Posts from — February 2010

BK Farmyards: Developing a 1-Acre Youth Farm – achieves funding goal

NEW YORK
Associated Press
February 28, 2010

NEW YORK – Students at one Brooklyn high school won’t learn about farming from textbooks in the near future. They’ll learn directly from the soil. Students at the High School for Public Service in East Flatbush plan to break ground in April on a 10,000-square-foot vegetable farm on their campus’ front lawn. The first crop of vegetables could be harvested in June.

Principal Ben Shuldiner says the goal is to teach the skills and science behind farming. Fresh produce will also be offered to the community. Senior Elliot Bowman says it’s difficult to find fresh produce in the neighborhood.

Urban farming collective BK Farmyards will design and operate the farm, which is expected to cover the school’s entire 1-acre yard in four years.

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The 44th Street and Fifth Avenue Organoponico in Havana. They always grow lettuce, both acelga espanol and acelga bok choy, spinach, radishes, green onions, garlic chives (which they call ajo montana), arugula, chicory, green beans, carrots, watercress, apio (celery), parsley, broccoli and an Argentine green bean that looks like a snap pea on steroids. They also raise medicinals – aloe vera, manzanilla (camomile), tilo, mejorana, cana mexicana, yerba buena, and another kind of mint. A sign explains the health benefits of chicory. – Photo: Scott Braley

Havana Harvest

by Mickey Ellinger and Scott Braley
San Francisco Bay View
February 26, 2010

Excerpt:

“Del cantero a la mesa: from the garden bed to the table,” says the banner outside the urban garden at 44th Street and Fifth Avenue in Havana’s Playa district. People are lined up at the counter to buy today’s harvest: lettuce, spinach, bok choy, garlic chives.

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The New Urban Farmer
By Celia Brooks-Brown
Quadrille Publishing Ltd
March 2010

As the New Urban Farmer, Celia has been detailing the day-to-day goings on at her North London allotment since April 2007 through her blog for the Times Online, and March 2010 sees the launch of her monthly column, “Grow to Eat’, in BBC Good Food Magazine.

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In the garden with Christie Brinkley

Newsday
Interview with Jessica Damiano
August 14, 2009

How did you become interested in gardening?

I grew up on the beach in Malibu, and we didn’t have gardens there. My house was on a pile of sand. My mom had a couple of ice plants in a container on the deck, so, for me to get my hands in the soil, I was so intimidated. I thought I had to be an expert.

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Let’s Come Back Offline

from Learning from Farmville
by Stephanie Smith
Jan 29, 2010

Excerpt

Let’s come back offline and bring our new social networking toolkit with us. Why don’t we create an urban farm that integrates everything we’re learning about community-based sharing from both the physical and the virtual realms? This farm would be an online/offline mash-up of social and community infrastructures that could act as a model for how our 21st century ‘commons’ will work. Sounds to me like the kind of utopia Stewart Brand and “the hippies who built the internet” first imagined, and that can finally be realized today.

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Women Planting Pea Stakes, 1891

Camille Pissarro

Excerpt from Biography.com

Born July 10, 1830 in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. Camille Pissarro was sent to Paris to study as a boy, where he earned acclaim for his budding talent as an artist. He was obligated to return to St. Thomas in 1847 to help his father run his general store, but by 1855, he had convinced his parents to allow him to pursue his dream of becoming a painter.

Camille Pissarro returned to Paris, where the landscapes of Camille Corot and other members of the Barbizon group made a huge impression on him at the World’s Fair. The concept of working directly from nature appealed to the young artist, and he gravitated toward landscape painting. Over the next 10 years, he studied at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts and at the Académie Suisse, where classes were free.

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Garden number 5. Cuba – Alberto’s Huerto, Havana. An urban vegetable garden in the space left by a collapsed building.

Around the World in 80 Gardens – BBC

Around the World in 80 Gardens was a television series of 10 programmes in which British gardener and broadcaster Monty Don visited 80 of the world’s most celebrated gardens. The series was filmed over a period of 18 months and was first broadcast on BBC Two from 27 January to 30 March 2008. A book and DVD based on the series were also published.

