biweekly for the entire growing season. The course consists of 12 engaging classes beginning in May finishing in October. The course is for adults of all ages who want to learn how to grow nutritious food in an urban setting. Whether you are looking to transform your property into an edible garden, learn how to maintain a community garden, or you want to improve your existing gardening skills, this course will provide you with theoretical knowledge and practical skills to support your journey towards becoming more self-sufficient.
Agriculture is one of the leading sources of global pollution, industrial farming is destroying our biosphere and chemical pesticides and fertilizers have negative effects on our health. Buying locally grown food is a great way to minimize your environmental impact, and learning to grow your own food is even better! Food prices are on the rise; a study from Dalhousie University, the University of Saskatchewan, University of Guelph and University of British Colombia found that food prices increased by 10.3% in 2022. Growing your own food is a rewarding way to reduce your carbon footprint, save money and learn practical skills that you can share with others. Whatever your motivation, with a little bit of knowledge and practice, it is possible to grow an abundance of healthy fruits and vegetables and participate in a movement to cultivate a more resilient and food secure future.
This course is for anyone who is interested in learning about gardening, urban farming, and urban permaculture. Students in this course will gain knowledge on how to produce food in their own yards, balconies, community/collective gardens, and other urban spaces. For those who don’t have access to an urban space for practice, we will offer hands-on training opportunities on one of Coop CultivAction’s farms to get the most out of the course.
Students will learn:
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Coop CultivAction Loyola Farm – At Concordia University in NDG behind the TB building
7079 Rue de Terrebonne, Montreal, Quebec H4B 1E1.
DATES
The course runs biweekly on Tuesday evenings from May to October. See the dates of each class below.
TIME: 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
COST: $650 (for 12 classes)
This a a non-certificate course. If you are interested in certification please click the button below.
It is important to us that our programming is accessible to the community but also believe in compensating our workers at fair wages. Those who cannot pay the full registration fee have two options:
Volunteering with our Guided Hands on Learning Experience
Erik Chevrier has been a driver of sustainable food systems at Concordia University as a part-time professor, activist and student.
As a part-time professor, Erik had taught Food and Culture and Food and Sustainability, and provided his students with opportunities for hands-on learning and critical-participatory-action-research. He enables his students to learn by doing and empowers them to become community leaders, urban farmers, and sustainability activists. With a strong interest in the political economy of ethical food systems, Erik has meticulously chronicled Concordia’s student-run food cooperatives through his PhD in Humanities. His community involvement in sustainability at Concordia includes the Concordia Food Coalition, Divest Concordia, the Hive Café Co-op, and more. He has also founded a number of organizations, research projects and educational programs, including the non-profit solidarity urban farming cooperative CultivAction.
Dr. Mohammed Al-Duais is a biologist, specializing in plant ecology and phytochemistry, with more than 17 years of experience in sustainability agroforestry and nature conservation. He has managed and involved in many projects and programs with agroforestry and food security components directly benefiting less privileged communities and smallholder farmers and their ecosystem, in Canada and the middle east respectively. Dr. Al-Duais has significant expertise in university teaching, project and NGO management, technical reporting and auditing, grant writing, products development, team supervision, and capacity building.
Dr. Al-Duais received his Ph.D. in Biology from Friedrich Schiller University, Germany. He served as an Assistant Professor at Ibb University and as the director of the Foundation for Endangered Wildlife (FEW), both in Yemen and was the Natural Science Specialist in the UNESCO Doha Office. He was a Fulbright fellow at the Bioactive Botanical Research Laboratory of the University of Rhode Island in the USA for one year. He was also reinvited in the summer of 2013 to the Institute of Nutrition, Friedrich Schiller University, where he continued the phytochemical investigation on less-used vegetables from Yemen ethnobotany. Dr. Al-Duais is currently serving as a Research Associate at the McGill Institute for Global Food Security. He is involved in the interdisciplinary research on global food security, with a focus on developing novel methodologies, with a comprehensive ecosystem approach, to tackling the cycle of poverty and malnutrition. Out of his research activities, many concept notes were submitted to partners and he is the CEO and co-founder “Harvest for Health Inc.”, a McGill startup focused on solving the globally increasing hidden hunger and its consequences.
Relevant to Dr. Al-Duais involvement in food security he is a member of the food literacy committee, under Montreal West Island Community Resource Centre, he is also the CEO of Permaculture Sainte Anne de Bellevue (PSADB), which is a nonprofit organization established by the “Moving Towards Sustainability” Fund of Sainte Anne de Bellevue municipality. Under PSADB he managed many agroecology urban projects including Duff-Court Neighborhood Life Committee urban farm and two other urban gardens in Montreal island, Canada.
nico resides in Tiohtià:ke, and is Native to the Cherokee Nation. The CultivAction Co-op materializes nico’s commitment to mitigating the effects of factory farming, climate change, and environmental racism such as food deserts. They believe that weeding a small flower bed is a radical political act! nico also cultivates gourmet mushrooms for co-op cultivaction as one way to lessen the socio-enviro effects of centralized, colonial food and medicine systems. When they are not farming, nico runs a small business @nicosnovelties. In addition to creating clay goods, they utilize their foraging knowledge of plants to make tinctures/elixirs, body butters, tea/smoke blends, and other herbal remedies all sourced within a 10km radius.
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