Spleenhouse

In Leamington, Ontario, the largest complex of greenhouses in the world has turned farming into a high-tech, bourgeois enterprise, complete with year-round light and heat control, hydroponics, and low-paid laborers imported from Mexico. This massive industrial outcropping is a fantastic leap from the modest structures built by the French farmers of LaSalle (originally Petite Côte), the oldest continually inhabited European settlement in Ontario. The greenhouses of LaSalle were not originally intended as permanent grow houses. They were temporary shelters used for germinating seeds until the danger of early spring frost had passed and seedlings could be planted in the black earth of Petite Côte. LaSalle greenhouses were also, typically, sites for running whiskey stills and for fermenting wine, providing farmers with a lucrative moonlighting opportunity during the prohibition years in the neighboring United States. But today, the last of the greenhouses, pitiful in comparison to their Leamington heirs, are being pushed out by the growth of suburban neighborhoods, the products of rampant sprawl from the city of Windsor. In the near future, the only thing sprouting from the black dirt of Canada's original French strip farms will be cloned housing and well-trimmed lawns.

LaSalle Strip Farms, ca. 1800	LaSalle Strip Farms, ca. 2000	LaSalle Strip Farms, ca. 2010

LaSalle, Ontario Greenhouse