EDMONTON — A dispute pitting okra versus oil is raging in rural northeast Edmonton, where a group of community gardeners is vying to save their crops from a pipeline company’s construction schedule.



The 2.4 hectare Wecan community garden is a cornucopia of greenery, filled with all manner of ripening peas, cabbage, beans and squash. Yet among the vegetation stands another type of green — fluorescent markers showing the route where a pipeline is to be constructed.The 70 gardeners who use the site have known about the project for some time, but say the company, Plains Midstream, has given them insufficient notice that earthmovers are set to arrive this week.The news has sent many scrambling to salvage what they can from the field, even though most of the plants are not yet ready for picking. While the company sent word late Tuesday that it would delay construction to discuss the issue, it’s unclear if they will meet the growers’ call for a four- to six-week reprieve to allow all of the vegetables to properly mature and be harvested.“This didn’t need to be a conflict. There are options. They could have gone under the garden and avoided destruction, or they could wait another month and allow people to harvest,” said Francisco Huezo, whose mother was one of the original creators of the garden 22 years ago.Huezo said the garden, near Alberta Hospital Edmonton, is used by many low-income immigrant families who depend upon the produce to reduce their food budget. In addition, most of the gardeners donate a portion of their harvest to the Edmonton Food Bank.Jocelyn Jones, a Filipino-Canadian who has used the garden for 14 years, said her plot contains a large variety of plants from her home country, including special varieties of rice, okra, shallots and bitter melon.Such produce is not available in Edmonton grocery stores, she said. The rice, for example, used to be planted by her ancestors on mountainsides in the Philippines. She said her family will pick what they can and hope to save some of the other crops by putting them in pots and transplanting them.“I used to plant these things when I was a kid,” Jones said. “We brought the seed here to see if it would survive and it did. It’s been very special that the things we used to eat in the Philippines, we can have here. It’s made us feel close to home.”The garden also provides a kind of spiritual sustenance, she said. Families work together to dig, plant, water and harvest, while at the same time bonding with the multicultural community of growers on-site.“We use it to integrate with the other cultures,” Jones said. “We all have this common interest, so we get to know each other. We exchange produce, we exchange food ideas, get each other to try various things. People will come over and say ‘What is this? How do you cook it?’ ”Guatemalan-Canadian Marco Miranda and his father, Santos, were busy Tuesday salvaging beans, a staple in Spanish cooking.