Posts from — June 2010

Uniting a community in Northeast Baltimore through gardening

Hamilton Crop Circle is seeking seed money to help our various projects grow!

Some money will be allocated to developing worm composting systems other funds will be allocated to building greenhouses for year round produce production. Our projects will become sustainable economic engines thanks to start up funds.

Local Composting Program:
Hamilton Crop Circle works with area restaurants to collect compostable materials at no charge, reducing waste, while creating natural fertilizer.

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Musical about how an urban lawn becomes a food farm

Book, Music and Lyrics by Jean Elliott Manning
Directed by Andy Cuk
August 18 and 19
Montreal, Quebec

In the year 2020, the sprawling city of Megapolis is a tangle of freeways, off-ramps, and traffic jams. Over the traffic and the noise, a mysterious voice proclaims a brand new spring when a daisy and a weed fall in love: a musical about how an urban lawn becomes a food farm.

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Granata Farms

By Dorothée and Mark
Organic Nation TV
June 4, 2010

Excerpt:

While producing a video about SAME Café, the pay-what-you-can restaurant on Denver’s Northwest Side, co-owner Libby Birky suggested that we check out Granata Farms, which provides a lot of the fresh, organic vegetables served at SAME Café. So while we were in Denver, we met up with Elaine Granata at her one-acre plot on Clarkson Street.

Elaine told us that she started the urban farm, which is made up of three city plots in different locations, after she lost her own farm in the country. Remarkably, she runs the farm by herself, growing a diverse mix of greens, herbs, tomatoes, beans and squash. She sells her produce to multiple restaurants in Denver as well as her fourteen-member CSA.

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Bishops’s Executive Chef Andrea Carlson talks with Maria about fava beans

Maria loves to cook with the ingredients she grows in our Compost Demonstration Garden. What a treat to be able to chat about different recipes with the Executive Chef of one of Vancouver’s famous restaurants.

Andrea Carlson is Executive Chef at Bishops Restaurant in Vancouver. The restaurant is recognized for its delicious food and its efforts to support organic, local farming.

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Cardoons at City Farmer’s garden

For years we’ve grown cardoon as a beautiful ornamental with purple flowers. But many people have told us that it is used in Italian cooking. Visitor, Andrea Carlson, Executive Chef at Bishops Restaurant in Vancouver, shares with us how she uses the plant in the kitchen.

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Chris Hoyt, left, and L’Tryce Slade weed a row of beans in a community garden planted in Calera. Slade, who owns an environmental land use firm, came up with the idea of the urban garden; Hoyt’s firm, Dunn Real Estate, planted the garden on the property, which it owns. Photo by Frank Couch.

Concept of a garden on unused developer’s property

By Roy L. Williams
The Birmingham News
June 5, 2010

Excerpt:

Birmingham — Part of a 40-acre commercial site in Calera that went unsold because of the economic downturn has been turned into something the owner hopes will benefit the community — a vegetable and fruit garden.

Dunn Real Estate, the development arm of Birmingham’s Dunn Companies and a corporate sibling of Dunn Construction, last year hired Slade Land Use, Environmental and Transportation Planning to inspect the undeveloped site on Alabama 304 just off U.S. 31.

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Discord sprouts from community garden in St. Thomas, Ontario

A bid to open the first such garden in St. Thomas has led to a clash with a neighbour — and rants on the Internet

By Kate Dubinski
The London Free Pree
May 26, 2010

Excerpt:

It started as a plan to plant beets, potatoes and carrots. But all that’s grown in a community garden in St. Thomas has been resentment and animosity.

A zoning infraction, a YouTube video and a death threat are also part of the plot, as a neighbourly project wilts before it gets roots.

“We have a book store owner, an organic gardener, a horticulturalist — we’re not violent people. We’re a group of volunteers who want to grow a garden,” said garden organizer Brigitte Cosens, who says she got the idea to start a community garden in October after attending a how-to workshop in London.

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Farms produce more than food for consumers and money for farmers

By Tom Philpott
Grist
3 Jun 2010

Excerpt:

Over on Earth Island Journal, Sena Christian has an excellent, rigorously reported article about the tough economics of urban farming. She focuses on some of the more famous city farms of the Bay Area, where EIJ is based — City Slicker Farms, People’s Grocery — but she also discusses projects like Milwaukee’s Growing Power. And she finishes the piece with a farm I’d never heard of before: Greensgrow, in Philadelphia.

