Posts from — October 2011

Title: Cliffside Arbutus Tree. “He painted for over 50 years, totally unrecognized, every week, every month, every year.” See more of Donald Flather’s work here.

Flash from the past – 1979 article in City Farmer Newspaper

By Kerry Banks
City Farmer Newspaper
Vol 2 No. 1, October, 1979
(City Farmer began in 1978 by publishing a newspaper. Kerry is a founding member of City Farmer. He is an award-winning freelance writer and journalist. See bio further on.)

(1979) – Dr. Donald Flather and his wife Grace have one of the more unique vegetable gardens in Vancouver. It’s the last remaining ‘victory garden’ from the city’s World War Two home food production effort.

Beginning back in the early forties, the Government of Canada made a concentrated effort to get city and town folk involved in growing their own food. Large advertisements were placed in the daily newspapers.

“Plant a wartime garden,” they urged. “Home production of vegetables is needed now more than any time during the war. Help by growing the vegetables your family needs.”

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“If you’re living in an owned or rented unit you will be able to legally sell produce that you grow on the lot.”

By Lee Romney in Oakland
Los Angeles Times
October 4, 2011

Excerpt:

“With this simple but important change, Oakland residents will now be able to start their own locally-grown food micro-enterprises,” said Esperanza Pallana, owner of the home-based Pluck & Feather Farm and co-founder of the East Bay Urban Agriculture Alliance.

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Episode 73: Greg and Olivia from Detroit Dirt

By David Klein
The Perennial Plate

There’s a lot going on in Detroit. After years of decay, excitement is growing around urban gardens. Previously abandoned lots are being turned into food producing centers. In this video, we follow Greg and Olivia from Detroit Dirt and Brother Nature Produce.

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A Farmscape garden installed in a client’s front yard.

“It takes courage to be a first-adopter of a new service”

By Kelly Hatton
Seedstock
October 5, 2011

Excerpt:

The 150 gardens that Los Angeles, CA-based urban farming startup, Farmscape, LLC has installed at residences, senior centers, schools and in communities since 2009 do more than provide yearlong bounty to customers – collectively, the small gardens represent a movement to bring food production back to the city.

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By Lynne Cherry
Blue Sky Press
2003

Review by Shelle Rosenfeld
American Library Association

Little Groundhog loves eating from the neighbor’s vegetable garden–maybe too much. Perhaps it’s time he planted his own garden and, fortunately, Squirrel is willing to show him how. The two animals collect seeds, store them, and after winter hibernation and spring thaw, plant and tend them. By summer, Little Groundhog is joyfully harvesting and eating what they sowed. And such a plentiful harvest calls for sharing, bringing a wonderful Thanksgiving feast for all to enjoy.

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Fin’s Labyrinth.

Brooklyn New York

Fin’s Labyrinth
First Place – $1200

Stewart HICKS, Allison NEWMEYER of DESIGN WITH COMPANY with Joseph ALTSHULER: Fin’s Labyrinth is an architecture and urban strategy that encourages you to play with your food. Both a working fish farm and a new form of public (civic) amenity, this project uses the infrastructure for raising fish as a backdrop to a wide range of activities designed to entertain you while getting you acquainted with your next meal.

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By Susan Grigsby
Albert Whitman & Company
Forthcoming: February 1, 2012
32 pages

Maya loves contests, so she is excited when her teacher announces they will plant a school garden like Thomas Jefferson’s garden at Monticello–and they’ll have a “First Peas to the Table” contest, just like Jefferson and his neighbors had each spring. Maya plants her pea seeds with a secret head start –found in Jefferson’s Garden Book– and keeps careful notes in her garden journal.

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George Washington Carver designed a mobile classroom to take education out to farmers. He called it a “Jesup wagon” after the New York financier and philanthropist Morris Ketchum Jesup, who provided funding to support the program. See more information here.

Today is the day to return as the dressers and keepers of the garden

By Uriah Yisrael
Truly Living Well Urban Harvest
Oct 4, 2011

Excerpt:

In 2008, I was directly affected by the Recession. For months I survived off of severance pay, and unemployment benefits, the months became years and all hope and money seemed to fade. I then remembered a sharecroppers words “everyone needs something to eat”. This sharecropper escaped the Jim Crow south and moved to the city of Boston, Massachusetts, where he continued to grow his beloved crops in a vacant lot next to his home. With no fanfare, grant money, or nonprofit status and while working 3 jobs with a family of 6 to feed he nurtured a trash filled plot into the envy of the neighborhood.

