Posts from — April 2009

Google Garden Plantingg
Executive Sous-Chef Jennifer Johnston leads a team of volunteers to plant a Growing Connection garden on Google’s campus.

The Google Garden consists of 100 EarthBoxes all planted with vegetables and herbs from different regions of the world.  The Garden was planned in cooperation with the Chefs at Google, and made possible with support from Google and the Master Gardeners of Santa Clara County and volunteers from Google, University of California – Cooperative Extension, EarthBox, and TGC. 

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David Graves is the originator and keeper of rooftop beehives all over the city. Photograph by Josef Astor.

by Adam Gopnik
The New Yorker
September 3, 2007

Twelve-thirty on a beautiful summer day, and the chicken committee of the City Chicken Project is meeting at the Garden of Happiness, in the Crotona neighborhood of the Bronx. The chicken committee is devoted to the proliferation of egg-laying chickens in the outer boroughs, giving hens to people and having them raise the birds in community gardens and eat and even sell the eggs (“passing on the gift,” as this is called in the project), and thereby gain experience of chicken, eggs, and community—or fowl, food, and fellowship, as one of the more alliterative-minded organizers has said. It is the pet program of Just Food, a small organization that is administered by a startlingly young-looking woman named Jacquie Berger, who is silently monitoring the proceedings.

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Larger version here.

World War II poster promoting home gardens so that food can be sent to refugees freed from Axis regions. 1944.

Green Boris Johnson sends vegetables to the Tower

By Chris Gourlay
The Sunday Times
April 19, 2009

THE rooftops and open areas around some of the capital’s most famous attractions could soon be sprouting crops of vegetables under plans drawn up by Boris Johnson, the mayor of London.

His advisers hope to convert unused plots of land around the Tower of London, Marble Arch and on the roof of the Hayward gallery into public vegetable patches as a model of sustainable living. Johnson will lead the way by planting runner beans in the shadow of City Hall.

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Photo by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, National Geographic

A chef at Vancouver’s Fairmont Waterfront hotel harvests apples ripening among skyscrapers. Hotel accountants say the roof garden produces fruits, vegetables, herbs, and honey worth about $16,000 annually.

One of a series of beautiful Roof Garden photos in National Geographic magazine found here.

Visit Diane Cook and Len Jenshel website here.

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Photo by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, National Geographic

Wasted space in the modern metropolis may become productive “farmland” thanks to advances in waterproofing green roofs. Some of the rice used to brew Japan’s popular Hakutsuru sake grows atop the company’s Tokyo office.

One of a series of beautiful Roof Garden photos in National Geographic magazine found here.

Visit Diane Cook and Len Jenshel website here.

October 22, 2008

Discovery Channel’s Matt Danzico investigates vertical farming, an agricultural concept aimed at growing food and raising animals in skyscrapers in city centers.

Part 1. See HD version here. (Click HQ icon when at YouTube site.)

(I believe these creative visions are funded by Absolut Vodka.)

In An Absolut World, Cities Farm. (Parts 1 and 2)

Lehua Chong sent this information about the videos.

Short videos by organic chef / eco-artist Jim Denevan.

“The video features footage and interviews from a dinner that Jim hosted to raise awareness about and show the potential of urban farming.  He hosted a dinner for about 120 eco-chic New Yorkers and prepared a five course menu composed entirely of ingredients from the five boroughs.  Some of the menu items included Rockaway Striped Bass with Bronx Collard Greens, Brooklyn Cranberry Beans, and even cocktails with muddled berries foraged from Central Park.

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April 22, 2009
By Lisa Johnson
CBC News

Several B.C. seed and plant retailers say business is blooming this year, and the recession, rising food prices and star power may be feeding British Columbians’ growing enthusiasm for gardening.

West Coast Seeds owner Jeanette McCall told CBC News she had expected a busy year at the Delta facility, shipping vegetable and flower seeds to customers, but not this busy.

Stocks of packaged seeds that were supposed to last all season were running out before March.

