Two gardening renters in East Vancouver are headed to provincial arbitration on September 30. This will come after their landlords demanded they dig up their extensive vegetable garden, and remove a greenhouse and rain barrel, along with other instructions sent in writing on August 5 and 14.

“It was like an absolute slap in the face,” Jodi Peters, project coordinator with the Environmental Youth Alliance and an avid gardener, told the Georgia Straight while sitting in the back yard of their multi-unit dwelling at 1922 Adanac Street. “It [the first letter] was worded very harshly and quite insultingly, given the amount of time and care that we’ve put into this garden, with absolutely no room for negotiation. It was handed down like the law.”

At issue is Peters’s claim that she and her boyfriend, Jeffery Radke, agreed to rent because they were explicitly told they would be allowed to garden to feed themselves year-round. The couple did not formalize this in written form, only verbally, but have gardened since moving into the large, 102-year-old house in November 2009.

The couple are refusing to take out the garden. Management for Taryn Court Apartments, owners of the building, told them they will tear up the garden if it is still there on September 18 and replace it with lawn.

Radke, an arborist who also does part-time bicycle-safety education for schoolchildren, finds recent developments “heart-wrenching”.

“This [garden] is why we moved here,” Radke said. “It’s a nice apartment, but the value to us is greatly diminished. I’m not interested in grassy lawns. We have a green, grassy lawn in the front. We have a green, grassy lawn a block away at the park.”

Peters said she and Radke have already filed an application for dispute resolution with the Residential Tenancy Office, and she claimed they have suffered a “loss of service” as stipulated in the Residential Tenancy Act. They want a reduction in rent that will reflect the losses they will incur if their garden and greenhouse are destroyed and their winter crops are uprooted.

Veteran housing activist Tom Durning of the Tenant Resource and Advisory Centre told the Georgia Straight by phone that he hopes the adjudicator rules in favour of the renters.

“It’s part of the contract,” Durning said. “They’ve allowed them to do it and they’re taking it away. They can’t take it away. If they didn’t want any gardening, they should have said that right from the very beginning. But you can’t give it to someone and then take it away, because it’s part of their implied contract.”

Jack Pereira, building manager for Taryn Court Apartments, told the Straight the actions undertaken against the renters in this case were necessary.

“First of all, when they rent, they didn’t say they were gardening and doing a business there, and doing gardening and growing some tomatoes,” Pereira said by phone. “They asked if they could take care of the garden or maintain the garden, not growing the garden and putting in a greenhouse there.”

Pereira added: “If they had asked to have done gardening and put in tomatoes and grow all that stuff, we wouldn’t rent it to them; the company wouldn’t rent it to them.”

However, Peters maintained that issues such as peak oil and peak food will have an ever greater impact on tenants like her and others down the road.

“We take our food very seriously,” she said. “We are definitely into local food security, and it feels like the most ethical thing we can do is to produce as much food as we can for ourselves and our neighbours.”

“Enlightened landlords usually get enlightened tenants,” Durning said, and allowing renters to garden fosters positive relations.

“But that doesn’t have any impact on the hearing; it’s strictly contractual,” Durning added. “What did the tenants contract? What did the landlord contract with them? What rights did he allow them to have? And under our tenancy law and contract law, you can’t take that away.”