Posts from — May 2010

For a few weekends this spring, perch-lovers lined up to buy whole fish for $5 each. It takes three or four perch to get a pound of fillet. More fish should be big enough to sell by late summer. Photo by Jon Lowenstein. See more with the article.

Perch, Loved in Milwaukee but Decimated in Lake Michigan, Find New Life in an Old Factory; On the Side: Fresh Produce

By Joe Barrett
Wall Street Journal
May 14, 2010

Excerpt:

MILWAUKEE—Josh Fraundorf remembers when yellow perch were so plentiful in Lake Michigan that people pulled out all they could eat with just a bamboo pole and some worms.

Now, they have to come to places like this old factory south of downtown.

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Free Farm

By Chris Carlsson
Nowtopia
May 13, 2010

From a meeting named Circle The Food Wagons: Local Food Economies with Hayes Valley Farm, Little City Gardens, The Free Farm, and Far West Fungi from The Heart of the City Farmers’ Market.

Excerpt:

Next up was the Free Farm, represented by Lauren Anderson and Case Garver, which is a new garden farm on an empty sand lot at Eddy and Gough where an old Lutheran Church burned down in 1995. After fifteen years of lying fallow and gathering garbage and debris, the collaborative effort of several non-profit organizations (including Lauren’s Produce to the People), community groups and individuals got permission from the Lutheran Church to begin an organic farm there.

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In stores now

Deep Impact
Urban farms and public green spaces are a breath of fresh air for cities of all sizes. by Cherie Langlois

Don’t Worry, Grow Happy
Ecopsychotherapy: It’s the new happy pill of choice for city dwellers.
by Joy Perrino Choquette

When Life Gives You Lemons, Give Back
Get inspired by Anna Chan’s urban fruit-foraging and produce-collecting mission. by Lisa Kivirist

Barnyard in Your Backyard
When keeping livestock, even the smallest parcel of land needs careful management. by Sharon Biggs Waller

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By Marta Teegan
Rodale Books (May 11, 2010)
192 pages

Marta Teegan is a trained master gardener and chef. She worked in politics and the nonprofit sector before pursuing her lifelong love of gardening and cooking. She lives in Los Angeles.

Swap the annuals for edibles, creating attractive beds and containers that both beautify the yard and provide a bounty of fresh produce

As a trained chef-turned-professional kitchen garden designer, Marta Teegen knows what a difference freshly harvested vegetables can make to a meal—and how easy it is to ensure seasonal vegetables are always available when you need them.

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A Japanese company debuts their newest bra that doubles as a rice growing kit, complete with water hoses, seedlings, gloves and a wearable pot. TODAYshow.com’s Dara Brown reports.

Grow rice in bra

By Rosemary Black
Daily News
May 13th 2010

You might call it the wondrous bra. Japanese urban farmers who wear the gimmicky new undergarment can grow their own rice in recyclable plastic pots that double as the cups, according to Reuters.

The pots can be filled with soil and rice seedlings, and the wearer waters the rice with a hose that doubles as a belt that loops around the waist.

Made by the Japanese lingerie maker, Triumph, the bra debuted as interest in food safety and the environment is growing in Japan. Farming is getting popular among Japanese city dwellers, and rice, a staple in Japan, is a natural crop to considering growing.

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Canon Canada’s President and CEO Kevin Ogawa presents Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson with a $60,000 cheque for Vancouver’s Community Urban Agriculture Fund at the opening of Canon’s BC headquarters in downtown Vancouver.

$60,000 donation to Vancouver’s Community Urban Agriculture Fund celebrates the company’s expanded presence in the city

VANCOUVER, May 11 /CNW Telbec/ – Canon Canada announced today it will be opening a new Vancouver Business Solutions office during a gala luncheon for dignitaries, employees and partners held at the Fairmont Hotel.

The invite-only event featured 2010 Olympic gold medalist Maëlle Ricker and a performance by Grammy and Juno Award-winning artist Sarah McLachlan. Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson was also on hand to accept a donation of $60,000 from Canon Canada to Vancouver’s new Community Urban Agriculture Fund, established to support community-based gardening projects across the city.

