Posts from — July 2010

Abalimi Bezekhaya – Harvest of the Hope. Cape Town (South Africa), the business “Harvest of Hope” is selling 170-200 boxes of mixed vegetables a week. Urban Producer Field Schools emphasize the identified weaknesses of production planning, quality control, and pack shed management. This project won the Impumelelo Sustainability Award for 2010

RUAF Update 15 – July 2010

Excerpt:

RUAF from Seed to Table programme

In the past months, the producers who participate in the urban agricultural businesses that are supported by RUAF in 17 cities, have started to harvest and market their first products. Please find some of the experiences described below. All groups have analysed the results from the first production cycle(s) and identified on the improvements to be made in the second production and marketing cycle, which lessons are included in the second round of Urban Producer Field School sessions. New sessions will give for example more attention to Integrated Pest Management, post-harvest technologies and negotiations with buyers.

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Sura Faraj attaches a water hose to a fire hydrant for the community garden near E. Concordia Ave. and N. Palmer St. Faraj said it will be difficult to maintain the garden without a fire hydrant permit. Photo by Benny Sieu.

For years, Milwaukee grew its community gardens on water from fire hydrants. Soon those gardens will have to go without.

By Karen Herzog and Tom Tolan
The Journal Sentinel
July 11, 2010

Excerpt:

A fire hydrant on N. Booth St. and E. Garfield Ave. has a backyard spigot affixed to one of its nozzles.

Attached to the spigot is a garden hose that stretches along a sidewalk, and then across the grass, to a cluster of 123 raised vegetable beds – tomatoes, beets, broccoli and brussels sprouts – that make up the Community Gardens at Kilbourn Park.

On Wednesday, city officials and residents who organize and tend community gardens like this one will brainstorm what to do when the city makes hundreds of gardeners give up their connections to fire hydrants they now can tap for a fee with a permit.

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Urban Agriculture: Small, Medium, Large

By Gil Doron
Architectural Design
Volume 75 Issue 3, Pages 52 – 59
Special Issue: Food + the City
Published Online: 12 Sep 2005

Abstract:

Could urban agriculture be the next design revolution? Gil Doron explains how horticulture, a subject that has until now remained remote from the concerns of contemporary architects, is ripe with potential, bringing with it many ecological, economic and social benefits for the city dweller. He also points out that at all levels, whether at the scale of window boxes, balconies or roof gardens, or on the scale of full-blown farms, vegetation and agriculture exist in most cities in the world right underneath our noses.

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David Homa and Eli Cayer stand in the permaculture garden behind the Urban Farm Fermentory in Portland.

Urban Farm Fermentory

By Avery Yale Kamila
The Portland Press Herald
July 14, 2010

Excerpt:

Even a small patch of earth in a neglected industrial area can become an oasis of food production.

That’s one of the lessons to be learned at the new Urban Farm Fermentory located on Anderson Street in Portland’s East Bayside neighborhood. Tucked in back of a single-story former warehouse and hidden from view by a jungle of Japanese knotweed, a greenhouse and a container garden grow lush and verdant with the fullness of midsummer. Here, tomatoes ripen and lavender blooms along with cilantro plants.

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Moonstar visits a terrace with a veggie garden

Moonstar Kaur Doad visits the home of Meenakshi and Dinesh, a couple who enjoy growing their own vegetables organically on their terrace, and share great tips with us in this video.

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Simple formula converts yards and vacant lots into thousands of dollars worth of food

BusinessWire
July 13, 2010

PHILADELPHIA – Figuring out how much money can be made farming on slivers of land is getting easier thanks to a “calculator” now available for free download from the SPIN-Farming website. SPIN stands for small plot intensive.

“Growing and selling fresh, safe, healthy, local food to urban neighbors is valuable grass roots economic development in locations that seem unlikely for agriculture, but can be highly efficient production units that deliver what consumers want—and need.”

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The Farm Truck from Holton Farms on one of its 22 stops in Manhattan. Photo by Holton Farms.

Holton Farms

By Lauren Shockey
New York Times
Jully 12, 2010

Excerpt:

It was only a matter of time before two of New York’s biggest culinary fads — food trucks and Greenmarket fare — united. As of May, the Farm Truck from Holton Farms has roamed the city’s streets, stocked with the Vermont farm’s pickling cucumbers, radishes and yellow squash, along with other regional products from up north, like Walpole Creamery’s raw-milk maple walnut ice cream and Vermont Coffee Company’s fair-trade, organic beans.

