Social media is buzzing this week after a local woman claims her donation garden was on the receiving end of a chemical attack that left nearly 40 per cent of her plants destroyed.
Gardening near Bell's Point Beach Campground in Garden River for several years now, Trista Pino has been growing a wide variety of fruits and vegetables to help fight food insecurity in the area.
“About four years ago I started calling it a donation garden because I wanted to start donating the food more publicly,” she says. “I donate about 90 per cent of what I grow.”
A recovering addict for the past six years, Pino says she got clean and discovered her love for gardening and giving back to those in need. She has provided fresh produce for Garden River’s elder community, low-income families, and residents living with diabetes ever since.
Rather than ground gardening, Pino maintains around 680 buckets worth of food and plants, including lettuce, potatoes, tomatoes, beans, melons, peppers, peas, radishes, and sunflowers.
“The size of my garden was the biggest it’s ever been this year,” she says.
But two weeks ago, Pino noticed something strange began happening to her produce.
“I noticed what looked like soapy bubbles on my plants and they started to droop,” she says. “You can get diseases in gardens, so I instantly thought it was blight because the two buckets in question were potatoes.”
“I physically moved those cases of potatoes and moved them way back in a field far away.”
Several days later, more plants began to have issues.
“I had green healthy melons that were basically melting,” she says. “These leaves were melting and leaving the fruits behind. No damage to the fruits – just the leaves. The stems weren’t really affected.”
Then just last week, Pino was at work when she received an emergency call from her landlord.
“She told me there was white stuff everywhere and that the garden smelled of chemicals,” Pino recounts. “I raced home and saw my plants were bubbling and oozing. The leaves were just gone. You could smell the chemical. I just had this feeling that someone sprayed it with something.”
“I spent three days hosing the garden down to dilute whatever was put on it. The more I watered, the whiter the residue got.”
After speaking with other gardeners in the community, Pino grew confident that her garden was the victim of a chemical attack as dozens of buckets of plants were left destroyed – the majority of which had been impacted overnight.
“I was looking at my fence, and you can see a dip where someone stretched it down to go over,” she explains. “You start at that dip, and you work your way diagonally through my garden, and you can see the path of destruction.”
“On some of the plants, you could see where they physically sprayed. The fruit was still on these plants, but the leaves were completely dead. I had never seen anything like that before.”
Tomatoes, beans, melons, and lettuce took the brunt of the hit according to the avid gardener.
“I debated back and forth with other gardeners on diseases that it could have been, but the diseases that were in the running would have just affected tomatoes – not everything else that was impacted,” she says.
“Beans hardly get any diseases, but I had 16 dead pots of beans. I’m at a loss.”
Pino filed a police report last week with the OPP detachment in Sault Ste. Marie, who transferred her case over to the Garden River Band Office.
“They came out and agreed they could smell something,” Pino explains. “They didn’t even know much about gardening, but they could smell the chemical.”
“We asked Garden River authorities about any overhead or nearby spraying, and we asked around the community as well, but nobody sprayed. Every time it would rain, you could smell the chemical.”
Because she had no cameras near the garden and no eyewitnesses to suggest it was an act of vandalism, Pino says there wasn’t much the police could do.
“I have trail cameras up now to get through the rest of the season, and I’ll have better cameras in the future,” she says. “I’ll also be putting in more lights.”
Pino began to dismantle the garden last Thursday and says she had to put gloves on after she started getting burns on her hands and face.
Upwards of 40 per cent of the garden was directly impacted, while many of the other buckets are considered questionable.
“There are parts that are completely untouched,” she says. “There’s a whole section of melons and beans that were unaffected, and my peppers for the most part weren’t touched.”
Pino spent Sunday afternoon replanting the affected produce before taking her story to social media on Monday, where she was met with hundreds of comments in support of her efforts.
“It’s been so heartwarming,” she said tearfully. “When I wrote that Facebook post, I said I wasn’t doing this anymore. But when you see all the nice things that people said, you can’t let the people who try to destroy your dream win.”
“I was an addict for 30 years. But six years ago, I picked myself up, got myself sober, started a business, and started doing this garden. And it’s this garden that saved me. It’s my life.”