Posts from — June 2011

Created by artist Jodie Mayne

Local artist Jodie Mayne created this sandwich board for our Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden.

Jodi Mayne is a Vancouver based artist who grew up in the beautiful Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island. At the age of twenty she moved to Vancouver to study visual art at The Emily Carr University of Art and Design. During her schooling Jodi was mainly focused on Printmaking techniques and developed a real love for line and shape, which is now evident in her painting and drawing. Living and growing up on the West Coast of British Columbia has given Jodi an appreciation for the rich surroundings she is so fortunate to be a part of everyday.

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The piglet dispersal program is an ongoing activity of the city’s agriculture program that allows poor families to care for and breed the hogs.

By Lydia C. Pendon
SunStar
June 15, 2011

ILOILO City Mayor Jed Patrick Mabilog will lead Thursday the awarding of 61 piglets to selected beneficiaries in urban poor and farming communities.

He will be joined by Iloilo City Congressman Jerry P. Treñas, City Vice Mayor Jose Espinosa III and Dr. Sylvia S. Bermillo of the City Agriculturist Office (CAO) in awarding the piglets to the recipients.

City Agriculturist Officer (CAO) in-charge Geraldine Hautea said despite Iloilo’s status as a highly urbanized city in the Visayas, there still exist farming communities in 22 barangays in the city with concentration at the Jaro and Mandurriao districts.

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The Environmental Youth Alliance Society has 30 homeowners willing to uproot their turf to plant small-scale wheat fields. The group aims to educate schools about the origin and history of grain. Illustration Vancouver Sun.

Group seeks funding for ‘ Lawns to Loaves’ pilot project

By Jeff Lee
The Vancouver Sun
15 Jun 2011

Excerpt:

From chicken coops in backyards and vegetable plots at city hall, Vancouver is branching out into experimental wheat plots in place of lawns.

The idea of replacing turf with a waving patch of yellow grain is among a list of ideas the Vision Vancouver-led council is considering for this year’s Greenest City Neighbourhood grants allocations.

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Photo of Casey O’Leary and Lori Bevan of Earthly Delights Farm in Boise, Idaho.

Boise may see changes as soon as this summer or early fall.

By Brady Moore
Boise Weekly
Jun 14, 2011

Excerpt:

Urban farms, community gardens and produce stands may finally have a place to call home within the Boise City Code.

The Urban Agriculture Committee will present preliminary recommendations to Boise’s City Council this afternoon. The committee was formed in anticipation of Boise’s new comprehensive plan to create standards relating to agriculture within city limits, including farms, livestock, beekeeping and poultry. Currently, Boise City Code does not identify these, making regulation more challenging.

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The Urban Adamah farm will be located on a parcel of land at 1050 Parker Street in Berkeley, CA.

The Jewish Sustainability Corps – educational center in Berkeley, California

Urban Adamah is a three-month residential leadership-training program for young adults that integrates urban organic farming, social justice work and progressive Jewish living and learning. Fellows operate an organic farm and educational center in Berkeley, CA, while interning with community-based social justice organizations addressing issues at the intersection of poverty, food security and environmental stewardship. The Urban Adamah curriculum is designed to equip fellows with the tools to become agents of positive change in their own lives and in their communities.

Twelve Urban Adamah fellows will be selected to participate in the inaugural three-month pilot program starting in June, 2011.

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Ivy Stovall, who lives in St. Johns, gathers an armful of hay to feed the rabbits she raises for her family to eat. Photo by Rebecca Koffman.

“I swear I bought this house because I needed to have a piece of the earth. I wanted to get my hands in the ground.”

By Rebecca Koffman
The Oregonian
June 13, 2011

Excerpt:

Stovall also gives an occasional workshop on raising rabbits for food. She has 26 rabbits at the moment, with one doe about to give birth and a group of 8 adolescents ready for slaughter. “I try to give an honest look at what it involves.”

What are the best ways to eat the meat? Rabbit stew is always good in the winter. In summer you can roast it on a spit.

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The Perennial Plate Episode 57: Lord, Lord, Lord from Daniel Klein on Vimeo.

