Posts from — November 2010

Image by Stephanie Carter.

Eleven articles on urban agriculture in Vertigo – The electronic journal of Environmental Science

Vertigo, Vol 10, No. 2
Sept. 2010. In French
Articles about UA in Europe, America and Africa by authors from various backgrounds. This issue was coordinated by Eric Duchemin Institute of Environmental Sciences at UQAM (Canada), Luc Mougeot IDRC (Canada) and Joe Nasr Ryerson College (Canada).

Louiza Boukharaeva et Marcel Marloie
L’apport du jardinage urbain de Russie à la théorisation de l’agriculture urbaine

Manon Boulianne, Geneviève Olivier-d’Avignon et Vincent Galarneau
Les retombées sociales du jardinage communautaire et collectif dans la conurbation de Québec

Emmanuel Pezrès
La permaculture au sein de l’agriculture urbaine : Du jardin au projet de société

Christian Peltier
Agriculture et projet urbain durables en périurbain : la nécessité d’un réel changement de paradigme

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100% sustainable urban mushroom farm

By Sarah Henry
Berkeleyside
Nov 12th, 2010

Excerpt:

There’s so much buzz around the fledgling food business launched last year by two former University of California at Berkeley students, that you’d think they were pumping out premium honey.

BTTR Ventures, run by Hass School of Business grads Nikhil Arora and Alejandro (Alex) Velez, has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and on the BBC.

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Lillooet Park Community Garden, North Vancouver. Link here.

Staff have been instructed to prepare an urban agriculture strategy as city looks for alternative uses for ‘wasted space’

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
Nov 12, 2010

Excerpt:

VANCOUVER — Mayor Darrell Mussatto wants to convert North Vancouver’s lawns to urban farmland.

“We don’t need a lot of expensive technical solutions like rooftop gardens. What about front yards and back yards?” Mussatto said. “That’s a huge land base, and how many of those yards are dedicated to turf?

“Twenty per cent of the people live on 80 per cent of the land, and most of their yards are lawn,” he said. “It can easily be changed over to fruits and vegetables.”

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Photo by Michael Levenston.

A fruit tree planting ceremony, led by the Vancouver Park Board with local schools and the Renfrew Collingwood Food Security Institute as partners, took place in East Vancouver on November 8, 2010

Falaise Park
November 10, 2010
2 pm – 3 pm

“Twenty-five fruit trees—apple, cherry, plum, pear and peach—will provide an opportunity for the development of community stewardship programs,” says Vancouver Park Board Chair Aaron Jasper. “Students enrolled at Vancouver Christian School, Renfrew Elementary School and Windermere High School will help plant the trees, which will become an educational tool for ecology programming.”

The project supports the City of Vancouver’s Greenest City Action Team’s recommendation to plant 150,000 trees by 2020, as well as the Park Board’s commitment to sustainable practices in urban agriculture.

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Container for gardening on the roof, an antique enameled cast-iron bathtub. Photo by Cathy Erway.

Cathy grows lunch from the roof

By Cathy Erway
Lunch at Six Point

Excerpt:

Hi, I’m Cathy. I wrote the blog Not Eating Out in New York for four years. Two of them were spent not eating out as a strict rule within the city where I live in. I wrote a memoir about those experiences, called The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove, and host a weekly podcast called Let’s Eat In on Heritage Radio Network. I still enjoy cooking more than eating out, and have gone on to try growing my own food, too.

These are the stories, the characters, and the food of my life now, making lunch at Sixpoint Craft Ales. I cook healthy, family-style meals for the staff that brews the beer here, and friends. We grow a lot of it on the roof — vegetables, fruits, herbs and chickens who lay eggs. For a small company, it provides enough to make some kind of lunch throughout the harvest months, and it’s a fun challenge figuring out what that is.

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Parla Food is written by Katie Parla, a travel writer, food historian, and sommelier, based in and around Italy.
Nov. 11, 2010

Excerpt:

For a city that is so blessed with fertile soil, so rife with green spaces, and so proud of its local produce, there are relatively few plots of land dedicated to plant cultivation in town. And, while there are a handful of produce gardens in the city, there isn’t a strong, consolidated movement towards establishing urban gardens for public use. Instead, there are several organizations that have been successful in launching small-scale projects, most of which are aimed at youth education.

Read the complete article here.

Prop 84 Funding for City Slicker Farms Brings Land Security to West Oakland’s Urban Agriculture Movement

Press Release
November 10, 2010

Oakland, CA (November 10, 2010)—On Monday, November 8, 2010 City Slicker Farms was awarded $4,000,000 for a “West Oakland Park and Urban Farm” project. The funds come from Proposition 84, a California bond initiative approved in 2006, which reserves 5.4 billion dollars in bonds for projects involving water quality and access, park improvements, and natural resources and park preservation. The funds will be used to purchase a vacant lot in West Oakland at 28th and Peralta Streets and construct a farm and park there. At 1.4 acres, this will be City Slicker Farms’ largest farm site; greatly increasing their ability to grow and distribute food for the West Oakland community.

