Mutual Aid Garden volunteers with their vegetables. Photo via Mutual Aid Gardens website.
Mutual Aid Gardens (MAG) have started their free veggie markets for the 2026 growing season, offering five opportunities for locals to collect free vegetables from now until October.
MAG is a volunteer-run network with no formal leaders or hierarchy. They aim to improve access to fresh food and create stronger community bonds. They are a working group of the Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) Kingston.
To date, they have a core group of around 10 volunteers and a WhatsApp group chat with over 60 members, all volunteering their time here and there.
The group has a schedule where people can sign up for watering, weeding, and helping out at the market days.
Kingstonist caught up with MAG summer student, Charlie Atkinson, and one of the group’s original volunteers, Liz Turner, to learn more about MAG.
“A bunch of us had started Mutual Aid Katarokwi-Kingston, which formed over COVID and started as a kind of neighbour matching grocery delivery thing. So we set up this, kind of, network where people could sign up to help bring groceries to their neighbours who were isolating,” Turner explained.
“Through that process of neighbour matching, we encountered very quickly, like, how food insecure so many of our neighbours were… So we kind of pivoted and started growing food.”
MAG started growing food in a family garden of one of the group’s original volunteers, which grew into a garden network, using any volunteer’s unused garden space.
Since then, the group has expanded to four main plots. Two plots in Gananoque, with one at Root Radical CSA Farm, and a plot at Friendship Park and Oak Street Park in Kingston. At their Oak Street garden plot, they have a weekly drop-in on Thursdays at 2 p.m. where anyone is welcome to come and learn basic gardening.
In 2023, the group became a working group of OPIRG because their initiatives aligned. Still an autonomous group, OPIRG supports them through opportunities such as grant funding, promotion, and Canada Summer Jobs. Atkinson is working with MAG for the summer through the Canada Summer Jobs program.
“I was like totally, totally broke in my undergrad, living on just frozen meals… then I came across the Mutual Aid Gardens free veggie market, and I remember being like, ‘Are you serious? Like, are you sure?…’ I had kale for the first time, and probably the one leafy green [I had] in that year,” said Atkinson.
Atkinson shared that they were onboarded to help in the gardens as well as to increase community engagement. They’ve started organizing free garden-themed events such as film screenings, crafts, a book club meeting, and learning opportunities, such as ‘herbs for beginners’.
As well as providing food, community-building is a core goal of the group.
“We kind of pop up in a bunch of different neighbourhoods, but there’s been a few places that we go back to every year and have built some connections within that neighbourhood. It’s always just nice, kind of seeing people spilling out of their houses and then telling their neighbours, ‘Oh, go get veggies, like right over there’,” said Turner.
“That kind of immediate community building in the market is really nice… Like stuff’s getting harder, and so the more connections you have with the people around you, and the more you’re able to, like, call on them in emergencies, I think is a valuable thing, and that only comes if you make those connections.”
Atkinson added that the group loves to foster community across different organizations as well.
“Recently, we had an abundance of lettuce… so we reached out to Feed the People who work over at the Belle Park encampment, serving hot meals every single day, 365 days a year, and they were able to provide salads for two days because we had all this excess lettuce,” they shared.
The garden’s crops include tomatoes, kale, lettuce, swiss chard, cucumbers, squash, eggplant, potatoes, basil, carrots, various flowers, and more. They also grow and sell garlic as a way to fundraise for buying manure and seeds for the next season.
Turner shared that the group’s goals for the future is to grow more food and grow their capacity to help their community in tough times.
“It’s just getting harder for people to feed themselves,” Turner expressed.
“We’re a bunch of people who are, kind of, intimately aware and believe politically that the government is not really going to save all of those people, and not coming in to, like, solve that problem. And so, what can we do to try and help a little bit ourselves?”
MAG’s next free veggie market is taking place on Sunday, Aug. 9, 2026, at 2 p.m. at the Firelane — between 106 and 140 Compton Street. Find the full market schedule here.
To learn more about MAG’s events and to get involved as a volunteer, visit the Mutual Aid Gardens website.
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