The Perennial Plate – Episode 57: Lord, Lord, Lord

By The Perennial Plate

It was hard to imagine focusing on just one urban gardener in New Orleans… so we didn’t. This video tells the story of several different New Orleans residents who came back to the city after the storm to rebuild and start making food in the city’s abandoned lots. And you can’t tell a New Orleans story without music, thankfully one of our farmers happened to play in the Treme Brass Band!

Link.

The penitentiary at Leavenworth has its own garden that inmates maintain. Last year 4,597 families benefited from the fresh produce. Garlic grows outside the prison gate.

$96,856.57 – Estimated grocery store value of the produce given to the needy

By James A. Fussell
The Kansas City Star
June 7, 2011

Excerpt:

Prison food has never enjoyed a great reputation. But the quarter million pounds of produce grown annually by inmates at the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth just might change that. It’s fresh, free, feeds the less fortunate and even has helped inmates get good jobs after being released — all without costing taxpayers a nickel.

Wait. A prison farm?

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Baby in the cabbage patch – women and children the biggest beneficiaries of urban horticulture.

How a project for development of urban and peri-urban horticulture in five cities is helping to grow 150,000 tonnes of vegetables a year — supply fresh, nutritious produce to 11.5 million urban residents
— build sustainable livelihoods for 16,000 small-scale market gardeners — generate jobs and income for 60,000 people in the horticulture value chain

City malnutrition drops as more affordable fruit and vegetables available

FAO Press Release
10 June 2011

Rome – An FAO urban horticulture programme in the five main cities of the Democratic Republic of Congo has taken a bite out of chronic malnutrition levels in urban areas and created a surplus with a market value of over $400 million.

The programme, started as a response to mass urban migration following a five-year conflict in the eastern DRC, now assists local urban growers to produce 330 000 tons of vegetables annually.

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Esperanza Pallana raises chickens and bees and grows seasonal plants at her 5,000-square-foot Oakland property. Photo by Russell Yip / The Chronicle.

“Even just in the last year, I think there have been a lot more people who are venturing to convert their space more intensively to grow food and keep animals.”

By Lauren Reed-Guy,
San Francisco Chronicle
June 12, 2011

Excerpt:

In 2008, Ruby Blume founded the Institute of Urban Homesteading, which offers classes in everything from beekeeping to cheese making to herbal medicine taught by local experts.

Next Sunday, the institute will offer tours of five backyard farms of varying sizes to demonstrate various sides of urban sustainability and show people how they can use the land they have, said Blume, co-author of “Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living” (Skyhorse Publishing), written with Rachel Kaplan and released earlier this year.

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Urban Farming founder Taja Sevelle, in a garden at Linwood and Gladstone in Detroit, estimates that there are 1,000 similar plots in the metro area.

In 2005 Sevelle created Urban Farming, a movement to plant vegetable gardens as a step toward ending hunger.

By Cassandra Spratling
Detroit Free Press
June 11, 2011

Excerpt:

“This is more than a gardening organization,” Sevelle says. “I want people to see farming as a way of life, a way we really can end hunger in this generation. If we want that to happen, we can make it happen.

“Look at recycling. Recycling is pretty much a way of life. A few years ago, few people were recycling.”

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New book on Urban School Gardens

By Veronica Gaylie
Peter Lang Publishing
June 15, 2011

Veronica Gaylie, Ph.D., is a writer, teacher and author of The Learning Garden: Ecology, Teaching and Transformation.

This book explores the urban school garden as a bridge between environmental action and thought. As a small-scale response to global issues around access to food and land, urban school gardens promote practical knowledge of farming as well as help renew cultural ideals of shared space and mutual support for the organic, built environment. Through a comprehensive history of school garden practice rooted in Eastern industrial cities, to case studies from four Pacific Rim regions, this book examines the practice and culture of the urban school garden as a central symbol for environmental learning.

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“Gardening the City of God” – Regent College course students visit City Farmer’s Compost Garden in Vancouver.

Culture is fundamentally what we do with the earth in order to provide sustenance for human life.

Transcribed and edited by Thea and Jon Reimer
Et Cetera
Apr 5, 2011

Excerpts:

LW: There’s a lot written on Christian ministry in the city that uses the metaphor of gardening. There’s a lot written generally on environmental issues by Christians. But, there’s practically nothing by Christians about specifically connecting people in the city to their sources of food or about urban gardening, which is a growing movement – no pun intended. There is a Christian silence here, which is challenging because we seem to be exploring something that isn’t being done very much yet.

