Posts from — March 2011

Doris Duke (1912 – 1993) was an American heiress, horticulturalist, art collector, and philanthropist.

New Land Grant for Urban Living

By Melanie Grayce West
Wall Street Journal
March 15, 2011

Excerpt:

Developing a plan for the future of urban farms in New York City is the focus of the Five Borough Farm project through the New York nonprofit Design Trust for Public Space.

The organization was recently awarded $90,000 from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to work with organizations throughout the city to develop a map, quantify the many benefits of urban agriculture and develop a set of recommendations on how the city should support urban agriculture activity.

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The compelling economics of Green Building and Urban Argriculture: Interview with James Kalin from The Socio Capitalist on Vimeo.

Watch SCUFI urban agriculture interview starting at minute 18:40

Sustainable Commercial Urban Farm Incubator (SCUFI) Program

By Luke Miller Callahan
The Socio Capitalist
03/07/2011

The Sustainable Commercial Urban Farm Incubator (SCUFI) program trains aspiring commercial urban farmers, assists with startup financing, helps secure land and provides technical and business support to urban farmers. SCUFI program sites are getting underway across the country. Two of the first are in Concord and Hayward, California.

Sustainable commercial urban farms can be profitably operated in cities. A commercial urban farm team can make a good annual income from farming a single parcel, or a collection of neighborhood parcels, that may total less than an acre.

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For Gloria Putnam and Steve Rudicel, goats, eggs and produce make a winning enterprise. Photo by Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times.

Neighbors swap produce, honey, eggs and much more in Altadena, where the urban homesteading movement has produced much more than sustenance.

By Veronique de Turenne,
Los Angeles Times
March 10, 2011

Excerpt:

Sometimes, the peach on a backyard tree is just a peach, a sweet, home-grown bonus. In certain circles of Altadena, though, that peach is a gateway fruit.

One tree becomes three, which becomes an orchard. The quest for organic fertilizer leads to a flock of chickens, which beget a garden. Before you know it, there’s a herd of goats out front, heritage turkeys in back, a beehive, a rabbit hutch and a guard llama.

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Hedahl raises two types of domesticated ducks, khaki Campbells and Indian runners, in her backyard in Seattle’s Wedgwood neighborhood. The colorful duck eggs sell for $6 a dozen out of her home.Photo by Erika Schultz/Seattle Times

Around Puget Sound, urban farming has extended to various small-plot livestock, with lots of city chickens, and now ducks for eggs and goats for milk.

By Tan Vinh
Seattle Times
Mar 9, 2011

Excerpt:

In the name of urban farming, there were a lot of ways BJ Hedahl could have transformed her spacious, fenced backyard in Seattle’s Wedgwood neighborhood: putting in an organic garden, a beehive or a chicken coop maybe.

But no. Hedahl wanted ducks. Or rather duck eggs: richer, denser, with yolks bigger than your chicken variety, she said.

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Ron Berezan has been gardening organically and exploring new possibilities for growing food in urban areas for over 25 years. Enhance PG brought Ron to Prince George to talk about growing food in urban areas, and to hold a workshop about transforming your yard.

Visit The Urban Farmer website here.

Photo by McLaughlin Grows Urban Farm.

Our goal is that the garden will be self-sustaining and a job creation engine

By Megan Hart
The Muskegon Chronicle
March 12, 2011

Excerpt:

For a few investors, putting money into urban agriculture isn’t a way to make some greenbacks, but to make the community a little greener – and get a few fresh salads for themselves in the process.

The investment program, called community-supported agriculture, allows people to buy a share in the McLaughlin Grows Urban Farm at the beginning of the growing season, and receive a grocery bag of produce weekly as “dividends.” The cost is $300 for the spring-summer or the fall-winter season, or $550 for the whole year. It’s a relatively new idea in Michigan, but has been practiced elsewhere.

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Farmscape created kid-accessible planters with drip irrigation, helped to choose seeds, planted them, then came every week to weed, water and harvest plants from the planters and the hanging pouches.

