Gardening at USask is hosting a free webinar on Tuesday evening entitled, “Food is Too Expensive!”
With food bank usage doubling across Canada since 2019, 2025 was a record year for people accessing food banks.
Brooke Coller, a Horticulture Outreach Specialist with the College of Agriculture and Bioresources at the University of Saskatchewan, said one quarter of households were food insecure in 2024.
“It makes sense that people are organizing around this issue. Since the 2020 pandemic, there’s been a huge increase in people home gardening and looking at how to be more self sustainable. Part of that was because, of course, we’re all staying at home, but I think a larger part of that is just because grocery prices were hugely outpacing overall inflation. The overall prices from 2019 to 2025, for an average family of four, increased about $4,400, and are expected to increase a further $1,000 over the next year.”
The ‘Food is Too Expensive!’ webinar will be held on Tuesday, February 10th from 7 to 9 p.m., hosted via ZOOM by Gardening at USask, in partnership with the City of Saskatoon Healthy Yards Initiative. Registration is required.
“The webinar explores why food prices across Canada keep climbing, so what are the underlying causes there, as well as what it means for community food security. So this webinar is going to look at some specific case studies of communities both in Saskatchewan and abroad, and the collective action that they’ve taken to achieve food sovereignty. This webinar is also going to explore some some policy solutions, as well as individual solutions for combating high food prices,” shared Coller.
The Gardening at USask website, she noted, provides free, accessible and research-backed growing advice online.
“We also provide free or low cost public workshops and events and opportunities to connect with local gardening communities, and importantly, we also run Garden Line,” she said.
“Garden Line is where community members can either call in, they can email in, or they can submit a form through our website to ask any questions that they have about gardening or landscaping. Garden Line is open May 1st through September 30th every year, but we do sporadically respond to gardening questions outside of that same season as well.”
Coller said she feels so fortunate having been raised around both of her grandmothers, who taught her how to garden.
“I remember when I was a kid, spending a lot of time in the garden with my grandmas. And so it’s really nice to be able to provide that resource for free to the community. I know that it’s really, really valued by our community members,” she shared. “Our website is really nice, because it is all research-backed. So we’re so fortunate here at the University of Saskatchewan to have access to all of these incredibly knowledgeable researchers who are actively involved in research in these horticultural areas. We’re able to take that really important research that the faculty members are doing and translate that into evidence-backed advice for the community.”
She said the website also has a search feature.
“So if you need advice on growing tomatoes, you can go in and you can search for tomatoes and it pops up all of our articles about tomatoes.”
Anyone with questions about the webinar or the website can contact Coller at gardening@usask.ca. Find additional resources, including food preparation, healthy eating and food insecurity, comparison shopping, cooking with discount produce, and more on the ‘Food is too expensive!’ page.
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