Posts from — November 2010

4000 seed balls were rolled in two hours along this production line at Urban Abundance.

Urban Abundance

By Dean Baker
The Oregonian
November 05, 2010

Excerpt:

They kick-started their program this fall by creating a computerized database of fruit and nut trees in the city.

From trees at the 20 sites that registered on their website, Urban Abundance volunteers harvested 1,500 pounds of prunes and apples that might otherwise have been wasted, and donated them to One Life Food Pantry in Vancouver.

But, Neth said, that was just a start for the program.

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Anton Crawford harvests Swiss chard in the garden in front of the school. Photo by Keith Beaty – Toronto Star.

An edible education

By Jennifer Bain
Food Editor
Toronto Star
Nov 3, 2010

Excerpt:

This is the cutting edge of edible education. What Bendale has is one step beyond a simple school garden but not quite an urban farm. It’s believed to be Canada’s first school-based market garden. It proves the educational value of food and all the ways it can be worked into the curriculum. And, if all goes as planned, Bendale will serve as a model for schools across the country.

“There are so many schools that could be turning their lawns into fields of food,” says garden co-ordinator Ian Hepburn-Aley, a community food facilitator with FoodShare.

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Karen Washington poses for a portrait at La Finca del Sur, a community farm, Thursday, Oct. 28, 2010 in the Bronx borough of New York. Photo by Associated Press.

School Brings Farming To Big Apple

By The Associated Press
NPR
Nov 5, 2010

Excerpt:

One of Farm School’s instructors will be Karen Washington, a longtime urban farmer and a founder of La Finca del Sur, which sells its produce at a farmer’s market.

Washington said she hopes Farm School will serve as a prototype for other urban centers by providing “the incentive to say, you know what? We can do the same thing.”

On a crisp fall afternoon, Washington stopped by La Finca on her way to pick up chickens for a community garden in another Bronx neighborhood. It is legal to keep hens in New York City but not roosters — too noisy. Beekeeping was legalized this year.

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Broadacre City. Frank Lloyd Wright, 1950-1955.

Today’s agrarian urbanism

Essay by Charles Waldweim
Via Design Observer, Nov 4, 2010
“Notes Toward a History of Agrarian Urbanism” is excerpted from Bracket 1: On Farming, edited by Mason White and Maya Przybylski, and just published by Actar.

Excerpt:

While much has been written about the implications of urban farming for agricultural production, public policy, and food as an element of culture, little has been written about the potentially profound implications for the shape and structure of the city itself. To date the enthusiasm for slow and local food has been based, on the one hand, on the assumption that abandoned or underused brownfield sites could be remediated for their productive potential; and on the other it has been based on the trend toward conserving greenfield sites on city peripheries — on dedicating valuable ecological zones to food production and to limiting suburban sprawl.

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Urban Agriculture Special Issue

Issue 2 will include the following:

A tribute to the life and work of Jac Smit, the “father of urban agriculture,” contributed by his colleagues and edited by Joe Nasr and Anni Bellows

“Assessing the Local Food Supply Capacity of Detroit, Michigan,” by Kathryn Colasanti and Michael Hamm

“Could Toronto Provide 10% of its Fresh Vegetable Requirements from Within its Own Boundaries? Matching Consumption Requirements with Growing Spaces,” by Rod MacRae and colleagues

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Quezon City Vice Mayor Joy Belmonte.

Joy in Urban Farming

By Chitto A. Chavez
Manilla Bulletin Publishing
November 2, 2010

MANILA, Philippines – In a bid to address the malnutrition woes among schoolchildren, the Quezon City (QC) government is aggressively promoting urban farming and gardening in the city’s public schools.

According to Quezon City Mayor Herbert Bautista, the school-based urban farming project is being pushed to minimize if not totally eradicate child hunger among public schoolchildren.

Medical experts in the past have correlated malnutrition as one of the major causes on the child’s sub-par academic performance level in school. This prompted the city government to come up with measures to reduce if not altogether resolve the problem of malnutrition.

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FARM:shop – an urban agriculture store

By A Battisby
Dalston People
October 31, 2010

Something & Son have created FARM:shop, a concept that puts farming at the centre of the city.

After three months of hard work, volunteers have transformed a disused shop on Dalston Lane, into an indoor farm.

The farm, on 20 Dalston Lane, consists of growing rooms, fish tanks for tilapia and giant freshwater prawns, a chicken coop on the roof and green houses growing tomatoes.

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The Farm Team: Urban Sustainable Opens in Adams Morgan

By Matt Bevilacqua
Washington City Paper
Nov. 2, 2010

Excerpt:

Occupying a small white storefront on 18th Street and Columbia Road NW, the agricultural supply store boasting several shelves full of seeds, organic nutrients, and other products for home-growing opened its doors last Wednesday.

Manager and cofounder Matt Doherty said he wants his store to not only provide the materials needed to grow healthier food than what’s available at Safeway a few doors down, but also to engage the city and spread knowledge about how individuals can lead more sustainable lifestyles.

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5 Dirty Backyard Chicken Secrets

By Julie Anderson
The Stir
November 3, 2010

Excerpt:

Keeping chickens in your backyard for fresh eggs and perfectly roasted Sunday dinners seems like such a sweet “Little House on the Prairie” idea, but are you cut out for the hardcore realities of urban farming?

My kids have been begging for backyard chickens ever since we saw some at the county fair this summer, so I went to have tea with a friend who has her own little flock, and some of the things she said made me afraid.