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Fairmount Community Garden and New Public Market

Written by Kevin Buchanan
Fortworthology
June 4, 2010

Excerpt:

Fort Worth is a bit behind the times on the urban agriculture movement, but the city is starting to embrace it at last.  Above is the first official city-approved community garden in the city of Fort Worth – the Fairmount Community Garden, located at 5th & Maddox across from Fairmount Park in the Fairmount neighborhood in the Near Southside.

Built on what were once vacant lots repossessed by the city, the Fairmount Community Garden was put together by a group of neighborhood residents wishing to promote local food sources in Fort Worth.

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Photo by Photographer Anne Hamersky. City Slicker Farms. They collaboratively build backyard gardens and distribute fresh produce for free throughout their cash-strapped neighborhood.

Her forthcoming book (mid-November 2010), “Farm Together Now” with co-authors Amy Franceschini and Daniel Tucker (Chronicle Books)

My portrait and documentary photographs have appeared in LIFE, Time, People, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, Yoga Journal and National Geographic Traveler, among many others. My forthcoming book, “Farm Together Now” with co-authors Amy Franceschini and Daniel Tucker (Chronicle Books) illustrates how ordinary people across the United States are creating a more sustainable, cleaner and safer food system, one farm at a time.

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By bringing agriculture into the city, these farms conserve energy normally used to transport food. Rendering courtesy of Jeremy Edmiston, SYSTEMarchitects)

Urban Space Station

By Rob Goodier
Popular Mechanics
June 3, 2010

Excerpt:

Natalie Jeremijenko, an aerospace engineer and environmental health professor at New York University, came up with a rooftop design to solve these common problems for urban farming. Her fixtures may be more economical than other urban farm concepts because they take up real estate that otherwise goes unused, and unlike other urban farm designs, they can pack in the plants, because everything, from the integrated systems to their bubble shape, is a slave to efficiency.

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Photo by People’s Grocery.

A Growing Concern

By Sena Christian
Earth Island Journal
Summer 2010

Excerpt:

Sean Hagan shoves a digging fork into the soil and pries out a bunch of carrots. He ties the bunch together, then stops and looks across the crops to another farmer calling for his attention. She holds a gnarly root in her hand.

“Do we have something against large turnips around here?” asks Sonya Ciavola.

“I have something against turnips in general,” Hagan says. He’s not fond of their taste.

On a gloomy February morning, the blond, 29-year-old Hagan trudges through muddy row crops growing on six acres of agricultural land operated by Soil Born Farms Urban Agriculture and Education Project, a nonprofit farm in Sacramento, California. Soil Born has two other acres for pasture and plans to plant a three-acre fruit tree orchard this fall.

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Garden offers nourishment for body, spirit

By Justin Williams
FOX6
June 1, 2010

WITI-TV, MILWAUKEE – There’s a bit of an urban renaissance going on in Milwaukee’s Washington Heights neighborhood. Neighbors are coming together to till the soil as they create a new community garden.

Neighbors chose the space for the garden last November; a lot where an abandoned home once stood. 16 plots are now being installed along with a common planting area.

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Gardeners can sell whole, uncut, fresh food and horticultural products grown at their homes from May to October

By Lynn Horsley
The Kansas City Star
June 2, 2010

Excerpt:

A Kansas City Council committee today approved new rules designed to promote urban farming — but it has some gardeners worried that it’s a step backward rather than forward.

The Planning and Zoning Committee endorsed a measure that would allow urban farmers to sell their produce at their homes, something that’s not currently allowed. But the proposal also says row crops would not be permitted in front yards of occupied homes — a restriction that goes beyond the current code.

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On Day 2, Richmond High School was equally blessed with the construction of 6 wooden planter beds, the planting of six fruit trees, and the raising of a native plant garden. Each wooden bed spans 32 feet in length, 4 feet across, and nearly 2 feet deep!

Job Opportunity, teacher – Environmental Science II: Urban Agriculture and Food Systems

Kennedy High School (KHS) in Richmond, California is looking for a Biology (or possibly Chemistry) teacher who will also teach 1 section of Environmental Science II: Urban Agriculture and Food Systems. Candidates need a teaching credential in biology or chemistry. This is an exciting opportunity for an energetic teacher to help build a cutting-edge urban agriculture program.

The Urban Ag and Food Systems class is a new course developed and supported by a local non-profit—Urban Tilth. Urban Tilth helped Kennedy High students and staff put in a 4,000 square foot market garden and a 1,500 square foot edible forest.