By Emily Green
LA Times
March 11, 2011

Excerpt:

Farmscape services aren’t cheap. Depending on the size of the garden, installation of beds, irrigation, soil and the planting can run into the thousands of dollars. Follow-up visits from Farmscape staff run about $200 a week. So when the president of the parent-teacher organization of San Jose-Edison Academy, a West Covina charter school, got a grant from a local business, she worked to stretch the dollars.

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Al Renner, 70, is a familiar name in Southern California community garden circles, legendary for his success in working the system to get more funds and land available for gardens throughout the county. As executive director of the Los Angeles Community Garden Council, he was intimately involved with the effort to heal the trauma from the 2006 destruction of the South Central Farm. He has started three community gardens: one in Silver Lake, one in Echo Park and, most recently, one in Solano Canyon. Photo by Ann Summa.

Link to 23 photos of gardeners and stories about the gardens.

Urban Farming and the Future of Food Production: Curtis Stone Interview from The Socio Capitalist on Vimeo.

Interview with Curtis Stone – approximately 60 minutes

By Luke Miller Callahan
The Socio Capitalist
Mar 8, 2011

Excerpt:

Curtis Stone is an Urban Farmer, more specifically he is the owner of Green City Acres, a Sustainable Commercial Urban Farm, in Kelowna British Columbia. He farms ¾ of an acre as a full time job and is showing others that eating locally, organically, and fossil-fuel free is not only fun, but an integral part of our future.

Link to article here.

“We’re getting some really smart people to help us as we move our urban agriculture system to the next level”

By Karen Herzog
Journal Sentinel
March 9, 2011

Excerpt:

IBM will announce Wednesday that Milwaukee is among 24 cities worldwide to receive a Smarter Cities Challenge grant, which will give the city access to top IBM experts and technology to potentially expand local, cutting-edge urban agriculture efforts around the globe.

The IBM Smarter Cities Challenge grants, valued at about $400,000 apiece, are aimed at helping cities improve one aspect of city life. Issues addressed by winning cities include health care, education, safety, social services, transportation, communications, sustainability, budget management, energy and utilities.

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The Complete Guide to Year-Round Organic Gardening in the Pacific Northwest

By Linda Gilkeson
New Society Publishers
April, 2011

Are you itching to start your own garden or grow more in the one you have, but feel that gardening is too challenging or time-consuming for your busy schedule? Would you like to enjoy fresh, home-grown produce every month of the year?

Backyard Bounty is like having your own Master Gardener to consult every step of the way. This encyclopedic reference demystifies gardening, bringing it back to the down-to-earth, environmentally practical activity that anyone can enjoy. Learn about:

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See videos of the 15 community gardens

From garden to table, community gardens build healthy communities one veggie at a time. As part of our ongoing commitment to community gardens, DeLoach Vineyards will award a total of $20,000 to five gardens working to improve the community they serve. The five gardens to receive the most votes will be announced in the October/November 2011 issue of Organic Gardening

Here are the gardens in the running. See short video clips about each garden.

Alemany Farm, San Francisco, California
Alemany Farm is a 4.5 acre organic community garden in San Francisco which attracts hundreds of volunteers and provides them with the opportunity to experience food production first hand.

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Telus building new $750-million headquarters

The landmark development reinforces TELUS’ commitment to the City of Vancouver, and will make a significant contribution to the city’s goal of becoming the greenest city in the world. Once complete, TELUS’ new headquarters will be unique in North America, featuring 10,000 square feet of green roofs providing organic produce for local restaurants, two elevated roof forests, British Columbia artwork, LED lighting on the western façade projecting programmable coloured images on to fritted glass, and media walls where cultural events such as symphony concerts can be broadcast to the public.

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Photo by Edwin Remsberg, USDA/CSREES.