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By Susan Grigsby
Albert Whitman & Company
32 pages
Sep 1 2010

Sally is a young girl living in rural Alabama in the early 1900s, a time when people were struggling to grow food in soil that had been depleted by years of cotton production. One day, Dr. George Washington Carver shows up to help the grownups with their farms and the children with their school garden.

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Ostrich feather Badge of the Prince of Wales.

The hope that the Patronage of His Royal Highness will help to create greater awareness of the allotment movement

16th September 2011

His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales has kindly agreed to assume the Patronage of the National Society of Allotment & Leisure Gardeners, which is based in Corby, Northamptonshire. The Prince of Wales has a long standing interest in horticulture and sustainable growing and has always championed the benefits of partaking in such activities.

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Entrance to Shaftesbury Park Allotments, Newport.

Hazardous substances, including lead, were found by investigators.

By thehortchannel.tv
September 28, 2011

An allotments Newport (Wales) where lead was found in the soil could be closed for good from December.

Shaftesbury Park Allotment holders were told by Newport council last month it would close the site after hazardous substances, including lead, were found by investigators.

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Illustration: Tavis Coburn.

While we’re busy teaching our kids to tend school gardens, they’re failing provincial tests in reading, writing and math. The folly of the new enviro-propaganda

By Jan Wong
Toronto Life
October 2011

Excerpt:

This fall, hundreds of Toronto students are harvesting beets and zucchini from their school gardens. I say: nice photo op, bad idea. The argument for school gardens assumes that by grubbing in the dirt, kids will learn to love eating vegetables. They won’t think chickens hatch into this world as deep-fried nuggets. And they’ll develop a respect for nature.

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Greg Willerer (right) has a business that provides produce to 27 families through his community supported agriculture co-op in Detroit.

“I hope what I’m doing makes the neighborhood more attractive.”

By Jon Kalish
NPR
Oct 2, 2011

Excerpt:

“I farm about 10 acres in the city, and alfalfa’s my thing. I bale about a thousand bales a year,” he says.

That’s alfalfa grown within Detroit city limits. The 58-year-old public school teacher lives alone in a single-family house in the Farnsworth neighborhood.

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A farm in South Africa.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reports that produce from Africa’s small urban farms jumped by 122 percent from 2005-10.

By Marko Phiri
Written for UPI
Sept. 28, 2011

Excerpt:

From a modest piece of land provided by the local municipality, 69-year-old Nancy Witbooi is ensuring her community gets enough to eat.

Her weathered face reveals how tough it can be to toil in the Western Cape’s unpredictable climate. But Witbooi still has energy to work the land.

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Urban Agriculture – Innovative Farming Systems for the 21st Century

Online Class (December 19 – January 20, 2012)
Instructor: Helena Farrell

Description: The course explores the subject of Urban Agriculture through the investigation and evaluation of current urban farming system. Using case studies, students will practice critical research skills including information gathering, analysis and assessment, as a means for learning about contemporary urban farming systems and issues in the field. The first half of the course will involve focused investigation of particular urban farming designs using national and international examples.

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While the long term role and significance of urban food production in feeding the global population is unclear, understanding its myriad benefits and positive impacts locally and globally is imperative.

Thesis by Helena K. Farrell
Master Of Landscape Architecture
University of Massachusetts – Amherst
February, 2011
106 pages

Abstract

Modern, conventional food systems vulnerable to declining fossil fuel resources are a 21st century plight demanding rapid transition to regenerative agricultural practices. Urban agriculture is currently responding; expanding and diversifying from recent and historic roots worldwide to help meet the needs of contemporary urban dwellers and ameliorate the aftereffects of industrial agriculture.

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Randy Shore is the Vancouver Sun newspaper’s ‘Green Man’. One year ago Shore took on the challenge to eat something that he grew each and every day for one year.

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
September 30, 2011

Excerpt:

For every hard-to-manage bit of ground in your yard, there is a protected corner, sunny spot or shady microclimate waiting to be exploited with a pot of soil and a few seeds. If you can find those secret spots, you can use them, usually year round.

Growing food has been delicious, rewarding, discouraging, heartbreaking and the best thing I do all day. Preserving, processing, picking, cooking and eating what we grow, my wife and I do together every day.

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