Ward Teulon, otherwise known as City Farm Boy, surveys the bustling traffic far below the seventh-floor patio garden of a Seymour Street condominium. A fresh ocean current blows through the city, and as he inhales the salt air he seems to stand even taller than his 6’ 3” frame. Spring is coming and anything is possible. He is dreaming of zero carbon farming.

On this wispy day in March, the 1,100 square foot raised garden before him is a blank canvas. The waist-high weeds have been cleared, the soil is tilled, and some day soon he’ll plant basil. Built-in irrigation and a sheltering glass wall make the raised garden ideal for herbs, and Teulon envisions selling them to downtown restaurateurs—by bicycle. “I’d like to set it up where once or twice a week I’d come here with my bike and do deliveries using a detachable bike cart,” he says, blue eyes alight. “The only part that wouldn’t be zero-carbon would be the fertilizer.”

The garden was more or less forsaken before it became a welcome addition to Teulon’s City Farm Boy enterprise, which started small last year as a patchwork farm of three backyard gardens (including his own) within a five-kilometre radius of Teulon’s Cedar Cottage home. Originally from a farm in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, Teulon really is a farm boy in the city. In addition to selling produce at the local farmers’ markets, he designs and builds urban vegetable gardens. His eureka moment came when he’d done an estimate on garden boxes for Steve Lloyd and Melanie McLaughlin, who live near Commercial Drive. They didn’t go for the boxes, but when they asked Ward about doing work around their house, he mentioned urban farming, and serendipity did the rest.

Lloyd, who is a teacher and Vice-Chair of the East Fraserlands Committee, says, “The garden is a lovely thing to look at, and I like knowing the food is being sold to my neighbours around the corner. We need to start growing food in the city. Urban farming is one of the solutions to making this a sustainable city.”

Teulon got his third plot—and started his official farm in the city—when a retired neighbour who was struggling to keep up with the weeds gave him another 600 square feet.

This year he has expanded to about 12 gardens and almost 8,000 square feet of land, thanks to a Vancouver Sun article last autumn that sent his phone ringing off the hook. Apparently, a lot of Vancouverites love the idea of someone else farming their backyard. Offers of acreages in Surrey, huge yards in South Vancouver —suddenly Teulon had his choice of prime farmland. He sat down and did the math, looked at the practicalities and came to the conclusion: anything farther than five kilometers (about three miles) just didn’t make sense. Teulon uses a van to take the produce to the markets and pick up heavy items like soil and fertilizer, but he aims to do most of the garden maintenance on his bike, and farming gardens within five kilometers is ideal. Ultimately Teulon turned down many of the offers, because having too many gardens and covering too much distance would defeat the purpose of running his own business: spending quality time with his three-year old son.

“I wanted to be here while he was growing up. I didn’t want to be in Philadelphia at some Holiday Inn,” he says. Teulon previously worked as an agrologist for Nutri-Lawn, a Toronto-based company that specializes in ecology-friendly lawn care. He was on the road for 100 to 150 days a year.

City farming is no get-rich-quick scheme, and this is not about money. It helps that Teulon’s wife, Jennifer Griffiths, is a lawyer, and that during the lean winter months he picks up some work as a computer consultant. Teulon also sells a unique brand of raised beds in collaboration with J.D. O’Connor Designs, a high-end furniture designer in East Vancouver. “A lot of boxes fail at the joint. The big fingerjoints differentiate us. They’re high quality. They’ve been sanded and finished and boiled. They’ve been glued, screwed and tattooed (with the City Farm Boy logo, of course),” he says, chuckling.

Teulon also differentiates himself by growing varieties that you can’t buy in Safeway. Last year, one of his market success stories was French Heirloom pole beans, which hail from France in the 1700s. They’ll be back again this year. Teulon was his own best customer: “I ate these for three months last summer, pan-fried with my garlic and some butter for lunch every day.” Another regular sell-out was Rouge D’Hiver, a beautiful, big-leafed red romaine lettuce, which Teulon contrasted with some brilliant green, almost fluorescent lettuce on his white tables.

This year he plans to sell garlic like wine. With names like Persian Tempest, Leningrad and Korean Purple, and flavours to match, it might catch on. “Most of the garlic in stores comes from China,” says Teulon. “After fresh garlic, the taste is disappointing.”

Garlic aside, his true ambition is to add some momentum to the urban food movement. “I’m the guy who put the seed in the ground, I’m the guy who pulled it out, who washed it and cleaned it, and I’m handing it to you right now. It’s a different experience than going to the supermarket and buying a package of iceberg lettuce.”

At the end of February he spoke at the Food for All Dialogue, a food security conference in Richmond. Teulon’s aim was to spread the message about urban agriculture and pick up a few collaborators. If people are willing to weed and harvest, he’ll help with the seeding and selling. Together they can split the profits.

Teulon looks at Vancouver and sees a lost opportunity. “We’ve got beautiful soil in some parts of Vancouver,” he says. “Most cities are built on some of the best farmland there is, because initially when they were building a city they were looking for a place that had good water, good land and good soil, so they could grow food. The cities grew up around that, and they’re still sitting on some of the best farmland in the world.”

This summer, Teulon plans to introduce a new element to his neighborhood: an honour box. The self-serve corner stand will have vegetables and a tin can for money, so his neighbours can share in the bounty. He is also musing about pocket markets—just setting up a stall on the street corner and selling his goods, but he suspects he may have to get a license.

“I have vivid childhood memories of my father being so proud of his crop,” Teulon recalls. “It’s great to be able grow your own food, and know it’s quality food, and sell it to people who get so excited about your lettuce or your carrots that they’re coming back the next week. I was at the West End market four times last year, and at the fourth market people were lined up five-deep. I sold everything I had. That was such a great feeling of accomplishment.”

To learn more about City Farm Boy, visit cityfarmboy.com

Kimberley Fehr is a professional writer and photographer whose job description occasionally includes lurking on high-rise patios to get the dirt on urban farming.