It is possible to operate a market garden of less than an acre with little more than a shovel, rake, hoe and garden hose

By Janet Bachmann
NCAT Agriculture Specialist
Published 2009

Excerpt:

Market gardening is the commercial production of vegetables, fruits, flowers and other plants on a scale larger than a home garden, yet small enough that many of the principles of gardening are applicable. The goal, as with all farm enterprises, is to run the operation as a business and to make a profit. Market gardening is often oriented toward local markets, although production for shipping to more distant markets is also possible.

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Food from the Sky has planted a vegetable garden on a shop roof in north London – and its founder wants other shops around the country to do the same

By Laura Barnett
The Guardian
9 March 2011

Excerpt:

Of all the things you might reasonably expect to be doing on a blustery March day, standing on the roof of a supermarket and dragging a rake through a bag of decaying vegetables is probably not one of them. I am on top of Thornton’s Budgens supermarket in Crouch End, north London, which volunteers have transformed from a flat expanse of concrete into a flourishing potted garden and vegetable patch.

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By Elizabeth McCorquodale
Black Dog Publishing
Spring 2011
96 pages, 257 colour and b/w ills
Kids in the Wild Garden follows on from the acclaimed Kids in the Garden, the new edition of which also releases in February 2011. Kids in the Garden is the perfect companion to Kids in the Wild Garden.

Haul your kids out of the post-Christmas slump in front of the TV and begin the New Year with fun in the fresh air with this brilliantly accessible guide to the great outdoors. Kids in the Wild Garden, following on from Kids in the Garden, is a fresh and playful book brimming with colourful ideas, experiments, projects, recipes and games for children of all ages.

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Inoculating willow trunks with oyster mushroom spores. Photo by Debra Solomon. Dutch food blogger. See culiblog.org here.

Urban Agriculture in Holland

By Jan Eelco Jansma en Esther Veen
Wagewningen University
04/03/2011

Excerpt:

On the day of the provincial elections, I visited the cities of Assen and Groningen. Groningen, designated the Capital of Taste, has been active for a number of years in connecting the urban green areas with the Stadjers (the inhabitants of Groningen). In various locations within the city, fruit trees have been planted in cooperation with residents, a flock of sheep keeps the verges and grassy strips neatly trimmed, the catering facilities within the municipal council serve local produce, and entrepreneurs in the surrounding area take on the challenge of selling their wares in the city. Following in the footsteps of Groningen, Assen is also keen to create space for forms of urban agriculture.

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Everything from urban fish farming to alternate energy

Who are we….. We are the urban experiment…

We are the seed that died and went into the ground. We are about 20 families who have purposefully uprooted from out of their comfortable suburban homes and moved into one of the worst neighborhoods in Kansas City. We bought homes within a 5 block radius of each other and we put down our stake for the sake of the youth and the poor.

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Quartierbewohner bei einer Pflanzaktion für den temporären Garten Kalkbreite in Zürich Wiedikon. (Bild: Sabine Wolf)

Junge Städter entdecken ihre grünen Daumen – mitten in Zürich spriesst Gemüse auf temporären Freiflächen

By Irène Troxler
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
7. März 2011,

Excerpt:

Sie pflanzen Gemüse zwischen Trams und Autokolonnen und entwickeln Fischfarmen für Hausdächer. Die Bewegung der Urban Farmers hat Zürich erreicht. Dabei geht es um nachhaltige Ernährung und um eine kreative Verwandlung der Stadt.

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Though most of the family gardens are of 20 sq. meters to 500 sq. meters, products from such gardens contribute significantly to the food supply of the family.

By: Sushil Thapa
Email: ag.sushilthapa@gmail.com
March, 2011

In Nepal, urban and peri-urban agriculture (PUA) has been practiced since time immemorial and is a traditional way of life. The rate of migration from villages to the urban areas has increased significantly in the past decade especially, after the beginning of the armed conflict in the country. Hence, urban population has increased dramatically in all the urban areas. Rough estimates show that more than half of Nepal’s population will be living in urban and peri-urban areas by the year 2020. With increasing population, traditional agricultural systems in urban and peri-urban areas are changing and agriculture in and around the urban areas is becoming more market oriented compared to subsistence oriented rural agriculture.

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