MRW: Often in Christian literature authors refer to the Jeremiah 29 verses – to plant gardens, get married, have children. When they quote the verses they usually leave the gardening part out and if they do include that phrase, they do very little with it. The most we’ve found is an isolated paragraph here and there. It’s as if all that matters is human presence and action, but we can’t divorce ourselves from creation because of the simple fact that we have to eat in order to act and eating inevitably involves creation.

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Urban Farming in the Heart of Atlanta: MyFoxATLANTA.com

Video Story

By Beth Galvin
My Fox Atalnta
10 Jun 2011

ATLANTA, Ga. – It’s an oasis in the concrete and congestion of city life. Just around the corner of the historic Wheat Street Baptist Church, a community garden is springing to life.

Drop in and you’ll see people harvesting food, and summer campers practicing their planting skills. It’s part of a project to bring Atlanta back to its roots.

Kohl wächst im Prinzessinnengarten am Moritzplatz in Berlin-Kreuzberg. (Bild: picture alliance / dpa)

By Von Ingeborg Breuer
dradio.de
26.05.2011

Excerpt:

Wenn aus innerstädtischen Brachflächen “Community Gardens” werden

“Urbanes Gärtnern”, Gärtnern mitten in der Stadt ist angesagt. Auf Brachflächen, Parkdecks oder in Hinterhöfen werden Beete angelegt. Anwohner begrünen triste öffentliche Flächen. In interkulturellen Gärten bauen Menschen verschiedenster Herkunft Obst und Gemüse an. Selbst der als spießig verschriene Schrebergarten erfreut sich zunehmender Beliebtheit.

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Whole Food Market video

In this episode (Round Table Farm): Neysa and Travis ditch demanding career paths in Boston and follow their dream of organic farming all the way to Texas. In Austin’s thriving local-food scene, growing their first crop opens their eyes and brings up more than fresh vegetables.

From rooftops and back yards to community plots and small farms, across America inspired individuals are waking up and taking food production into their own hands. Look into their lives and living spaces as they nourish themselves and others, along with their gardens.

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Hunting Park Community Garden in North Philadelphia

By Bernie Wilkie

“Cultivation” was completed in summer 2009. It was proposed to brighten a deteriorating wall next to the Garden. After meeting with stakeholders, I developed a design. One of the features of the design is the merging of the tilled furrows of the field with the highways of Philadelphia — suggesting the Garden’s positive influence on the city as a whole. This project wouldn’t have been possible without the compassionate efforts of Michaelanne Harriman at Ayuda. Over 70 neighbors also helped in all phases of this project. Nearly 100 people came to our mural dedication party, and we received media coverage in the Bulletin and on local TV stations at ABC and FOX.

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“Field Trip” – Connecting city folk in Toronto with their food source

Field Trips are day trips to local farms. The trips aim to ‘connect city folk to their food source’ and farmers to their consumers. Eating locally, reducing our carbon footprint and healthy living are hot topics these days. However, we are saturated with media messages and it is often difficult to make sense of it all. Field Trips provide a hands-on learning experience to help educate ‘city folk’ about why eating locally is incredibly important to our own health and to the collective health of our communities. We get out of town and breath some fresh air. We meet the amazing people who grow our food and we get a little muddy!

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For $30 a year, a household receives the resources and technical aid necessary to grow vegetables and prepare nutritious meals.

Latin American Herald Tribune
June 9, 2011

?Excerpts:

DENVER – Dozens of Latino families in a low-income Denver neighborhood are taking part this summer in a project to grow their own vegetables as a step toward economic independence and food security.

The Re:farm Denver initiative is focused on the Westwood neighborhood, where Hispanics make up 76 percent of the 15,000 residents.

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Will open in 2015 for 12,000 employees in Cupertino California

80% of the land, on which this one-of-a-kind, circular building is to be built, will be landscaped. Parking is underground. An apricot orchard will bring back some of the agricultural history of the property. As well, 6000 other trees will be planted – the rest of the greenery will be native species.

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