These food gardens were featured the series:

Garden number 32. USA – Liz Christy Garden, Manhattan, New York. The first community garden in New York City, founded in 1973 by local resident Liz Christy on a vacant lot on the corner of Bowery and Houston Street.

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Photo by Don Kohlbauer. See complete series of beautiful photos – and audio here.

Meet the pioneers planting crops in the shadow of downtown skyscrapers

By Erin Glass,
San Diego News Network
March 18, 2009

About a year ago, Karon Klipple, a mathematics professor at San Diego City College, took a long, hard look at the campus lawn.

With all the talk about global warming, the benefits of eating local and organic food, not to mention San Diego’s drought worries, it seemed the land and resources might be put to better use. So Klipple, who is chair of City College’s Environmental Stewardship Committee, founded Seeds at City, a thriving sub-acre farm smack dab on the downtown campus.

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Sharon and Michael, of Vancouver’s Compost Demonstration Garden, take us on a tour of their site, including the various new technologies that make composting, gardening and greening more urban home friendly.

Positively Green

By Katrina Prescott
W2CommunityTV
February 23, 2010

Through W2 we will be broadcasting shows focused on the environment during the Olympics (and hopefully beyond).

Our vision is to create a daily broadcast in which we will shine a positive light on the environmental movement of visions and solutions. We are looking to send out a positive empowering message of how people are taking initiatives into their own hands to tackle their concerns and create their visions. We want to leave the viewers empowered about how easy it is to be green, what they can do/change in their daily lives to have lower their carbon footprint.

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Farm interns share stories of dirt, bugs, and trips to Starbucks.

By Carrie Golus
Photography by Dan Dry
The Core, College Magazine of the University of Chicago
Winter 2010

To her family in North Carolina, “a farm in a city doesn’t make any sense,” says third-year Emily Howe. “Even my friends here don’t understand. They think I work indoors or on a rooftop.”

“I’ve worked on a big pumpkin farm before,” says fourth-year Elspeth McGarvey, who grew up in Arcola, Illinois, population 2,700. “The weirdest part for me isn’t the dirt, or the grossness. It’s being right next to Western Avenue.”

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The Kitchen Garden.

British artist, Richard Adams’s Kitchen Gardens

Richard Adams (b. 1960) received a BA Hons in Graphic Design at Leicester Polytechnic. He spent his childhood amidst the British countryside in the south Cotswolds. Its outstanding landscape has had a strong and lasting influence on his art work.

Richard Adams creates a dream world often adding ‘odd’ people that seem to float above the ground and seldom stand upright. Full of humour Richard Adams paintings are beautifully drawn and highly imaginative.

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Out of the Scientist’s Garden – A Story of Water and Food

By Richard Stirzaker
CSIRO Publishing
January 2010

Out of the Scientist’s Garden is written for anyone who wants to understand food and water a little better – for those growing vegetables in a garden, food in a subsistence plot or crops on vast irrigated plains. It is also for anyone who has never grown anything before but has wondered how we will feed a growing population in a world of shrinking resources.

Although a practising scientist in the field of water and agriculture, the author has written, in story form accessible to a wide audience, about the drama of how the world feeds itself. The book starts in his own fruit and vegetable garden, exploring the ‘how and why’ questions about the way things grow, before moving on to stories about soil, rivers, aquifers and irrigation. The book closes with a brief history of agriculture, how the world feeds itself today and how to think through some of the big conundrums of modern food production.

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Photos by Jami Scholl

Urban farming on the rise

By Carrol Krause
Herald-Times Homes
February 13, 2010

Excerpt:

Jami Scholl is a local garden designer who uses permaculture principles to create beautiful, edible landscapes that taste as good as they look. Jami is now taking her passion for “foodscaping” one step further; she has begun working with city government council members and planners in order to clarify the elements of urban agriculture that will be acceptable throughout Bloomington.

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Founded in early 2009, The Grow Local Colorado Campaign is a project of representatives from the Living Earth Center, Transition Denver, The Mile High Business Alliance and Denver Botanic Gardens.