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Trends based on 1.4 million blog posts from 13 countries

Global Garden Report 2010 by Husqvarna and Gardena

What is gardening about today and in the future? What do gardeners do, think about, live for? What is at at the heart of modern gardening around the globe?

From the 2010 report, individualism in the garden is on the rise, replacing conformity. Gone is the obsession with keeping up with the neighbours’ … it’s now about expressing yourself using your outdoor space, encouraged by on-line friends.

See what the report says about urban farming and kitchen garden. Read on.

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Truck Farm! a wicked delicate film and food project

The Farm

When Fayette Plumb gave his grandson the keys to the old pickup, he wasn’t expecting the half-ton to drive back home––as a farm. But last spring, using green-roof technology, lightweight soil and heirloom seeds, filmmakers Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis transformed granddad’s ’86 Dodge into a traveling 20-member CSA. They planted between the wheel wells with arugula and tomatoes, parked the truck on a Brooklyn street, and waited for sun and rain to work their charms. When the first sprouts came up, Truck Farm was born. Subscribers received deliveries of produce, arriving via the mobile farm itself.

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Planter boxes on St. Paul’s roof looking over the West End of Vancouver. Photo by Michael Levenston.

Planned garden to open in June organizers hope.

The goal of the Intercultural Community Gardens Project is to make Vancouver more welcoming and inclusive for everyone, including immigrants. Everyone can grow healthy, organic food together with neighbours from all over the world!

Who is in charge?

The project is managed by YMCA Connections in partnership with the West End Residents Association (WERA) and the Gordon Neighbourhood House. This project is made possible through funding from the Government of Canada and the Province of British Columbia.

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Baltimore City high school seniors working during the summer at the Great Kids Farm.

Great Kids Farm Yields Great Taste

Fall 2009
The BCF Edge
The Baltimore Community Foundation Newsletter

Excerpt:

When Geraci first viewed the overgrown, abandoned, city-owned farm behind Catonsville’s strip malls and fast-food joints he saw only promise. He had had success in New Hampshire as a co-founder of the farm-to-school fresh food movement, and he envisioned the land as it could be, full of life that children would help create.

In short order, Great Kids Farm became a place of bustling activity. A donated herd of goats cleared the land for vegetable crops and an orchard. Fallen trees in a wooded area were inoculated to produce shiitake, chanterelles, and oyster mushrooms. Two of three existing greenhouses swung into full production using techniques from water-based hydroponics to worm-enriched he vermiculture.

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Illustration by Thomas Pitilli

What happens when idealists, entrepreneurs and bureaucrats all latch onto the same trend?

by Isaiah Thompson
Philadelphia City Paper
Apr 28, 2010

Excerpt:

A few weeks ago, at a community meeting in North Philadelphia, I witnessed a scene that seemed somehow symbolic, prophetic, even. The meeting — an energized rally by the Eastern North Philadelphia Coalition, a group trying to acquire vacant land for a neighborhood-managed land trust — had just ended, and community members were filing out.

At the door was a young, bearded white guy, passing out seeds.

“Free seeds!” he shouted jubilantly. “Take them home, plant them, have better food, save money!”

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Vision to reuse decaying inner-city land for urban farms, gardens takes shape; advocates see potential for self-sustaining industry

By Kathy Aimes Carr
Crain’s Cleveland Business
May 10, 2010

Picture this: Cleveland’s landscape reinvigorated with life in the form of urban farms and market gardens. It may be a long way off, but the idealistic vision for the city slowly is taking root as farmers and other entrepreneurs reuse vacant land and parking lots for urban agricultural initiatives.

Some of the projects are modest in scope, but advocates say that this industry, though still in its infancy, has the potential to become over the next couple of decades a viable sector with locally based urban growers, sellers and distributors cultivating a self-sustaining region.

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Honnington Farm, Bourne Mill, Vauxhall Lane, Tonbridge, KENT

The New Allotment Company Ltd

Ecologist
5th January, 2010

Excerpt:

Private enterprise will increase the number of available allotment plots, but they will cost much more than their council subsidised cousins. A private company has started renting out its first allotment sites as it bids to make 10,000 plots of land available to the public by 2012.