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Speakers announced – local and national experts join keynote speaker Will Allen

Engaged Community Offshoots, Inc. (ECO), organizers of Sowing Seeds Here and Now! A Chesapeake Urban Farming Summit, announced workshop topics and speakers for the day-long event to be held on June 18, 2010 at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Prince George’s County, Maryland.

In addition to keynote speaker Will Allen of Growing Power (Milwaukee, WI), confirmed speakers include:

• Kaifa Anderson-Hall – Washington Youth Garden
• Larry Bangs – USDA Center for Faith-based & Neighborhood Partnerships (Washington, DC)
• Amanda Behrens – Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (Baltimore, MD)
• Vinnie Bevivino – Engaged Community Offshoots (Edmonston, MD)
• Chris Bolden-Newsome – Foundations for a Brighter Future (Philadelphia, PA)
• Tyler Brown – Real Food Farm (Baltimore, MD)
• Tanikka Cunningham – Healthy Solutions (Washington, DC)
• Matthew Kochka – ReVision Urban Farm (Boston, MA)

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King Yang Farm

Youth Karatica: Harvesting Earth Farm in Beecher, a community outside of Flint, Michigan

Videos produced by faculty, students, and summer camp participants at the Department for Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University

Each week in the summer, about 50 high school and college students feed the hens, tend the greenhouse and sift the new compost at Youth Karatica: Harvesting Earth Farm in Beecher, a community outside of Flint. At the same time, farm owners Master Jacky and Dora King, black belts in karate, teach these young workers self-defense with rakes, hoes and shovels. For many of these young students, this is their first job. For the Kings, the farm sows the seeds of a sustainable agriculture that may save Flint.

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Curious about a visitor, Beets, the pig, sticks his head through the wire of his pen. He is owned by Nancy Jauregui, a student in the agricultural program at Buena Park High School. Photo by Mark Rightmire, The Orange County Registrar

4 acre farm on campus

By Michael Mello
The Orange County Registrar
May 30, 2010

Excerpt:

BUENA PARK – In one hidden corner of Buena Park High School, the sounds of students’ busy chatter give way to the cadence of clucking chickens and bleating sheep.

There’s an entire 4 ½-acre farm on the campus, complete with animal pens, a greenhouse, vegetable plots, fruit trees, and even the requisite tractor. The farm is one of the school’s best-kept secrets, though it has been quietly recognized with a national award and spotlighted in prominent agricultural magazines.

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The Fabulous Beekman Boys

Planet Green’s The Fabulous Beekman Boys will make its Discovery on Demand series premiere on Friday, June 9, before the network premiere on Wednesday, June 16, at 9 p.m.. Subsequent episodes premiere on-demand on Tuesdays and on the network on Wednesdays at 9 p.m.

By Valerie Milano
Hollywood Today
May 26th, 2010

In June, the Discovery channel’s Planet Green is introducing a new series based on a urbanite gay couple in New York who ‘accidentally’ became farmers. Trying to build a sustainable farm while managing a relationship makes for some funny and emotional episodes. Author Josh Kilmer-Purcell and Brent Ridge, a doctor and former executive with Martha Stewart, run the Beekman Farm.

The idea blossomed from an unlikely place, and Ridge explained, “We started by growing vegetables on our rooftop in New York City, and that inspired us so much that we started looking for what we thought was going to be a weekend place in the country and grew the size of our garden. Now we grow 110 different varieties of heirloom vegetables. What we hope is that by doing a show like this, we will inspire more people to do that, to see how easy it is.”

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Turner Tech juniors Aleyda Trana, 17, left; and Ashli Jay, 17, second from right, get help from Magda Martinez to push/pull Ace, Ashli’s steer, off a transport trailer. It was a practice run for a trip to Tampa for the State Fair in February. Photo by Marsha Halper – Miami Herald staff.

At William H. Turner Technical Arts High School in North Miami-Dade, urban students learn the science and joy of farming.

By Robert Samuels
Miami Herald
May 31, 2010

Excerpt:

Twenty years ago, before urban farming became a bohemian buzzword, Parton was commissioned to nurture students at Turner Tech who had no agricultural background.

The trick, he has found, is to offer them a vision of taking control of their lives and their surroundings. He tells them the truth — that the Bureau of Labor Statistics ranks agricultural jobs as some of the fastest growing in the nation and that the government gives out scholarships to minorities interested in the field. Then it grows bigger than a hobby. More like an addiction.

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