Posts from — October 2010

Creating a raised bed garden on asphalt at Jessica Levine’s Wonder City Farm in Cleveland, Ohio, located at the former site of the Hofbrau Haus Restaurant and parking lot. By Cleveland Memory Project.

The potential to turn Cleveland into a national model for how a city can remake itself as a better place to live, work – and eat

The Plain Dealer Editorial Board
Cleveland.com
October 16, 2010

Grit-to-green visionaries have finally established a farm hold on Clevelanders’ civic consciousness, and it stretches from City Hall to the Cleveland Foundation.

It’s innovative. It’s transformative. It’s an economic driver full of vitamins and fiber, and a wedge to plow under old notions of decaying cities by changing blight to bloom. That’s why City Council should act to let the gardens grow and the farmers’ markets multiply.

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Touring the farm. Photo by Mark Randall. Urban Farmer founder Jessica Padron talks with Chef Baron Skorish, owner of the Blue Moon Fish Company in Lauderdale by the Sea. The chef toured the property on Powerline Road where Padron is growing various types of lettuce, peppers, tomatoes and strawberries on about 6000 square feet of a 1.15 acre industrial site. The produce is being grown hydroponically on verticle stands. More photos here.

Some municipalities are changing laws to allow farming on under-utilized lots, other small pieces of land

By Maria Herrera
Sun Sentinel
October 17, 2010

Excerpt:

Appropriately named The Urban Farmer, Jessica Padron will participate in a community agriculture program, offer workshops for children and adults and have a farm stand for the extras.

“If I won’t feed it to my daughter, I won’t sell it to you,” Padron said.

Padron’s is one of dozens of farms sprouting in urban settings and inner cities across South Florida. There’s Earth N’ Us and Roots in the City in Miami; Marando Farms in Fort Lauderdale; and the Girls U-Pick Strawberry Farm in Delray Beach. There are also smaller community gardens taking root behind backyard fences, church gardens and abandoned lots.

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Singapore students to learn how to grow rice

Tara Shyam
International Rice Research Institute
IRRI Fund Singapore
Oct. 15, 2010

Singapore students will soon have the chance to learn one of the most fundamental and important aspects of living in Asia – how to grow rice.

This activity is being organized by the Science Centre Singapore (SCS) and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). The aim is to teach young Singaporeans about rice and how it is grown, especially the environmental cost of producing a bowl of rice.

“Rice is the single most important, best known, and most loved food staple in Singapore and across Asia,” says Mr. Duncan Macintosh, executive director of the IRRI Fund Singapore.

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Stollenwörthweiher community gardens, second largest garden colony in all of Germany. See map here.

My great grandfather said Hitler could just kiss his ass

By Patty Cantrell
Regional Food Solutions
Oct. 5, 2010
Patty Cantrell founded the Michigan Land Use Institute’s entrepreneurial agriculture program in 1998.

Excerpt:

My family here in Germany, where I’m visiting this week and next, has a favorite story about my great grandfather, Karl Bader. After already fighting in World War I, he stayed on the home front during the next war, taking care of his wife and two daughters. He did the best he could with a cellar for bomb shelter and a garden for what food they could raise there in the industrial city of Mannheim on the Rhine, one of the most bombed parts of the country during WWII.

In the chaotic last weeks of the war, the Nazi government called on all the older men not yet fighting to take up arms and defend the country. The story goes that my great grandfather said Hitler could just kiss his ass, and he started planting another garden that spring instead.

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Soil remediation, sifting and trench composting at Prospect Farm.
A Farm Grows in an Empty Lot in Brooklyn

By Monique Peterson
Civil Eats
October 6th, 2010

Excerpt:

Since the inaugural groundbreaking, Prospect Farm has rooted into a community project, with a mission of producing local food as an alternative to industrial food—with diversity in both food production and membership. But even before future crop growers (and eaters) could think about what kinds of things to grow and where and how there was the issue of taking a hard look at what was underneath all that land and cleaning up what had long been buried there.

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Photos by BK Farmyards.

A severe hailstorm that wiped out 80-90% of our crops

By Nona Brooklyn
NonaBrooklyn Blog
October 14, 2010 

Excerpt:

On Monday night, as a line of powerful thunderstorms moved across Brooklyn, something that rarely happens in these parts began to unfold. Updrafts in the storm front’s giant cumulonimbus clouds pushed massive amounts of rain thousands of feet up into the atmosphere, where the raindrops began to freeze and coagulate into marble-sized balls of ice which quickly grew heavy enough to fall back onto our streets as hail. Millions of Brooklynites gawked in disbelief as close to an inch of ice pellets coated many neighborhoods in a matter of minutes, creating a fleeting (if unsettling) wintery fantasy. For most, it was all over in a matter of minutes. But for some of our urban farmers, it was a living nightmare and it was just beginning.

