Cathy Wetton doesn’t know why anyone would spend hours unscrewing and stealing dozens of garden-hose taps from a Saanich community garden.
Wetton, the long-time president of Agnes Street Gardeners’ Association, said she felt personally targeted as she walked around Agnes Street Community Garden this week inspecting the damage.
“Even to walk that amount of space up and down the rows to locate each cap and unscrew it, just the walk alone would have taken quite a while, let alone unscrewing and carrying off all the taps,” she said.
The theft, which was discovered on Tuesday and likely happened over the holidays, targeted 56 of the 60 brass water taps in the garden, she said. “This was pretty massive, brazen theft,” Wetton said.
About 190 gardeners tend the community garden plots on the north end of Saanich’s Glanford Park, with rows of potatoes, onions, corns, squash and berries in the summer and fall.
Wetton, who has been gardening at Agnes Street since 1999, said it’s the first time the community garden — which has been in continuous operation at 613 Agnes St. since 1978 — has been targeted in this way.
She’s not sure if her society, which oversees the operations of the community garden, which is on Saanich municipal land, has enough money to cover the estimated $1,000 replacement cost.
Brian Faught, a retired Camosun College groundskeeper who maintains the garden’s water systems as a volunteer, said it’s likely the taps were taken in the week after Christmas.
“It must have taken them hours to do this,” he said, adding it was an unusual and thorough act of vandalism.
None of the taps were hooked up to water, as the lines are turned off for the winter, he said.
The incident has been reported to police, as well as the capital region’s main metal recycling centres, in the event the taps are sold for scrap.
Wetton said her group is hoping to install new taps just before gardeners return in the spring to minimize the likelihood of a repeat incident.
The community gardens of Glanford Park predate the park itself.
Wetton said the land used to be owned by the school board before it was transferred to the District of Saanich in the mid-2000s.
Remains of rail tracks — remnants of the old Victoria-Sidney rail system — can still be seen in some parts of the garden.
Before the area became largely residential, there would have been orchards and farms in the neighbourhood, she said.
The gardens — which have grown in size since the initial batch of 25 plots in the late 1970s — were initially opposed by some local residents, Wetton said.
“Neighbours would write in petitions asking that we be closed because they didn’t like the idea of gardens,” she said.
It’s a different story today.
The gardens exploded in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. These days, they have a lot of community support, including from neighbours such as Pacific Christian School, whose students often use the garden for nature walks, photography classes and outdoor exercises, she said.
Saanich police are asking anyone with information about the theft to call the department’s non-emergency number at 250-475-4321 and cite file number 25-2481.