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Roma: primo Parco a Orti Urbani

È stato inaugurato a Roma il primo Parco a Orti Urbani, realizzato dal Dipartimento Tutela Ambientale e del Verde Urbano di concerto con il XVI Municipio, su parte di un’area di proprietà comunale che si affaccia su via della Consolata.

di Lisa Zillio
alternativasostenibile
22 Luglio 2010

Use Google Translation here.

Excerpt:

L’area, delle dimensioni di circa 18.000 mq, presenta al proprio interno 21 particelle destinate a orti urbani, di circa 200 mq ciascuna, 10 casette in legno per il ricovero attrezzi, una costruzione che alloggia tre locali, bagni e due locali tecnici, un’area parcheggio, viali interni, due fontanelle pubbliche, panchine e cestini per i rifiuti.

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The gift of urban agriculture is the work

By Many Howard
The Atlantic
Nov 11, 2010
Manny Howard is the author of My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm.

Excerpt:

Located behind our home in Flatbush, Brooklyn, The Farm was equal parts fever dream and forced march. During the course of my unintentionally ambitious experiment I turned a neglected 800-square-foot patch of barren clay into a verdant wonderland of vegetables, fruit, and livestock. Live on what you produced, and that alone (with the exception of salt, pepper, and coffee beans) for as long as possible, that’s all I hoped to achieve.

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Leslie Halleck’s North Haven Farms is one of fifty companies interviewed for the Wall Street Journal best-seller: Spend Shift: How the Post-Crisis Values Revolution is Changing the Way We Buy, Sell and Live. Photo from book.

East Dallas makeover in new book

Spend Shift: How the Post-Crisis Values Revolution Is Changing the Way We Buy, Sell, and Live
Hardcover published October 2010
By John Gerzema, Michael D’Antonio

Excerpt:

If you want to see how the Great Recession has reshaped consumerism you can start with the both the chicken and the egg. You find them in hundreds if not thousands of backyards, where do-it-yourselfers have built coops, installed hens, and begun harvesting their own eggs. At most of these homes you’ll also see the modern version of the old Victory Gardens: small plots that produce crops all year long. This shift from consumption to production in households across America is part of a more self-reliant lifestyle.

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Philadelphia 2035 Comprehensive Plan

Agriculture in PHILADELPHIA2035 is a viable economic driver with small, community-oriented farms. Philadelphians in all neighborhoods will have easy access to fresh food.

Agriculture Idea: Rooftop Greenhouses

An interesting idea of utilizing existing infrastructure is to create greenhouses on the rooftops of large Center City buildings. These greenhouses could incubate seedlings and grow vegetables throughout the year.

Agriculture is a community amenity

The common thread among participants’ ideas for agriculture is that it be community-based. Participants see community gardens or neighborhood-based, small-scale farms as the best way to take advantage of small parcels of vacant land and ensure that agriculture has direct connection with residents. Most participants see agriculture as a venue for community involvement and beautification.

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Mike Repkin envisions a series of rooftop farms in Chicago, like this one that he planted and maintains. Photo by Robert Thornton.

50 feet from farm to market and much of that distance is vertical

By Shanti Menon
One Earth
November 9, 2010

Excerpt:

Repkin started his farm in 2006 with Urban Habitat Chicago, a nonprofit group he helped found. The plants and soil sit atop a green roof system made of multiple layers of filtering and insulating materials. Repkin uses no pesticides or synthetic fertilizers and chooses each plant carefully to benefit the rooftop ecosystem. The cover crop of white clover, for example, produces a fibrous root system that defends against invaders and fixes nitrogen to help fertilize the soil. He’s got native prairie plants to bring in beneficial insects. Herbs like basil fetch a good price at the market — a profit incentive for urban farmers and building owners.

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Kevin Liu, 16, and Angela Ho, 15, collect compost from neighbourhood around Windermere Secondary in Vancouver.
Photograph by: Glenn Baglo, PNG

Windermere secondary students collecting compost from local schools, restaurants

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
Nov. 9, 2010

Excerpt:

During the school year, most of the produce is used by the school cafeteria. When school lets out the students who work on the garden through their summer vacation take the produce home or donate it to neighbourhood house food programs.

“When everything seems to come out of a factory, it’s nice that we can grow food ourselves and it’s really simple,” said Lau, who tries to bring the message home by talking to his mother about how to make Earthfriendly food choices. “She mostly worries about price, so it’s a bit of struggle.”

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Skip garden under construction.