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Earth Day
April 22, 2009

Garry Sowerby, who is in the “Guinness Book of World Records” for the record time of driving around the world, visited us at the Vancouver Compost Garden this Earth Day morning, as part of his cross-country trip to introduce the country to Honda’s ‘greenest’ car, the Insight.

Gary says, “We are doing an environmental program called Insight into Canada that hinges on a month-long environmental journey across Canada starting on April 21 in Victoria. The drive will be implemented in a new Honda Insight Hybrid and will see 25 teams of journalists hand the car off over 25 legs on the trek.”

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(Wait a few seconds after starting this video. It will say ‘the current item is not currently available’ but it will soon play.)
The 100-mile diet? How about the 100-metre diet? The cheapest way to enjoy local food is to grow it! Share your backyard with others and learn how to grow your own food while developing a self-sustained lifestyle. Link to Food Network here.

Director/Editor: Maayan Cohen
Camera: Maayan Cohen, Galit Mastai

Sharing Backyards

City Farmer’s Vancouver Sharing Backyards web site is featured in this webisode for the new TV show “The 100 Mile Challenge” on the Food Network. Elizabeth Leboe of North Vancouver and Marjorie Carroll, the woman who shares her garden, are featured. Also featured is the man who started Sharing Backyards in Victoria, who built the City Farmer Vancouver Page, a visionary coder, Patrick Hayes. Christopher Hawkins is now coordinating an expansion of Sharing Backyards to many cities in North America.

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Image from Growing in Detroit here

The Maturation of Urban Agriculture

By Marc Couillais
The Where Blog
April 21, 2009

Urban Agriculture is maturing, and like any concerned parent, those of us with a vested interest are worried about the path she will take and the choices she will make in these crucial developmental years. She’s not quite ready to leave home, but she certainly isn’t interested in hanging with the ‘rents all weekend. That corporate bloke has been coming around a lot more lately, whispering sweet nothings in her ear and chumming it up with Dad in the den.

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Pauline, pet cow of President Taft on lawn, in front of the State, War and Navy Building, Washington, D.C. between 1910 and 1913

White House Cow Arrives
Pauline Wayne, 3d, Comes Safely from Wisconsin – A Calf Expected

Washington, Nov 3, 1910
New York Times

Pauline Wayne, 3d, the much-talked of new White House cow, has at last reached Washington and taken up her domestic duties as provider of milk and butter for President Taft’s household. Pauline is a Holstein-Frisian cow of registered stock, her number in the bovine blue book being 115,580.

She came from the stock farm of Senator Issac Stephenson of Wisconsin, and was on the road from Kenosha just two days. Pauline arrived in a big crate, none the worse for her long journey in an express car.

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27th August 1948: Mr John Hodder and his wife, aged 86 and 80 respectively at work in their allotment in Fulham, London. Photo by William Vanderson

Allotments – Take this job and shovel it

Apr 8th 2009
From The Economist

As spring makes its usual staggered start, the Fielding Street allotments, off south-east London’s Walworth Road on a second world war bomb site, are buzzing. Plotholders—a mixed bunch of beekeepers, university lecturers, Zambian migrants and “Nyudies” (new yuppie diggers) alongside the London-Irish flat-cappers of old—are making up for winter neglect. Exotic tubers and decorative blooms jostle carrots, spuds and beans in plots that range from pocket handkerchief to half a football pitch in size. For the privilege, the allotment society pays a nominal rental to Southwark Council, which owns the land.

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Tokyo, Japan. A man tends a tomato plant in Pasona O2, an artificially lit and computer controlled greenhouse built in the basement of a high rise building in the business district of Tokyo on February 15, 2005 in Tokyo, Japan. Pasona Inc, a human resources service company, built the greenhouse in order to introduce the pleasure of agriculture also to train aspiring farmers in the city. The basement space was once used as a vault by Resona Bank Limited. Photo by Junko Kimura

Japanese Government to boost indoor cultivation

The Yomiuri Shimbun
Apr. 10, 2009

The government is set to launch full-scale efforts to promote indoor agricultural facilities to ensure stable cultivation of fruits and vegetables, government officials said.

