Photo of Dan Jason by John Cameron

Sowing seeds for a greener world

By Julie Beun-Chown,
Canwest News Service, November 29, 2008

For Jason, the solution is simple: learn to garden. As an experiment this year, he took 12 of his best and most reliable crops, which included wheat, barley, tomatoes and garbanzo beans, put them into a Zero Mile Diet Seed Kit and sold it for $ 36. It was wildly successful. For those seriously concerned about food shortages, he suggests a mix of grains and vegetables, including quinoa, amaranth, wheat and barley.

“ Until now, people thought seeds were part of the common ownership forever and ever,” he says. “ People in other parts of the world already collect their seeds. In general, we’ll be thrown onto ourselves much more in future to provide our food. We might as well start now.”

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Photo By Steve Bosch. Kent Mullinix is a sustainable agriculture specialist at Kwantlen College Institute for Sustainable Horticulture.

Instruction would be based on intensive farming on small plots.

By Larry Pynn
The Vancouver Sun – 29 Nov 2008

A school of urban farming — a North American first — is finding fertile soil in Richmond BC Canada.

Richmond’s parks, recreation, and cultural services committee has unanimously endorsed the concept of an urban farm school and directed staff to investigate city land for such a project, either at Terra Nova park at the west end of Westminster Highway, or the south end of Gilbert Road.

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