Video link here. See video showing young people building skip gardens and then delivering harvested food to the Guardian newspaper kitchen.

A Movable Feast in London: King’s Cross Skip Garden

By Jennifer Cockrall-King
Foodgirl.ca
Oct 18, 2010

Excerpt:

Bert explained that this site just celebrated its 1 year (plus 2 months) anniversary, and they brought over 400 school kids through the site. Bert and his colleagues at Global Generation, the London-based charity that runs this skip garden plus other sustainable urban agriculture sites on the 67-acre redevelopment area, use the site to educate kids and adults about sustainable food growing and waste reduction. Because the various sites will be redeveloped at some point in the years leading up to 2020, the idea of the skip garden came about as a way to create totally mobile food growing spaces. When a site needs to be vacated, the skips can simply be transported to a new site. The trees and plants in the skips will eventually be moved to rooftop food gardens as new buildings are completed.

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Kippen House chicken coops

By Emily Knudsen
Urban Farm Hub
September 1st, 2010

Excerpt:

Traci, founder and owner of Kippen House, started designing a chicken coop for her own family to use while she was living in Portland; but a few life events landed her in Seattle and building chicken coops for a living. Here’s the lowdown from Traci:

I was laid off from my architecture job in Portland. Shortly thereafter my husband’s job was relocated to Seattle. We packed up, shipped out, and I began my job search in one of the worst economic climates, particularly for architects. The unfulfilled desire to design and build was really starting to frustrate me.

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Chef David Garcelon up on the roof amongst the hotels’ 22 growing beds. Reportedly, the fresh-picked herbs from the hotel roof are used on approximately 6000 meals a day served at Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York hotel during the summer months.

Radio Royal York – Episode 7: The Rooftop Garden

In this episode, host Melanie Coates visits the Fairmont Royal York’s rooftop garden to talk with gardener Marjorie Mason as she supervises the planting of this year’s herb and vegetable garden. Marjorie knows her gardening, having grown-up on a market garden farm near Peterborough, Ontario. She shares a number of excellent tips on how to create and maintain a healthy and productive urban garden.

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David Kahn founded Edendale Farm five years ago on a sloping half acre in the middle of a Silver Lake neighborhood. He wanted to show that a slower pace is possible, even in a metropolis like Los Angeles. Photo Credit: Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

Urban farm really grows on visitors and volunteers

By Kate Linthicum
Los Angeles Times
November 07, 2010

Excerpt:

If there are any doubts about the viability of Edendale Farm — which Kahn built, improbably, on a sloping half acre smack in the middle of a swanky Silver Lake neighborhood — the mealtime menus should quell them.

The workers were chewing in silence Thursday, gazing happily out at the shady yard, when they noticed that something seemed off. The landscape was moving — and clucking.

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Liam Robinson (right) of Watermark Gardens presents the award to Michael Levenston (left) of City Farmer.

City Farmer – Garden Communicator of the Year Award

This award is shared by all City Farmer’s staff who “communicate” from our Compost Demonstration Garden in Vancouver. Sharon Slack, Maria Keating, Lauren Welch, Farhat Khan, Sheryl Webster, Lynsey Dobbie, Arzeena Hamir, Preet Ball, Michelle Drewitz, and Sean Reynolds. And our long-time directors Risa Smith, Bob Woodsworth, Susan Gregory and Tom Mommsen.

From the awards banquet, November 5, 2010:

Garden Communicator of the Year Award

Each year, BCLNA recognizes exemplary service to the association by its members, as well as some deserving non-members, whose actions have strengthened the horticulture industry.

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A Technical Advisory Committee concluded its 3-day sitting and short-listed 45 submissions from the 387 received from 90 countries

Zawya.com
04 November 2010

An independent jury of international experts has announced the 12 winners of the Dubai International Award for Best Practices to Improve the Living Environment (DIABP) at its eighth cycle. Dubai will host a special ceremony to distribute prizes at the end of this year.

This came at a news conference held by the Municipality on Thursday, attended by Eng. Hussain Nasser Lootah, Director General of Dubai Municipality, Mr. Obaid Salem Al Shamsi, Assistant Director General for International Affairs and Partnership Sector and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of DIABP, Dr. Diana Lee-Smith, Chairperson of the International Jury of the award and Ms. Wandia Seaforth, Chief of Best Practices Programme, UN-HABITAT.

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Including urban agriculture in a city’s plan has multiple benefits

By Jennifer Lem
Push Food Forward
11/05/2010

Excerpt:

City planners are recognizing the importance of integrating food into a city’s design. Last week, the Ontario Professional Planners Institute hosted a two-day symposium on healthy communities and food. I had the opportunity to facilitate a workshop on urban agriculture and city planning, presented by author Lorraine Johnson and Stewart Chisholm and Rebekka Hutton of Evergreen.

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