Grow Local Colorado is currently focusing on these primary projects.

Local Parks Edible Gardens Project

Local Garden Registration

Garden Space Exchange

Grow Local Colorado Events

Visit their website here.

Urban farming at Braddock Farms (Photo courtesy Susanna Meyer)

Training for local growers starts next month

By Denise Ellsworth
Special to the Beacon Journal
Feb 20, 2010

Excerpt:

Thanks to enthusiasm and support from partners in the Summit Food Policy Coalition, a group started last year to address food access in Summit County, Akron is jumping on the urban farming band wagon. The Summit Urban Farming Initiative (SUFI), a seven-week training program, will begin in March at the Akron General Wellness Center in Bath Township.

The pilot program, co-sponsored by OSU Extension of Summit County, Akron’s Department of Planning and Urban Development and the Summit Food Policy Coalition, will be offered on Thursday evenings through April.

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Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.

TED Talk
February 2010

Transcript:

Sadly, in the next 18 minutes when I do our chat, four Americans that are alive will be dead from the food that they eat.

My name’s Jamie Oliver. I’m 34 years old. I’m from Essex in England and for the last seven years I’ve worked fairly tirelessly to save lives in my own way. I’m not a doctor. I’m a chef; I don’t have expensive equipment or medicine. I use information, education.

I profoundly believe that the power of food has a primal place in our homes that binds us to the best bits of life. We have an awful, awful reality right now. America, you’re at the top of your game. This is one of the most unhealthy countries in the world.

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Strawberry Mansion Community Garden, North Philadelphia, 2008. All photos courtesy of The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society

From Community Gardening To Community Food Security

by Michael Nairn and Domenic Vitiello
Harvard Design Magazine 31,
Fall/Winter 2009/10

Excerpt:

Tomatoes always seem to taste better when you are acquainted with the person who grew them, especially when that person is you. Many Americans have never tasted a “real” tomato, vine ripened no more than a day or two before being eaten. Corn tastes best when you get the water boiling minutes before you pick it. The joys of fresh produce, along with those of saving money and building community, help explain the recent growth of farmers’ markets and of the fascination with urban agriculture.

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Forthcoming May 2010

By: Lorraine Johnson
Greystone Books
Forthcoming May 2010
(Note: This book is not about our organization, “City Farmer”.)

City Farmer celebrates the new ways that urban dwellers are getting closer to their food. Not only are backyard vegetable plots popping up in places long reserved for lawns, but some renegades are even planting their front yards with food. People in apartments are filling their balconies with pots of tomatoes, beans, and basil, while others are gazing skyward and “greening” their rooftops with food plants. Still others are colonizing public spaces, staking out territory in parks for community gardens and orchards, or convincing school boards to turn asphalt school grounds into “growing” grounds.

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Farming Heritage Project -‘Digging our Roots

Wellington-clad visitors to Heeley City Farm this weekend (Sunday 21 February 2010) can muck-in to help with the final stages of a long-running archaeology project in partnership with the University of Sheffield.

University of Sheffield´s Media Centre
19 February 2010

The Iron Age Roundhouse activity day will take place from 11am to 4pm and people will be encouraged to roll-up their sleeves and use a mixture of clay and straw to help finish the walls of the farm´s constructed Iron Age Roundhouse – a very early form of housing in Britain.

The reconstruction of the Iron Age Roundhouse forms part of a partnership with the University of Sheffield´s Department of Archaeology and the University´s Archaeology Society. Academics and students have offered advice throughout the project and will be on hand to give assistance, information and work on the Roundhouse.

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GlobalGiving is an online marketplace that connects you to the causes and countries you care about. You select the projects you want to support, make a tax-deductible contribution, and get regular progress updates – so you can see your impact.

Organic Urban Agriculture in Quito, Ecuador

If we can plant orchards, build greenhouses and wormeries, buy seedlings, and train people though workshops, we can enable people to provide for and feed themselves and their children.

26% of Ecuador’s children under 5 suffer from malnourishment. Since 2000, the cost of food in Ecuador increased dramatically. It’s cheaper to buy a Peruvian potato than to produce it.

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