The New Allotment Company Ltd opened its first site of 300 allotments on the outskirts of Tonbridge, Kent, this week. It expects to open more sites in the Midlands and South East by Summer 2010.

Individual plots of approximately 1000 square foot will cost £150 a year to rent. Tenants will be offered a 3-year contract with the option to leave after the first year.

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Saving allotment land at Fortis Green, London

Renowned artist and illustrator (and local!) Sarah McMenemy has generously donated her painting ‘Allotment Summer’ to our campaign (to buy the allotment land at Fortis Green, London), from which we have created a limited edition of one hundred, A3 size, fine art prints, each one numbered and signed by Sarah. These are now on sale and, thanks to funding from Haringey Council to pay for the printing, the full £100 from the sale of each print goes towards our £30,000 target.

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Blending the tromboncino squash on the bike blender.

It Ain’t Easy Being Green

By Anais
May 4, 2010
From Path to Freedom

Excerpt:

A few months back, we got a call out of the blue from the Food Network – they wanted to drop off two chefs on the urban homestead to make a meal from what was growing out in our “back forty (feet)” and prepare the vittles (no possums were harmed) without all the modern new fangled gizmos and gadgets. Instead harvesting what they needed and using the limited and home canned ingredients we had in the kitchen and preparing and cooking using little or no appliances, hybrid solar oven, bike blender and more.

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Volunteers and caretakers get to harvest the fruits of the labor at PPC’s Lomita garden-share.

An essay on local Los Angeles agencies and their dependency on food donations

May 6, 2010
Pedal Patch Community (PPC) is a community supported, social enterprise that advocate for innovative, community-based solutions to hunger and poverty in the LA region.

Excerpt:

In a world where there are more overweight human beings than there are malnourished, it is easy to recognize that a lack of food is hardly the real issue; it is a more balanced redistribution that is needed. Americans are in the eye of a recession; very few remain unscathed. Urban Agriculturalist and gardening extraordinaire Jason Boarde has witnessed first hand how getting the food from the, “farm to the plate to the charity is more than twice as expensive as farm to plate.”

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The rooftop of 211 East Georgia in Chinatown.

Rooftop farm troubles

Mike Klassen
in City Focus
May 6, 2010

Excerpt:

A cover story in the Vancouver Courier a few weeks back by respected writer Sandra Thomas announced a new “rooftop farm” that would make its home atop 211 East Georgia street. The project was reputedly the brainchild of a number of Downtown Eastside groups such as United We Can and B.O.B. (aka Building Opportunities with Business). It would take the top floor of a parkade owned by two local business people and grow food and create “green jobs” for the neighbourhood.

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Brian describes how the Red Dragon works.

The Red Dragon has surprised us!

Six months ago, we sceptics reluctantly agreed to test out a plug-in composter from Korea at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden. We’d already had a bad experience with one electric bin and were quite sure that this one would act badly too.

We put in the required mix of sawdust and microbes supplied with the bin, added some water and plugged the attractive machine into the wall. Then periodically we put in food waste brought from home.

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Maria Keating, City Farmer’s Bug Lady, points out all the different Mason Bee houses at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden.

Orchard Mason Bee

Excerpt from a fact sheet by the Oregon Master Gardener™ Association.

Overview

The orchard mason bee, Osmia lignaria, is an effective early pollinator native to the Western US and Canada. It emerges in the spring, before honeybees. As a pollinator, it is far more efficient than the honeybee by transferring more pollen and visiting more types and numbers of flowers.

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The Think&EatGreen@School Project: Community University Collaborative Project on Food Security in Vancouver Schools and Institutional Adaptations to Climate Change

An interdisciplinary research team from the Faculty of Land and Food Systems and the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia has led the formation of a food and environment related research project recently awarded a $1 million Strategic Research Grant for Community-University Research Alliance for Canadian Environmental Issues from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC). This project involving Vancouver schools hopes to enrich school students’ experiences connecting food, health and environment and to assist schools to have a lighter impact on the environment.

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