Now Magazine – Home Grown – plotting a farm city

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.

Home Grown
by Adria Vasil
Call me loopy, but I always do a little jig the day I pluck my first piece of lettuce from the ground, walk 10 paces, then plop it in a salad bowl. I do another dance when my first tomato ripens and those kernels of corn start peering through their long grassy husks.
Link to story here.

The future of farming in Toronto – Edible City
by Enzo Di Matteo
The Design Exchange’s wildly received Carrot City exhibit envisions a fertile future where local farms line rail corridors, and greenhouses watered by the Don sprout veggies under the Gardiner.
Link to story here.

The right tools
by Adria Vasil
You can’t have a truly green garden without truly green inputs. Make sure you’re stocked before you start your digging.
Link to story here.

Taming T.O.’s fear of food production
Urban foodies push city to sow up swaths of wasted public sod
by Mike Smith
Sometimes it seems as though our “world class” city can provide just about everything except the fundamentals of life.
During the blackout of 2003, some spoke half-jokingly of having to “forage” for food when stores shut down along with electric can openers.
Link to story here.

Plant, don’t panic
by Paul Terefenko
We don’t live in Dickensian London, but summer smog and tainted soil might have you rethinking the merits of urban planting. Be not afraid. According to Toronto Public Health, reaping a clean urban harvest isn’t a major problem, if you’re careful.
Link to story here.

Making use of the city’s wasted spaces
Plotting Potential
by Paul Terefenko
Unearthly that in a city this size, there are only a dozen allotment gardens and just over 120 community growing tracts.
Is this just a question of space? Don’t bet your hoe on it. T.O. has hundreds of acres lying fallow, just waiting for guerrilla planters to sow their green beans. Dig here, folks.
Link to story here.

Can you dig it?
by Enzo Di Matteo
The dirt on dirt: a practical guide for the city farmer on what to do when you turn up a toxic plot. We sift through the soil pros and cons.
Link to story here.

Gardens to fight the recession
The right to bear farms: We’re ditching retail addiction
by Wayne Roberts
I had no idea I would experience a mental turnaround at the opening night of the Design Exchange show Carrot City: Designing For Urban Agriculture, February 25.

It wasn’t 180 degrees, mind you. I’ve never been one to scorn urban ag as a contradiction in terms akin to “hospital food,” “careful investor” or “responsible banker.” But I did have a prejudice about what food production in cities is really about.
Link to story here.