Sarah Nixon, whose floral service is called, appropriately, My Luscious Backyard. Photo by Aaron Harris.

Local bouquets offer rarer, pesticide-free blooms

By Katie Hewitt
Globe and Mail
Aug. 27, 2010

Excerpts:

In Vancouver, Megan Branson of Olla Urban Flower Project maintains at least three backyard flower farms, from which she and partner Dionne Finch source dahlias, rudbeckia, giant sunflowers and even winter blooms such as Christmas roses. Constantly on the lookout for beautiful material, they also sometimes knock on doors to acquire blooms, approaching gardeners with particularly fecund inner-city plots.

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Photo by Annie Novak

Each bird lays a distinctive egg

By Annie Novak
The Atlantic
Aug. 31, 2010
Annie Novak is the founder and director of Growing Chefs, a field-to-fork food education program; the children’s gardening program coordinator for the New York Botanical Gardens; and co-founder of Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn.

Excerpt:

The eggs from our hens are given to the Rooftop Farm’s community supported agriculture (CSA) shareholders. Each bird lays a distinctive egg. The most fancy bird (the Polish) lays the most innocuous white egg, while plain white-feathered Francis lays eggs of a very pale blue. Tiny Beebe lays petite and perfect eggs with a distinctly narrow top. Lila’s are medium-sized and off-white. Wren and Pecked, regular layers both, produce brown and white eggs of a more substantial size. Between the six hens, we get about four eggs on any given day. Right before the eggs comes out, they crow and fuss, vying with the buzz of biplanes circling in to land on the stretch of water south of the United Nations.

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Sustaining an Urban Fruit Gleaning Program. Photo by City Fruit.

So far this year, we’ve harvested 5,775 lbs. of fruit

By James
City Fruit
August 31, 2010

Excerpt:

One of the main reasons we started City Fruit was to develop ways  to become more financially sustainable, rather than depend on an ever-shrinking pool of grant money for funding.

As part of that, we’re experimenting with selling a small portion of the fruit we harvest – with a goal of selling no more than 20% of the usable fruit we harvest. So far this year, we’ve harvested 5,775 lbs. of fruit and have sold 448 lbs., so about 8%.

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The Farm at Long Island Shelter.

Mayor says: “Bawk, bawk, bawk.”

Excerpt:

The hens came at the mayor’s suggestion to the 2 1/2 acre Serving Ourselves Farm, which brimmed yesterday with collard greens, plump pumpkins, acorn squash, and tomatoes engorged after a summer of sunshine. The labor that seeds, waters, weeds, and harvests the organic farm comes entirely from the residents of the Long Island homeless shelter and young people who had trouble with the law but are in a city program to help right their lives.

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Gate by metal sculptor, Davide Pan.

Photo by Naomi Clement

Internationally acclaimed local metal sculptor, Davide Pan designed our gate. Pan welded together old gardening tools and bits of rusty metal to create the piece that locks down by night and lifts up above the garden by day. Creaking chains and “rocks in bondage” counterweights give medieval flair to the old-fashioned pulley system.

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Los Angeles rental of a goat herd to clear weeds and other unwanted growth from Angels Knoll in Bunker Hill. Photo by Curt Gibbs.

Agribiz apologists ascribe these trends to a plague they call “agrarian nostalgia”

By Kerry Trueman
Grist
30 August, 2010

Excerpt:

The first link in this brave new food chain? Land tenure, zoning issues, and other regulatory hurdles that city folks have to contend with in order to grow food to feed themselves or sell to others. They’re also working on how to collect and compost food waste instead of shipping it to the landfill; how to increase the percentage of locally sourced ingredients in schools, hospitals, prisons, and other publicly run institutions; how to facilitate local food production and ease distribution bottlenecks; and how to support all kinds of urban agriculture, from school and community gardens to rooftop farms, aquaculture, chicken keeping, and bee keeping.

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Students from the Bancroft Elementary School weigh vegetables during the White House Kitchen Garden harvest party, on the South Lawn of the White House. Official White House Photo by Samantha Appleton.

Peoples’ Garden School Pilot Program

USDA Office of Communications
08/25/2010

WASHINGTON, Aug. 25, 2010 – Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced that USDA will establish a Peoples’ Garden School Pilot Program to develop and run community gardens at eligible high-poverty schools; teach students involved in the gardens about agriculture production practices, diet, and nutrition; and evaluate the learning outcomes. This $1 million pilot program is authorized under the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act. A cooperative agreement will be awarded to implement a program in up to five States. To be eligible as project sites, schools must have 50 percent or more students qualifying for free or reduced-price school meals.

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