Posts from — May 2010

Video by Simon and Schuster

Radio Interview with author Manny Howard

The Takeaway is a national morning news program that invites listeners to be part of the American conversation. Hosts John Hockenberry and Celeste Headlee, along with partners The New York Times, BBC World Service, WNYC, Public Radio International and WGBH Boston, deliver news and analysis and help you prepare for the day ahead.?May 19, 2010

For this week’s food segment, we talk with Manny Howard, a man who turned his tiny New York City backyard into a farm, complete with produce and livestock.

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Farmer-to-Farmer Movement, traditional knowledge sharing and the value of cooperation versus competition

By Jennifer Cockrall-King
Foodgirl.ca
May 18, 2010

Excerpt:

I’ve been to Cuba twice now, once in 2007 and just very recently (where I met and roomed with the amazing Jill Richardson, author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It, and the blogger behind La Vida Locavore). Both times, I’ve been in Cuba to research their agricultural models, especially their urban agricultural models, as I’m writing a book on the global movement of urban agriculture.

Jill and I participated in a conference and research tour from May 5 to 15, 2010, organized by the Asociacion Cubana de Tecnicos Agricolas y Forestales. and Jill is doing a mind-blowing job of chronicling our day-to-day adventures on the farms and our other wanderings on La Vida Locavore, so check it out for blow-by-blow visits to the farms.

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Paul Merriman, CEO of the Saskatoon Food Bank, sifts through the dirt on vacant property in the 900 block of Third Avenue North, where potatoes will be planted for the food bank. Photograph by Gord Waldner

150 lots citywide are now available for food production

By David Hutton
The StarPhoenix
May 18, 2010

Milton Taylor was sick of staring at dandelions.

The sprawling three-acres of city-owned land across from his photography business on Third Avenue North had long been an unsightly mess of weeds and litter. So, five years ago, as a test project, Taylor planted a small potato patch on a corner of the land at the edge of the north downtown in City Park, donating the 250 pounds of harvested potatoes to the Saskatoon Food Bank.

“I didn’t get a lot, but I got something,” Taylor said.

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John Ameroso at a farm he started on Governor’s Island. Photo by Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

“Anybody doing urban agriculture today should thank him personally”

By Tracie McMllan
New York Times
May 18, 2010

Excerpt:

John Ameroso didn’t hoe the rows of vegetables that help feed the Bronx at the Padre Plaza Success Garden in the borough’s Mott Haven section. He didn’t pick any tomatoes from the vines at the Brooklyn Rescue Mission’s farm. And he didn’t turn the composting bins that kept East New York Farms! fertile ground for collards, cilantro and chard.

But he’s responsible for all of it, along with the rest of more than 18 tons of produce grown in city lots for market last year.

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The Greenaid dispensary

Made from a mixture of clay, compost, and seeds, “seedbombs” are becoming an increasingly popular means combating the many forgotten grey spaces we encounter everyday-from sidewalk cracks to vacant lots and parking medians. They can be thrown anonymously into these derelict urban sites to temporarily reclaim and transform them into places worth looking at and caring for.

The Greenaid dispensary simply makes these guerrilla gardening efforts more accessible to all by appropriating the existing distribution system of the quarter-operated gumball machine. With a simple edict, “Change for Change”, the Greenaid initiative encourages urban dwellers of any age to become casual activists by taking part in the incremental beautification of their environment using only the loose coins in their pocket.

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Kid’s program teaches rice cultivation. The Lanna village envelopes a terraced rice paddy farmed by blue-shirted farmers and resident water buffalo. (The harvested rice is donated to the local temple.) See larger photo here.

Chiang Mai’s Mandarin Oriental resort is landscaped with rice paddies

Lanna Kids Property Tour

Kids can explore the resort’s grounds by horse-cart or trishaw and make visits to various interesting places, such as the Buddhist prayer hall and the spirit shrine. The highlight of the excursion will be a visit to the paddy fields where they will meet the resort’s resident family of water buffalos.

Kids will be offered a change into farmer’s hats, pants, shirts and boots and wind their way through the rice paddies to the shady field hut where they can sit and ride a buffalo and learn the special technique of planting rice.

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Mobile Unit. Pic courtesy of the MFC team.