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The Vertical Farm, Despommier’s new book

“The time is at hand for us to learn how to safely grow our food inside environmentally controlled multistory buildings within urban centers. If we do not, then in just another 50 years, the next 3 billion people will surely go hungry, and the world will become a much more unpleasant place in which to live.” – The Vertical Farm.

Link here.

Victoriano de Costa Elementary School’s students. Farmers in their ‘fields’. Photo by David Hagerman

School gardens in the Philippines

By Robyn Eckhardt and David Hagerman
Eating Asia
2010.09.03
Wonderful website – wonderful photos. Mike

Excerpt:

Long before Alice Waters introduced the concept of students growing their own food in Berkeley kids were putting hoe to soil at schools in the Philippines. School farms in the island nation go back at least to World War II. Many were, and still are, born of necessity. Others are started not only to feed kids but to teach them life skills and engender a respect for farming.

Didn’t know about this? I’m not surprised. We wouldn’t know about the Philippines’ own ‘edible schoolyards’ either had we not stumbled upon the farm at Victoriano de Castro Elementary School in Santa Rita, Pampanga province while on assignment there in December 2007 for Saveur magazine.

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Growing Power is a sustainable urban agriculture center located in the city of Milwaukee

Co.Nx, hosted by the U.S. Department of State, provides free online multimedia events with experts on a variety of topics. Our events are live, and we invite people from around the world listen in and discuss an array of important issues in order to share their thoughts and learn from each other.

Our goal is to connect people from around the world so they may discuss an array of important topics. We invite everyone to join our free multimedia events so they may engage each other in a discussion by sharing their thoughts, opinions and ideas.

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Food growing balcony paradise © Vertical Veg by Sarah Cuttle.

Gardener Mark Ridsdill Smith

Vertical Veg is a not-for-profit enterprise that aims to inspire people to grow high yields of food in small spaces.

Can you grow £500 worth of food without a garden or an allotment? That’s the target Mark set himself on 1 May this year – all from his 9 x 6 foot north-west facing balcony and six window sills in Tufnell Park, North London. By 8 October he’d already beaten his target by £169, growing food worth £669.

“Few people realise just how much you can grow in a tiny space” says Mark. “This year my balcony and window sills have produced the equivalent of 100 bags of salad, 120 packets of herbs and 92 punnets of tomatoes – as well as runner beans, courgettes, mange tout, carrots, potatoes, blueberries and strawberries. The harvest weighs 66 kilos or 145 pounds in total – and there is still more to come.”

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Urban Agriculture Magazine no 24

RUAF team: Marielle Dubbeling, Femke Hoekstra, René van Veenhuizen

Some urban farmers seek to enhance their income by engaging more directly or more efficiently in processing and marketing. But many of these, often poor, urban farmers are not able to sufficiently invest in starting a business, often do not undertake a proper analysis of market demand and tend to choose industries that have low entry costs, such as poultry production and food preparation.

This pattern generally leads to rapid market saturation, low levels of productivity and competition that drives down returns to the business owners (Campbell, 2009). Value chain analysis and value chain development help connecting urban and periurban producers with urban markets in a more sustainable way. In this Magazine you will find examples of different forms of value chains and value chain development in urban agriculture.

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The cultural geography of gardens

Introduction by Christie, Maria Elisa
The Geographical Review
July 1, 2004

Excerpts:

Garden spaces are such a common part of people’s everyday experience that they mostly escape scholarly attention. This collection of case studies offers readers a sense of people, places, and gardens based on geographical fieldwork in parts of the world as distinct as Istanbul, Toronto, Sydney, the Peruvian Amazon, and central and northern Mexico.

Whether they are called “dooryard gardens,” “home gardens,” “house-lot gardens,” “backyards,” “community gardens,” or “market gardens,” these spaces of intimate engagement with the land present us with an opportunity to explore important aspects of biodiversity, food sustainability, civil society, the roles of gender and ethnicity in daily life, and how people’s lives are affected by migration. Participating authors ask very different research questions and employ a range of qualitative and quantitative methods, encouraging other scholars to pursue stimulating new avenues of research.

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Seeds sprouting on an old mop

You don’t need a garden to grow your own fruit and veg

Helen Babbs
The Ecologist
29th September 2010

Excerpt:

Rowena and Philip Mansfield farm fruit, herbs and fish in Anglesey, North Wales. I was drawn to this Welsh couple, who have swapped urban life for something very rural, because they’ve been growing strawberries in a drainpipe.

From sections of humble pipe, and employing less humble hydroponics, they’ve harvested 75lb of berries. They’re dismissive of my delight.