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Urban farmer tending his crops in Burnaby BC. See the larger image here. Photo by Michael Levenston.

Chinese market farms in the Big Bend area

Extremely productive Chinese market farms, (today’s urban agriculture ‘commercial’ farms) thrive in the City of Burnaby’s Big Bend area. You can drive along Marine Way today, through residential neighbourhoods, and stop at Sun Tai Sang Farm (4886 SE Marine Dr), Hop On Farms (5400 Marine Dr.), Wing Wong’s Nursery (4978 Marine Dr.) to buy both wonderful flowers and local vegetables. These farms and others in the area may be the longest running ‘commercial’ urban farms in North America. They are models of intensive growing that can boast more than 100 years of experience and success.

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Video accompanying article here. Spurred by a crisis in the auto industry, around a third of Detroit has fallen into ruin. Now community groups are taking over derelict lots for use as community gardens and small-holdings.

Detroit – symbol of urban decay

Detroit was once the engine of America’s automotive industry. Today it is a symbol of urban decay. But a daring bid to return the land to farming is sowing seeds of recovery – and could be a template for cities across the world

By Paul Harris – Feature Story
The Guardian – The Observer Magazine
July 11, 2010

Excerpt:

Mark Covington, 38, is one of those 21st-century pioneers, though he stumbled on his role almost by accident. Finding himself unemployed after losing his job as an environmental engineer and living back with his mother two years ago, he started tidying up an empty lot near his Georgia Street home, planting vegetables and allowing local people to harvest them for free.

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Urban Harvest Store

Posted by Annia V
BlogTO
July 10, 2010

Excerpt:

Urban Harvest was the first urban agriculture business of its kind in Toronto, long before organic became a supermarket staple, specializing in ecologically sustainable garden alternatives.

Owner Colette Murphy has been at the forefront of the grow-your-own-food movement since the late nineties, when she was inspired by the lack of heirloom (open-pollinated, non-hybridized plants) and organic options available in the market. What may have started as a grassroots mission to supply Torontonians with locally harvested plants and seeds has since evolved into one which promotes stewardship of the land through greater farming consciousness.

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Working in the Cottage Street farm. Photo by Patrick Holian, CSREES-USDA

Food Project is getting $600,000 to renovate a deserted greenhouse in Roxbury and build 400 backyard gardens

By Patrick Lee
Globe Correspondent
July 9, 2010

Excerpt:

Less than two blocks away. halfway between Dudley Square and Uphams Corner, 20 or so of Arsenault’s fellow teenage interns work on an urban farm to produce vegetables and fruits for local shelters and farmers markets. US Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius visited the site today, after she met with city officials about local public health initiatives that had been awarded federal funding in March.

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At Mahim’s Nature Park, horticulture enthusiasts can grow a variety of fruits and vegetables.

Professionals by week, they turn farmers by weekend at the city’s first community farm, where they use an experimental technique to grow a variety of fruits and vegetables

Lekha Menon
Mumbai Mirror
July 10, 2010

It’s a curious group of Mumbaikars that meets every weekend at the lush environs of Maharashtra Nature Park (MNP) near Dharavi. Armed with soil, kitchen waste, saplings and seeds, they assemble at the park at a rather early hour in the day to become farming students. And the platform for their experimentation is also unique – a 500 sq ft concrete slab over a water tank that serves as a base for growing the most sought-after vegetables and fruits available in the market.

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At work in an Alleycat Acres garden. Photo by Alleycat Acres.

Farming in the City: Joys of Growing Food

by Ann Dornfeld
This is the VOA Special English Agriculture Report
July 5, 2010

The Voice of America, which first went on the air in 1942, is a multimedia international broadcasting service funded by the U.S. Government through the Broadcasting Board of Governors. VOA broadcasts approximately 1,500 hours of news, information, educational, and cultural programming every week to an estimated worldwide audience of 125 million people.

The short article is about Seattle’s Alleycat Acres. Sean Conroe and Amber Banks are interviewed. Following the story, 42 people from around the world used their limited English to comment on the story and speak about urban agriculture.

