Posts from — October 2008

Information below from the MacArthur Foundation Web Site.

Will Allen is an urban farmer who is transforming the cultivation, production, and delivery of healthy foods to underserved, urban populations. In 1995, while assisting neighborhood children with a gardening project, Allen began developing the farming methods and educational programs that are now the hallmark of the non-profit organization Growing Power, which he directs and co-founded.

Guiding all is his efforts is the recognition that the unhealthy diets of low-income, urban populations, and such related health problems as obesity and diabetes, largely are attributable to limited access to safe and affordable fresh fruits and vegetables. Rather than embracing the “back to the land” approach promoted by many within the sustainable agriculture movement, Allen’s holistic farming model incorporates both cultivating foodstuffs and designing food distribution networks in an urban setting.

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Photo by Cynthia Price. Larger image here.
MetroAg co-coordinators Joe Nasr, James Kuhns and Martin Bailkey, with Marielle Dubbeling of RUAF and Joe’s mother in Philadelphia for the event.

MetroAg promises to bring support and recognition to growing urban agriculture movement

Article by Kristin Reynolds in ‘Urban Grown’ the Newsletter of the Kansas City Centre for Urban Agriculture. Link to all ‘Urban Grown’ issues here.

Excerpt:
In conjunction with the annual Community Food Security Coalition Conference, a newly-formed organization held its first official forum on urban agriculture at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia on Saturday, October 4th, 2008.

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Photo by: Dorothea Lange, 1936. See larger image here.
Title from that time: “Homegrown food is homegrown wealth. The foresighted farmer makes a garden plan showing what to plant, when to plant, and when to make second plantings. The plan shows how to cultivate and keep the garden free of weeds, and what poison spray to use to kill the insects that might eat up the vegetables. A garden is meant to feed the family, not the bugs and worms.”

Farmer in Chief
By Michael Pollan
New York Times October 9, 2008

This new post (White House Farmer) would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden.

The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking “victory” over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population.

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Urban Wheat Field Sprouts Busting Through Concrete and Myths in New York City

On Monday, October 6th, a live wheat field, approximately one quarter of an acre in size, sprouted at New York City’s South Street Seaport. The Wheat Foods Council’s “Urban Wheat Field Experience,” which ran October 6th through 8th, brings the farm-to-fork journey of America’s most-consumed grain to life with a wheat field, full-size combine, functioning mill, bread-baking station, nutrition lab and more.

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Girl in garden, early 1900′s. Larger image here.

Julian Cribb, author of ‘The Coming Famine’, said:

“This intensive urban vegie culture is an entirely new industry and will need a new professional – the urban farmer who can grow food on the roofs and sides of buildings, in intensive biocultures and by other novel methods to feed the megacities of 30 million-plus inhabitants.

“If we don’t, by 2050 we will have more than three-quarters of the human population – almost 8 billion people – living in places where they are totally without the means or the knowledge of how to feed themselves. Our giant cities will be gigantic death traps, at the mercy of even quite minor glitches in regional or global food supplies.”

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Cover photo of Eliza and Peter.
Published by Sono Nis Press in 2007

The Garden That You Are explores that culture through the lives and stories of eight gardeners who all live within a square mile of each in other, in British Columbia’s bucolic and culturally diverse Slocan Valley. Some garden for a living, others garden as a passion, but all have fascinating personal histories and gardening lives.

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Image from Growing Gardens, Portland Chickens.

At the 5th Annual Portland Tour de Coops in July, about 600 people visited, on average, 17 backyard chicken farms in Portland, Oregon. Link to their web site here. See photos of hen houses at Dave’ Garden Forum here.

U.S. City Dwellers Flock to Raising Chickens

By Ben Block, Worldwatch Institute
October 6, 2008

In the backyard of a suburban home in Denver, Colorado, 22 chickens are hiding out from the law.

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CBC’s The X-Challenge

Canadian federal candidates debate economic issues facing Canada. The second debate on environmental policy aired October 8, 2008 on CBC Newsworld.

See candidates Lorne Mayencourt, Ujjal Dosanjh, Michael Byers and Adriane Carr in a town-hall-style debate moderated by Mark Kelley. A member of the audience mentioned worm composting and the moderator asked the candidates if they knew what that was.

See the complete CBC show here.

Photo by Michael Levenston
The City of Vancouver and City Farmer have provided worm bins to City residents since 1991.

By Carlito Pablo, Georgia Straight
October 9, 2008

Friendship can grow from just about every imaginable place and situation. For Farhat Khan, one blossomed out of the compost she creates in an indoor bin.

A few years ago, while Khan was volunteering for City Farmer, a Kitsilano-based group that teaches urban farming to Vancouver residents, a woman approached her and asked if she knew anyone who could give her some compost. The woman had a plot at a nearby community garden but didn’t have a composter.

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Photographer: Iwasaki, Hikaru — Hyde Park, Massachusetts. 1944
The Bancroft Library. University of California, Berkeley.
Larger image here.