Here are five things that may happen in your very own yard if you turn it into an urban chicken farm:

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Published November 2010

By Harriet Fasenfest
Tin House Books

In an era when go local, organic food, and sustainability are on the tip of everyone’s tongues, Harriet Fasenfest’s A Householder’s Guide to the Universe takes up the banner of progressive homemaking and urban farming as a way to confront the political, social, and environmental issues facing our world today. Offering grass-roots practical advice on how to shop, garden, run a household, preserve and cook food, and more, Fasenfest also discusses the philosophy of householding.

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Children during an urban harvest in London this year. Photo by Karen Liebreich, Abundance London.

Growing army of guerrilla fruit pickers

By Sara Calian
Wall Street Journal
Oct. 29, 2010

Excerpt:

My friend Sarah Cruz called me at 9 a.m. on a recent Saturday and said, “We found a hidden orchard on an abandoned property, can you grab my apple-picking poles at my house in your car and I’ll meet you there on my bike at noon.” I put my 3-year-old and 5-year-old daughters in the car, called my husband and told him to collect my 7-year-old son after football practice and bike to the apple-picking spot in a leafy part of West London. It was impossible to see the hidden orchard from the road, so Karen Liebreich, Ms. Cruz’s picking partner, scrambled from the abandoned plot of bramble and rubble in her long, rubber boots to guide us to the five trees bursting with ripe Bramley eating and cooking apples.

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Learning to Garden in Haiti. Photo by walkingwithward2009.

13,000 Haitian families currently work with 23 agronomists in the “ti jaden òganik” (Creole for “small organic garden”)

By Jane Regan and Marcela Valente
IPS
Oct. 22, 2010

Excerpt:

BUENOS AIRES/PORT AU PRINCE, Oct 22, 2010 (IPS) – Neither hurricanes nor floods, nor the devastating January earthquake or Haiti’s chronic political instability managed to wipe out the organic gardening initiative underway in that country since 2005. The seed was planted in Argentina twenty years ago.

Some 13,000 Haitian families (90,000 people in all) currently work with 23 agronomists in the “ti jaden òganik” (Creole for “small organic garden”) project, growing their own food. The goal is to engage one million people in this form of production.

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Image from Growing Media Group presentation.

Growing Media Group 2011 Garden Trends

By Suzi McCoy
Growing Media Group
2010

Urban Farming and CSA’s

In step with the move to reinvigorate communities with gardens, urban farming and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA’s) are springing up. Urban farming “micro-farms” are converting small spaces in blighted areas into thriving farms that produce fresh produce for inner city communities.

CSA’s provide fresh produce and companionship with full waiting lists. Even garden centers are getting into the act and offering community gardens to learn about varieties and “how-to” maintain plants and share experiences. According to the Slow Food Movement, farmer’s markets and CSA’s are up a whopping 60 percent.

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Official unveiling of the Ranch on Nov. 12–13 with two days of special programs

Symposium: Bringing Home the Ranch
Nov 12, Friday

Bringing Home the Ranch will combine talks from experts covering a range of perspectives with a student poster session and garden tour. This one-day symposium will bring together academics and professionals interested in the future of urban agriculture and introduce the Huntington’s experimental urban agricultural station, the Ranch. Gary Paul Nabhan, world-renowned ethnobotanist, ecologist, writer, and grower of heritage food crops, will be the keynote speaker.

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The “Chef’s Farm,” a small vegetable plant that can be installed in, for example, a restaurant and can produce 20,000 heads of lettuce per year.

The “Chef’s Farm

By Chikara Nakayama, Nikkei Monozukuri
Tech-on
Jun 14, 2010

Excerpt:

Dentsu Facility Management Inc will start taking orders for the “Chef’s Farm,” a small vegetable plant that can be installed in, for example, a restaurant, in June 2010.

The vegetable plant, which will be released in the summer of 2010 in Japan, was exhibited at International Food Machinery & Technology Exhibition 2010 (FOOMA JAPAN 2010), which took place from June 8 to 11, 2010, in Tokyo. It is priced at about ¥8.3 million (approx US$90,552). Dentsu Facility Management claims that it is possible to harvest 60 heads of lettuce per day (20,000 per year) and recoup the investment in about five years.

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Factory-farmed chickens roam free at Bushwick City Farm. Photo Lucy Butcher.

A whole network of farms in Bushwick and East New York

By Lucy Butcher
Bushwickbk.com
November 1st, 2010

Excerpt:

The trend of community gardens, back yard farms and farmers’ markets in Bushwick continues to grow in popularity, and while most of these have a commercial component, one local project considers itself outside the market. And Bushwick City Farm, built on a narrow abandoned lot under the J train tracks amidst bodegas, nail salons, and dollar stores, is flourishing. Freshly planted flowers are in full bloom, produce is sprouting from the vegetable bed constructed of recycled wood, and former factory farm chickens (and a couple of cats) roam freely between a spacious new chicken coop and a large composter.

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Boy Thinning Beets to Give Room for Development, Fairview Garden School, Yonkers, N.Y. 1906

November 3, 2010 – Creative Action and Everyday Urban Agriculture

Panel: Laura DeLind, Eve Mosher, Tattfoo Tan, Domenic Vitiello
Moderator: Jean Gardner

Urban agriculture in the United States, as panelist Domenic Vitiello has written, takes the form of everyday urbanism, “largely disconnected from the world of professional design.” The role of creative action in urban agriculture practices is explored by an urban historian, anthropologist, architect, and two artists. What does it mean for individuals in communities engaged in creative practice to reconnect to their food, neighbors, and environment through urban agriculture? What is the significance of the resulting physical engagement with place that growing food requires?

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