‘Nothing original about drainpipes,’ says Philip. ‘We look at all pipes and see them sprouting food. Just pass water along the tube and let the plant roots touch the liquid – they’ll take up whatever nutrients they need.’

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Desk farm: productive furniture. These prototypes aim to empower urban dwellers to produce food in their everyday lives. Designed as affordable, and easy-to-use systems inhabit under-utilized spaces within the dense city environment toward the cultivation of food.

By 2050 city dwellers are expected to number 6 billion

Saranga Nakhooda and Devin Lafo founded growingCities in 2010 upon graduating from the Master of Architecture program at Columbia University GSAPP.

GrowingCities is a research and design think-tank focused on exposing the potential that we see in urban agriculture. We strongly believe that the growing movement of local food production has the power to vastly benefit our cities – socially, environmentally, and bodily.

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Below the Manhattan Bridge. Photo by Tony Shi. See larger version and more of the artist’s work here.

Living Concrete – Carrot City Series

October 13, 2010: Planning, Food and the Neighborhood – Spotlight on Solar Decathlon and the Chase Community Development Competition
Presenters: Laura Briggs and Alison Mears
Respondents: Kubi Ackerman, Daniel Hernandez, Lara Penin
Moderator: Bill Morrish

October 20, 2010: Urban Agriculture: Perspectives from Toronto
Panel: James Kuhns, Joe Lobko, Wally Seccombe.
Respondents: Sarah Brannen, Judith LaBelle
Moderator: Joe Nasr

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Lunch New York City – Episode 1 – Urban Farming

By New York City Media
Watch this video. Mike

New York City is a huge metropolis thats urban areas greatly outnumber its rural ones. Yet for a city of over 8 million people, New Yorkers consume a staggering amount of food. Lunch NYC takes a look at the efforts and movements trying to make this concrete jungle a little more edible. This episode, Urban Farming, is hosted by Nicole Parker.

Topics include:

Farming Concrete
Community Gardens
Herb Farming
Indoor food grown hydroponiconically
Rooftop hydroponics
Urban farm produce taste test

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Therapon cancellatus or locally known as “Bulidaw”

By Leonardo V. Micua
Philippines News Agency
Oct. 8 2010

Excerpt:

DAGUPAN CITY — A rare fish called “bulidaw” may spur more success stories in fish farming in Dagupan City, Pangasinan and the rest of the country.

The Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) is looking into the potential of “bulidaw” (pigek in Mindanao) to find out if it can be cultured in brackish and/or fresh water fishponds.

Dr. Westly Rosario, chief of the Dagupan-based National Integrated Fisheries Technology Development Center (NIFTDC), revealed that when he traveled to Ilocos Sur two weeks ago to inspect some projects of NIFTDC, he accidentally saw the fish “bulidaw” and expressed his interest in culturing it.

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Pay Dirt – A resilient plot of land on the city’s south side will soon grow jobs and a whole lot more

By Maggie Ginsberg-Shutz
Madison Magazine
August 2010

Excerpt:

Imagine a self-contained, highly productive, culturally rich food and community utopia. Four acres, every square inch of it in sustainable use, right here in the city. Hoop houses arched protectively over beds of vegetables throughout the winter, edible perennials shaded by nut trees all summer long, ponds filled with farm fish whose waste is anything but, feeding the floating beds of plants above. Imagine a middle school where students, rather than sitting through six, fifty-minute classes, spend the day putting their hands on projects that integrate all subjects.

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Andrew on left.

Andrew Plotsky visits the farmers

I am looking for young farmers and urban agricultural projects to visit, to learn about and document. Using photographs, essays and videos, it is my intention to share the stories of the people who are taking initiative and making these projects happen.

I am interested in Doers. People who are passionate, whose eyes glow when talking about their trade. People whose hands have been callused and will continue to harden with the labor of growing food and growing a movement. I’m looking for people who are Movers, who understand the importance of community and personal interaction. People who are living out their dreams, who are not afraid to go for It and see what happens.

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Cartoon by T. McCracken.

Raising fowl in our yard was supposed to be a fun urban farming experiment. Then it took a turn for the absurd

By Marci Riseman
Salon
Oct 6, 2010

Excerpt:

Tallulah was listless. At least I think it was Tallulah. We had four identical Plymouth Rock chickens, and we’d only gotten around to naming two of them — which two, we weren’t quite sure.

After googling “San Francisco” and “bird hospital,” I secured a diagnostic appointment for the chicken, who lay uncharacteristically still near the water dish in the coop in our backyard.

The chickens came from my son’s first-grade classroom. At the end of the school year, they were going to be sent to the farm if no one claimed them, so we took them home.

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