Sheila (age 6), Setsujiro Uno, Chick Masaru Uno and Naomi (age 2-1/2) are shown picking string beans in the victory garden in the back yard of their home at 21 Beacon Street, Hyde Park, Massachusetts. The Unos lived at Tule Lake and Minidoka and came to Boston in November, 1943 as a result of a job offer from the American Baptist Home Mission to lead the boys’ club work in the West End Settlement House. With them came Mrs. Shizuyo Sese, Mrs. Uno’s mother, and Mr. Setsujiro Uno, Chick’s father. In looking for a place to live, they had no trouble because of nationality but did experience it because of the small children since landlords didn’t want to rent them an apartment.

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25 minute video by Peak Moment TV
Yuba Gals Independent Media production partners Robyn Mallgren and Janaia Donaldson have been producing local video programs for community access television since 2002.

Landscape architect Owen Dell has a vision: transforming suburban neighborhoods into shared “foodsheds” with food-bearing and native plants, and even chickens. Neighbors can start by finding edible plants already growing in their yards, maybe remove fences, plant what works best in each location.

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Photo by Tyler Anderson/National Post

For the past six years, staff at Scadding Park Community Centre have drained the pool of its chlorinated water, filled it with freshwater and dumped in 1,000 rainbow trout for a week of fishing.

So instead of taking people to the fish, Scadding Court brings the fish to them. Several school groups stream through each day; the pool is also open to the public after school hours for $8 per person. Two fish are included in the price, but gutting costs an extra 75 ¢.

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The fourteen-acre community garden at 41st and Alameda in South Central Los Angeles is the largest of its kind in the United States. Started as a form of healing after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992, the South Central Farmers have since created a miracle in one of the country’s most blighted neighborhoods. Growing their own food. Feeding their families. Creating a community.

But now, bulldozers are poised to level their 14-acre oasis.

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Link to the video here at theinsider.com Video is at the top of linked page.

This one-of-a-kind garden video, shot on October 3, 2008, features Bette Midler describing her passion for composting and community gardening and all things green.

The Target East Harlem Community Garden Opens

Bette Midler’s New York Restoration Project (NYRP), a non-profit organization dedicated to developing and revitalizing parks, community gardens and public space in New York City, announced the opening of the Target East Harlem Community Garden.

NYRP and Sean Conway have outfitted the newly designed garden with wind turbines and solar panels which will power the 5,000 square foot garden’s LED (Light-Emitting Diode) energy efficient lighting and a built-in irrigation system.

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By Stan Cox
AlterNet June 23, 2008.

I didn’t mean to lead anyone down the garden path. Adding my small voice to those urging Americans to replace their lawns with food plants wasn’t, in itself, a bad idea. But now that food shortages and high costs are in the headlines, too many people are getting the idea that the solution to America’s and the world’s food problems is for all of us in cities and suburbia to grow our own. It’s not.

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Allotments for the unemployed on the Garscube Estate, 10 Jan 1933. The estate belonged to Sir Archibald Campbell (1852-1941). Photo: Glasgow City Council, Glasgow Museums. Larger image here.

Glasgow, Scotland

During the Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s, tens of thousands of Glaswegian men lost their jobs. Although insured workers could claim unemployment benefit it was not equivalent to a living wage; for example in 1931 a man could just claim 15 shillings a week (75p). By 1933 over 120,000 Glaswegians were living on public assistance, and diseases associated with poverty had increased. Allotments offered them the means to improve their diets by growing their own vegetables, and of saving scarce cash for other necessities. The University of Glasgow purchased the Garscube estate in 1948.

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Slightly larger image here.

Photo: ca. 1915
By Stineman, Ralph P., 1871-1955
San Diego Historical Society

See: Developing San Diego: The Images of Ralph P. Stineman, 1910-1915

Photographer: T. H. O’Sullivan. Expedition of 1873.
Larger image here.

“Prior to the coming of the Europeans, the Zuni people were skilled and successful farmers. Their villages and fields were situated in the best areas for cultivation of their crops. They originally grew corn, beans and squash. Later, they added European crops such as wheat and peaches. One type of garden they cultivated was the “waffle garden”. Waffle gardens were built close to the village and the river and were a type of ‘kitchen garden’.”

Sowing Seeds of Zuni Tradition
By Susan Montoya Bryan
June 22, 2003 LA Times

Zuni waffle gardens.

Pueblo of Zuni web site here.

Photo: Boy Scouts at attention — staircase, rotunda, City Hall. (Victory Garden day, April 1st, 1918.) The Bancroft Library. University of California, Berkeley.
See larger image here.

Although we associate victory gardens with World War II, Laura Lawson says the term was actually coined near the end of World War I, replacing the more commonly used “war garden.” This, after all, was the conflict in which sauerkraut was renamed “liberty cabbage.”

Lawson’s book describes the festivities on April 1, 1918, designated by the mayor as War Garden Day in San Francisco. The Chronicle editorialized that “the first food gun of the nation” had been fired.

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Photo: Nyandarva boarding primary school in Kenya, Rift Valley Province.
© 2004 Didier Ruef

“Over 20,000 children and young people, 400 teachers, with many families and communities (we estimate about 50,000 people in total) in four continents in four continents have participated in garden-based teaching and learning and community action and have come to generate new ways of learning about, and living in, an uncertain modern world.”

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