Seattle’s P-Patch garden management system, which oversees 73 P-Patches distributed throughout the city, equals approximately 23 acres and serves about 2,000 households.

Urban farming entrepreneurs spread their seeds

By Ashley Deforest
Sustainable Industries
Sept. 1, 2010
Ashley Deforest is Community Relations Planner at King County Department of Transportation and a Director at Woonerfs Consulting.

Excerpt:

Skeptics are quick to note that, in the current economic climate, where many developable properties remain fallow, urban agriculture presents itself as an attractive interim use. But, as Kalin of Virtually Green notes, as the economy improves urban farms may be dislocated and left to the wayside unless the green building movement can absorb these farms and produce a similar level of food.

Kalin is putting his energy toward what he considers a more sustainable solution. In nearby Concord, Calif., a city of about 125,000 people located just 31 miles east of San Francisco, Kalin, through the Sustainable Commercial Urban Farm Incubator (SCUFI), is trying to create a commercially viable urban farm model that can be replicated elsewhere.

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Sara Mullin waters the vegetable garden she and her fellow tenants at a Quebec Street apartment building set up in the rear parking lot — despite the protestations of their landlord.
Photo by Jessica Barrett

Renters and condo dwellers also want to be city farmers

By Jessica Barrett
West Ender – WE
09/01/2010

Excerpts:

I can’t help but laugh watching Sara Mullin water her crop of just-planted winter vegetables — beets, parsnips, and kale — in the parking-lot-turned-garden behind her Quebec Street apartment building, Quebec Mansions. Garden hose in one hand, iPhone in the other, the ringletted, Western-shirt-wearing 27-year-old sprays her plants to an indie-rock soundtrack, only it isn’t a recorded accompaniment — the local band Bend Sinister is practicing in one of the building’s suites.

It’s this classic East Van hipster cliché that makes me laugh, but I have to admit: I’m envious.

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