Rachel Rossetti doesn’t mind getting her hands dirty.
Not if it gives a strawberry plant a better chance to bear fruit.
She noticed the vegetable and fruit garden that brought a sense of pride and community to the Lower Patricia encampment, named Moccasin Flats by residents, last summer was looking kind of neglected during a visit to the site earlier this week so she gave it a little love and attention, digging out the weeds that have had a couple of months to take root.
“I need a load of soil and I don’t know how to go about getting it,” said the Prince George woman, who turns 47 on June 9.
“A lot of people got in on this garden last year, even the homies were interested in it and everybody down here put work into it. Some people just only came just because the were getting paid.”
While digging around those strawberries Rossetti uncovered a couple of what looked like morel mushrooms growing in the soil, a small reward for her horticultural efforts.
“These are expensive mushrooms, how did we get these growing here?” she asked.
Looking at the old tires somebody left in front of the potato patch, Rossetti knew what they were for. As the potatoes grow, the tires are stacked on each other and packed with soil that goes around the plant to increase the yield.
She learned plenty of gardening tips helping tend Miranda Project Community Gardens on Milburn Avenue, which was decommissioned by the city a couple years ago after somebody set fire to the storage shed.
“I’ve been trying to find a garden space in the downtown area for a long time, because gardening brings people together,” said Rossetti. “I’ve got all the seeds we need, we just need soil. I’ll work days and on this and my own and I’ll get my son and his friends to come and help me. I’m going to restart this garden.”
Rossetti lived at Moccasin Flats two summers ago before it became the site designated by the city to serve as a camp for people without homes. Addicted to drugs, she bounced around from the Flats to Active Support Against Poverty downtown shelter until last week, when she moved into her own room at the BC Housing long-term supportive housing complex in the former National Hotel on First Avenue.
“When the first few people came into here my tent was one of the first six,” said Rossetti, a mother of eight children. “This area is out of the way and it’s an area that was supposed to get finished (as an extension of the Lower Patricia Boulevard roadway). I think they didn’t finish it because when they tried to pass over Queensway the sand kept sliding and wouldn’t the concrete and asphalt to stay but it never did get finished.
“People have been coming and going here for a long time. I left here because I was mad about all the violence that was going on. If I hadn’t gotten a place I would probably be back down here sooner of later.”
Rossetti, who has Italian blood mixed in with her Cree and Carrier First Nations background, is a former heroin addict who still uses “down,” a mixture of pills that includes fentanyl. But she’s trying to get clean and sober and gave up alcohol last year.
She’s hoping a place will be become available to her in the Aboriginal Housing Society of Prince George ‘s 17th Avenue Urban Aboriginal Community, which would give her a chance to live with her 15-year-old daughter now living in foster care.
"I've been homeless for five years now, it's been quite some time, how are we supposed to afford the rents, it costs a lot to live," asked Rorretti
“My goal is to get into aboriginal housing down there. There you can live there as a single person and they’re building more structures there."
