Posts from — October 2010

Diagram of a country community center. Including school, church, town hall and industrial plant. Circular 84 Office of Experimental Stations. From Country Life and the Country School, 1912, via Daily Yonder.

Local Food Boom Should Yield Rural Fruit

By Timothy Collins
Daily Yonder
Aug 22, 2010

Excerpt:

The heart of Duany’s proposal is that a dependable local food supply, raised by human hands with a minimum of fossil energy, is not only doable — it may be necessary: Duany calls it, “circling the wagons” against ecological disasters brewing around the globe.

As a rural observer who has seen far too many slums – both rural and urban – I don’t want to pooh-pooh Duany’s idea. Putting aside for now its ironic, perhaps dismissive, overtones for rural America, the idea has tremendous merit, whether we’re sliding toward ecological perdition or not. In fact, many cities and towns have died, and any idea that can help stem the waste resulting from those deaths deserves a hearing, especially in smaller rural towns, the original walkable communities.

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The garden today. Emily Wilkinson and Torsten Hermann played a key role in transforming the vacant lot into a community garden. Gazette photo: Bryanna Bradley

I am just trying to give something back
 
By Michelle Lalonde
Montreal Gazette
Aug. 10 2010

Excerpt:

During the past three summers, residents of a certain block of Delinelle St. in St. Henri have watched, first with skepticism, then wonder, as Torsten Hermann, Emily Wilkinson and friends have transformed a garbage-strewn vacant lot into a pretty little park and garden full of flowering plants, edible herbs, berries and vegetables.

The lot doesn’t belong to Hermann or Wilkinson, or any of the other so-called “guerrilla gardeners” who decided to get together and tend to this abandoned urban space. But the lot has been vacant for about 18 years, by Hermann’s calculation, ever since a fire burned down two row houses at the spot.

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