Chicago Mobile Unit

By Mr. Brown Thumb
Chicago Garden
May 17, 2010

Excerpt:

A fleet of bikes with custom trailers accompanies the Mobile Unit. The bikes carry farming and gardening tools and transport the “mods,” the nesting storage bins below the table, which house programming material. The accompanying bikes can also be used to deliver CSA boxes and are dispersed throughout a community to alert and direct residents to programming happening at the Mobile Unit.

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From the highest spot in the lovely community garden in Seattle’s Chinatown. Photo by Megan Driscoll.

Urban Agriculture Seattle

Specifically, the Department of Planning and Development (DPD)_is proposing the following code changes to support and encourage urban agriculture:

1. Add and/or clarify definitions for the following key terms: horticulture, aquaculture, animal husbandry, community gardens (including P-Patch community gardens), and urban farms. These refined definitions have additional recommendations (below) for regulation by zone.

2. Allow community gardens (including P-Patch community gardens) as permitted uses in all zones, with some limitations in industrial zones.

3. Allow urban farms in all zones as follows:

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In this episode I introduce you to “Urban Farming” a non-profit
organization that plants gardens for people in need.

Miko supports green politics

Miko supports green politics and keeps a video blog to talk about her current concerns.

“Enough with the melting glaciers scaring you out of your Hummer, if you’re a pimp, you’ll want to ride with the ladies in your big truck anyway. We just want to show you a few other ways to make a painless difference.

“Whatever we focus on grows – so I choose to focus on the possibilities and excitement of a green future. I do this by creating EkoMiko episodes, contests, interactive eco life guides and by organizing events that inspire.

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Emily Kniskern (left) and Michael Latsch, with the program Seeds for Success, prepare a new garden plot on a vacant lot in Duluth last week by digging up the ground and removing roots and rhizomes of the ubiquitous quack grass. Photo by Bob King.

Duluth could soon be awash in home-grown vegetables if two new programs taking seed this spring sprout as organizers hope.

By John Myers,
Duluth News Tribune
May 17 2010

Duluth could soon be awash in home-grown vegetables if two new programs taking seed this spring sprout as organizers hope.

One program, Seeds of Success, sponsored by Community Action Duluth, is turning vacant lots into urban vegetable farms where seasonal workers will grow produce to sell to local restaurants.

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Inspiration from her garden

By Jaine Rose

We have a small suburban garden in the town of Stroud in Gloucestershire, U.K. There is a growing movement of people, of which we are part, who are inspired to find different ways of slowing down, working from home, living creatively and simply, and building community resilience in the face of changing times.

My garden is small, but is crammed full of fruit trees and bushes, a tiny greenhouse, raised beds, and bursting permaculture in every nook and cranny!. At the end of the garden I have a small beach-hut where I work from, and a little deck to sit on, housing a Witchazel, an Oak, a Rowan and various herbs in pots. Any spare vegetables or fruit is handed out to neighbours, or can be sold at our local farmers market.

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Volunteers spread the soil at the farm, called Brooklyn Grange. Photo by Nicole Bengiveno.

Stop-work order

By Diane Cardwell
New York Times
May 16, 2010

Excerpt:

It had been a week of furious dawn-to-dark activity building a farm high above an industrial stretch of Queens: directing traffic along Northern Boulevard, hoisting truckloads of growing mix up to the roof and raking it over drainage and protective material. Once the eight-inch layer of engineered soil stretched over the 40,000-square-foot space, the volunteers could begin planting the 9,000 seedlings awaiting their new home.

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GardenAfrica’s work is currently focused in Southern Africa, where we establish productive organic training gardens in schools, hospitals and clinics, growing nutritious food and medicinal herbs. These gardens offer practical and effective solutions for building community health and livelihoods, ensuring the continuation of vital botanical and horticultural knowledge through to the next generation of carers and providers.

Countries where GardenAfrica operates

South Africa – Living Classrooms: Sustainable Schools Project (SEED), Cape Flats
The area on the outskirts of Cape Town is a poverty stricken area. Overcrowding due to rapid urbanisation has led to a degradation of the environment where communities struggle to survive alongside dwindling wildlife. The high level of HIV infection places further hardship on these communities, as access to nutritious food is essential to building immune systems, whilst assisting concentration and learning.