As part of a three-year plan to boost the number of indoor growing facilities about fourfold, to 150, and raise production about fivefold, the government will offer incentives including low-interest financing and a capital investment tax credit, the officials said.

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Now Magazine
March 29-25, 2009

Articles about farming the city of Toronto

Call it recession or climate change, toxic food or the new taste for community – we’re getting ourselves back to the garden. From leafy visions of Don Valley farm fields to floating greenhouses, the urban farm imagination is fertile. Where to park your hoe? Start with your own backyard or balcony and then head for the city’s hidden places and wasted spaces. Grow it up, T.O.

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Photo by Larissa Mead-Wescott. See link to photo here.

CBC News
April 8, 2009

Two Halifax syrup harvesters want the municipality to allow the tapping of maple trees.

Janice Ashworth and Jason Dionne have been collecting liquid sugar from eight trees along Allan Street, in the city’s west end. Dionne learned how to tap trees and boil the sap into maple syrup at a cousin’s farm in New Brunswick.

Ashworth said the project makes them more self-sufficient.

“It’s kind of hard to grow a lot of your own food in the city or produce your own produce and stuff, so we thought this would be one way that we can do a little bit of that,” Ashworth told CBC News.

Ashworth and Dionne say they’ll take the taps out of the trees at the end of the season and fill the holes with beeswax to prevent infection.

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Baltimore City Hall. See larger image here.

Baltimore City Hall garden plots to be planted in veggies. Crops will help to feed the poor at Our Daily Bread

By Susan Reimer
Baltimore Sun
April 2, 2009

Baltimore, which sometimes carries a poor-cousin chip on its shoulder when it comes to the nation’s capital, is about to trump the city to the south.

Mayor Sheila Dixon is planning to turn the formal gardens in front of City Hall into vegetable gardens covering about 2,000 square feet. Michelle Obama’s White House vegetable garden measures only 1,100 square feet.

“This was being planned before the White House,” said Dixon, firmly. “We are not copying!”

The city will be planting decorative urns, about 70 window boxes and several formal raised beds with spring and summer vegetable crops that will benefit Our Daily Bread, which feeds 700 to 800 people a day and often finds itself, even in summer, relying on canned vegetables.

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Photo by Michael Levenston

The six-acre green roof is the largest in Canada, with 400,000 indigenous plants and grasses and several beehives installed to house a colony of bees.

Green Bee

Just like the green roof, bees are essential to a sustainable environment.

During the day, bees are a busy lot – weaving their way through our cities and countryside, gathering pollen and pollinating flowers and agricultural plants. Insect pollinated plants make up 1/3 of our diet with industrious bees pollinating 80% of those crops.

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Mumbai Port Trust Garden receives Friends of The Trees first prize for its Terrace Garden at the Central Kitchen from the hands of the Governor of Maharashtra, in Durbar Hall At Raj Bhavan.

This garbage dump doesn’t raise a stink. Rather, it helps produce exotic fruits, vegetables and flowers. Lekha Menon meets city farmers who have mastered the art of making the most out of waste.

By Lekha Menon
April 05, 2009
Mumbai Mirror

At 80, Y V Damle conducts laughter therapy classes for women at Hindu colony, Dadar East. But the “fees” for his efforts is rather interesting – a bag of garbage! On other occasions, he trudges to the Dadar sabzi mandi where, along with greens and fruits, he asks the vendors to pack in vegetable peels and sundry rubbish. All of which find their way into plastic bags, drums and laundry baskets in his terrace where the retired BMC engineer farms for veggies, fruits and flowers.

Sounds incredible? But that’s exactly what the magic of city farming is all about. Like Damle, quite a few Mumbaikars are recycling waste to generate organic farm products right in their homes. Not just an effective method of waste management, these green thumbs believe, this form of urban agriculture is just what the eco-doctor ordered for solving critical food security issues.

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