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Symposium – September 24th & 25th, 2010

Truro and Halifax, Nova Scotia
Symposium and Discussion Forum is sponsored by the NSAC Department of Engineering, NSAC Research and Graduate Studies, AgraPoint and Dalhousie University School of Planning.

The purposes of the present symposium and discussion forum are to:

Bring together the leading scholars and published practitioners of urban agricultural systems for the first time in eastern Canada to synthesize and discuss the precedents, practices and prospects of this rapidly developing field.

Provide an opportunity for participants from municipal and provincial governments, citizen organizations, farmers’ markets, NGOs, and universities to share ideas and interact with the guest scholars during breakout sessions.

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Logo for Video Blog “The Urban Farming Guys”

Budget \ Reward: $250

What text should be included in the main part of the logo? A Graphic and Text: “The Urban Farming Guys” The Logo is for our Video Blog “The Urban Farming Guys” This video blog will be very entertaining, educational around the many topics surrounding urban farming. The logo should hit one or many of the following themes “urban” “self sustainability, “innovative farming techniques in urban environments”, “sustainability” maybe something with city-scape, or tall buildings, maybe not.

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The urban economy we’ve known fell apart, spectacularly, when Lehman Brothers fell

Alec Appelbaum
Faster Times
July 8, 2010

Excerpt:

So there’s room for a whole new kind of urban economy. And farming looks like a robust candidate.

Farmers in America today specialize like fashion houses in Milan- zebra eggplant, heirloom tomatoes, yada yada. Urban greenhouses and small plots can produce specialty crops, and urban farmers can use mass transit (and bike networks) to sell those crops locally around their neighborhoods.

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Boatanic – all green hands on deck!

By Damian O’Sullivan
Rotterdam (NL) 2010

The Boatanic (boat + botanic) is a novel concept that combines existing know-how to create an unprecedented solution for growing food within the inner city. Its aim is to reduce the environmental impact of our food which, today, still has to travel large distances before it hits our plates.

The concept is to simply convert discarded tourist boats into floating greenhouses as these are ideally suited due to their large glass windows. The idea dawned on Damian O’Sullivan as he was walking around Amsterdam and realised that the typical tourist boat actually resembled a greenhouse. ‘What if you replaced tourists with thyme or tomatoes?’ he asked himself – the Boatanic was born!

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Sisters Soleil Murray (left) and Raven Murray (R) inside their family’s Vancouver urban chicken coop. The family has four chickens for their four-person family. Photograph by: Ward Perrin, Vancouver Sun

Only seven people have applied to register their backyard flocks

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
July 8, 2010

Excerpt:

Vancouver — People are flocking to classes in backyard hens care in Vancouver, but nearly all of the new coops remain quietly covert.

Has the city’s chicken registry laid an egg? Only seven people have applied to register their backyard flocks as required under a June bylaw amendment, though many times that number have acquired laying hens and sought instruction on their care in the past couple of months.

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Jaymon McGhee, 13, plants mustard greens in a raised bed as part of the Lots of Hope gardening project. Photo by Rebecca Droke/Post-Gazette

“These are exciting times”

By Diana Nelson Jones
July 08, 2010
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Excerpt:

The urban farm — a novel, even whimsical, idea a few years ago in Pittsburgh — is now a movement so fully fledged that a neighborhood without one seems almost an anomaly.

Nationally, the movement is profuse, with seeds in the 1980s when foodies sprouted and gourmet eating went mainstream. The roots of several movements have intertwined since: urban enterprise farms, urban farms for educating children, community gardens, vacant lot greening, soil remediation of industrial landscapes, community supported agriculture, backyard chickens and bee hives, consumers who buy into livestock with farmers and grocery chains selling local produce.

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Loveness Dube outside her house in Gweru

Zimbabwe: Sex workers now farmers

By Daniel Dickinson
Africa News
1 July 2010

Loveness Dube may be new to farming, but this Zimbabwean former sex worker is committed to making a success of her new venture and never returning to selling herself to support her family.

She is one of 30 women, many of whom are also former sex workers, who are working a newly dug urban community garden in Gweru city in the Midlands province of Zimbabwe. The fenced garden, just on the outskirts of the city, measures one hundred square metres; each woman has her own plot.

‘I plan to grow some sweet potatoes and tomatoes as well as some green leaves for soups,’ said 41-year-old Loveness. ‘I didn’t know how to grow food, but after receiving training, I am now confident I can produce enough to feed myself and my family.’

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