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Establishes the Joint Committee on Urban Farming to study and make recommendations regarding the impact of urban farm cooperatives, vertical farming, and sustainable living communities in Missouri

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – In a unanimous 30-0 vote, the Missouri Senate passed Senate Substitute to House Bill 1848, the Urban Farming Bill. The Senate made a minor modification to the bill, sponsored by Representative Jason Holsman (D-Kansas City), by changing the task force to a joint interim committee of the Missouri General Assembly. Originally, the task force would have included legislators, farmers, and agriculture experts from across the state, while the version passed by the Senate will create a special, temporary A picture of a conceptual ‘Green Mall’committee of the Missouri House and Senate which will research and hear testimony regarding all facets of urban agriculture.

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From La Vida Locavore

by: Jill Richardson
La Vida Locavore
Sun May 16, 2010

Here’s the second installment on my trip to Cuba to study their urban & suburban agriculture and agroecology. I will be posting these daily for the next several days so please check in regularly to hear about the entire trip. In today’s installment, my group traveled to see a few farms & gardens in the western-most province of Cuba, Pinar del Rio.

Excerpt:

It’s difficult to separate the agricultural details of the Cuban system from the more organizational, Communist ones. Obviously nature works the same in both Cuba and the U.S. but Communism does not apply back home. This particular Organiponico provided vegetables to a maternity home and sold the rest to the community.

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Prinzessinnengärten (Princess gardens)

Nomadisch Grün (Nomadic Green) launched Prinzessinnengärten (Princess gardens) as a pilot project in the summer of 2009 at Moritzplatz in Berlin Kreuzberg, a site which had been a wasteland for over half a century. Along with friends, fans, activists and neighbours, the group cleared away rubbish, built transportable organic vegetable plots and reaped the first fruits of their labour.

Imagine a future where every available space in big cities is used to let new green spaces bloom. Green spaces that local residents create themselves and use to produce fresh and healthy food. The result would be increased biological diversity, less CO2 and a better microclimate. The spaces would promote a sense of community and the exchange of a wide variety of competencies and forms of knowledge, and would help people lead more sustainable lives. They would be a kind of miniature utopia, a place where a new style of urban living can emerge, where people can work together, relax, communicate and enjoy locally produced vegetables.

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UrbanBuds

By Design Academy Eindhoven Graduation Project

The design of this project involves the metaphor of a suitcase as a symbol of cultural background. We all are use to saying that wherever we move, we bring with us our backpack of culture, background… our so-called ‘bag of experiences’. The design takes influence from this picture and it transforms it into the product of movable, soil-filled suitcases.

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Benjamin Woods weeds between carrots and sugar peas at Mama Earth Farm, which he runs with his wife, Mary, and mother, Shirley, in Somerset, near Placerville. Benjamin got his start at an “urban agriculture center” in Santa Barbara; Mary liked organic food as a Sacramento college student. Photo by Paul Kitagaki Jr.

Cities and suburbs now supply young recruits to agriculture

By Carlos Alcalá
The Sacramento Bee
Apr. 20, 2010

Excerpt:

The refrain about young people and agriculture used to be, “How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm?”

City attractions were deemed too strong for the simple life to compete for the attention of young rural adults.

That longtime story is reversing.

Cities and suburbs now supply young recruits to agriculture, primarily to small and organic farms, and the trend is playing out in El Dorado County. Melinda Lundgren, 29, first came to agriculture as a college student at Northeastern University in Boston.

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Soil mix was hoisted on Thursday to a 40,000-square-foot roof where tomatoes, peppers and greens will soon be growing in Long Island City, Queens. Photo by Nicole Bengiveno.

Brooklyn Grange starts their farm

By Diane Cardwell
New York Times
May 13, 2010

Excerpt:

The stretch of Northern Boulevard near 36th Street in Long Island City, Queens, is about as far from bucolic as it gets: Old industrial buildings loom, traffic whizzes by, car dealerships line the street. Off in the distance, Manhattan’s skyscrapers glitter, the trains rumble, and the closest thing to a meadow is a small patch of plants the Parks Department has named Triangle 37.

But six stories up, on the roof of one of those old buildings, an ambitious farm began to take shape on Thursday. Called Brooklyn Grange — the group behind it settled on the name before they settled on their borough — it will grow tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and leafy greens amid the air-conditioning units and water tower perched on the 40,000-square foot-roof.

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The Freaky Farmstead

A stand-alone story continuing on from the acclaimed graphic novel Therefore Repent!, Sword of My Mouth moves the focus from Chicago, under siege by angels with machine guns, to the urban prairie of Detroit. Folks in the D have banded together to turn land with burned-out crackhouses into farming tracts, and seem to be on a road to self-sufficiency… until Famine rides into town.

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