At a garden off Lowell Street, Charlie Radoslovich weeds around lettuce plants. Credit Abby Jordan.

A two-part series looking at the backyard farming concept of Rad Urban Farmers.

By Abby Jordan
Lexington Patch
August 10, 2010

Excerpt:

Radoslovich’s “Rad Urban Farmers” brings the idea of local food right into the backyards or onto the lawns of 15 families, including 11 in Lexington and four in Arlington. In total, Radoslovich farms a quarter of an acre spread throughout the communities.

“It’s a lot of work, and I’m loving it,” Radoslovich said.

Rad Urban Farmers, known also as RUF, looks to change lawns into gardens, and reconnect people with the land and their food. Each family gets a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) portion of the yield from all of the gardens, while the rest Radoslovich totes by bike to the Lexington Farmers’ Market on Tuesdays.

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Caitlyn Galloway weeding a test plot on Wednesday at the urban farm in the Outer Mission that she leases with her partner, Brooke Budner. Photo by Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen

“It’s actually easier in Berkeley to have a pot collective than to have a vegetable collective”

Excerpt:

AnMarie Rodgers, a San Francisco city planner and the daughter of an Iowa pig farmer, is circulating a draft zoning change — one that has not been made public — that she hopes will be introduced in mid-September. It has the support of Mayor Gavin Newsom, who last year ordered the city to increase healthy and sustainable food.

“There are beginning to be relatively small-scale gardening operations that are running up against the constraints of the current code,” Ms. Rodgers wrote in a recent memo to city officials. “This is an issue that cities around the country are grappling with, and many big cities are revising or considering revising their zoning codes to support at least small-scale urban agriculture.”

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