Posts from — November 2011

Eighteen diverse kitchen gardens, from subtropical Queensland to the arid zone of central Australia, from the suburbs of Adelaide to the countryside of rural Victoria and Tasmania.

By Kate Herd
Penguin Books Australia,
28/02/2011
Hardback, 232 pages

Excerpt:

Twenty years ago my stepfather was horrified when my mother planted corn in our ‘nice’ and ‘respectable’ front garden in the Melbourne suburb of Kew. For him it was embarrassing; it smacked of urban peasantry: ‘What will the neighbours think?’ Thankfully, vegie gardens are again a more accepted part of the urban landscape. Groovy inner-city cafes boast their own potagers and there are monthly neighbourhood vegetable ‘swap-meets’ where fresh unused or excess backyard produce is swapped for the different surplus of others. The busy city family doesn’t even need to get its hands dirty to benefit from its own garden any more – you can pay companies to install and maintain your vegetable garden for you.

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Indira Naidoo embarks on a mission to transform her tiny thirteen-floor balcony into a bountiful kitchen garden. Penguin Books Australia, 31/10/2011, Paperback, 224 pages.

The Edible Balcony charts a year in the life of Indira’s balcony garden and gives a season-by-season account of the triumphs and challenges she faces.

Roslyn Grundy
Sydney Morning Herald
November 14, 2011

Excerpt:

Naidoo’s balcony vegie patch was an idea that could easily have withered on the vine. “A lot of people in apartments just automatically rule themselves out,” says Naidoo. “They just think, ‘Well, there’s nothing I can grow in an apartment so I won’t even think about it. I’ll fantasise about one day having a tree change or a sea change and having my little plot of land somewhere, but it’s not going to happen while I live in the city.’”

One of 261 people former US vice-president Al Gore trained in 2009 to educate the public on climate change, Naidoo is involved in communicating complex scientific and political concepts relating to climate change, carbon trading and consumer food miles.

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Urban farms could put a substantial amount of fresh produce on our tables without the long journeys.

By Fabian Schmidt
DW-World.De
14.11.2011

Excerpt:

Volkmar Keuter of the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology in the German town of Oberhausen says cities are full of unused potential to grow food.

“You might have some kind of production going on underneath a roof. Certain industrial installations that produce heat could be used as a greenhouse in winter,” he told Deutsche Welle.

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San Diegans are getting excited as the urban agriculture ordinance works its way through the city’s long and winding government system

By Jill Richardson
Grist
Oct 29, 2011

Excerpt:

An advocacy group formed calling itself the 1 in 10 Coalition, in reference to their hope that — once the rules changed — one in 10 people in San Diego would be able to get at least some of their food locally. One of the group’s leaders was Parke Troutman, who had written a PhD dissertation on land-use politics in the city and county of San Diego. “[It] was a land-use issue, and only a few of us had experience with that,” he recalls.

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August 1925 issue of Popular Science Monthly.

“There’s a big difference between gardening and farming. Some activities are essentially rural and some urban, and we need to reestablish this distinction.”

By James Howard Kunstler
Published in the July/August 2011 issue of Orion magazine
James Howard Kunstler is probably best known as the author of “The Long Emergency” (The Atlantic Monthly Press 2005), and “The Geography of Nowhere” (Simon and Schuster, 1993).

Excerpt:

Speaking of technofantasies, another popular proposal is for skyscraper farms. The fiasco of suburbia sowed a lot of confusion in how we think about our human habitat. It hopelessly muddled the distinction between urban and rural. A manifestation of this confusion is the notion that we should focus our resources on growing food in “vertical farms” in the midst of our cities.

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Watch this new documentary named “West Philly Grown”. By Clay Hereth. 2011. 17 minutes. (Must See. Mike)

The little half-acre that could: Urban minifarms, like Mill Creek, are keeping many Philadelphians from going hungry

By Dan Geringer
phillynews.com
June 08, 2009

Excerpt:

“When you use solar panels,” Walker said, “you don’t pay an electric bill.”

In a shoestring operation like Mill Creek Farm’s, that is one of many huge savings that help keep prices low for the fixed-income-neighborhood seniors who make up more than half of the farm’s customers and the low-income families that use food stamps to buy vegetables from the little half-acre that could.

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Audrey Silk grows 100 tobacco plants in her back yard

By zolofilms.com
2011

Audrey Silk, founder of New York City Clash (Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment) started growing tobacco in her back yard in Brooklyn three years ago as a protest against New York state’s increase in the cost of tobacco and the recent ban on smoking in public places. Today, she is growing 100 tobacco plants in her back yard and has quite a healthy yield of dry tobacco to make her own cigarettes. Zolo films visits her home to document her story and hear about the process of growing tobacco.

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Samson in the former garbage dump. Photo by Nicholas Parkinson.

Gardener Turns Garbage Dump into a Successful Garden and Supports his Family

By Nicholas Parkinson
Urban Agriculture in Ethiopia
USAID Urban Gardens Program Ethiopia
02 November 2011

Excerpt:

Sometimes when Samson Aberra is working in the garden, planting seedlings or replenishing his nursery, onlookers gather to watch him toil. What they don’t know is that Samson Aberra is not “toiling”—he’s barely working, he claims. In fact, he is doing what he loves: gardening.

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Photo by Neal Santos.

Philadelphia Community Building

By Felicia D’Ambrosio
Generocity Writer
11/05/11

Excerpt:

Here is Farm 51, a micro urban farm conceived and carried out by public landscapes manager Andrew Olson, in collaboration with partner Neal Santos and neighbors like Roberta Baker, Yahya Adib Bey and his son Yahya Jr.

“I saw Andrew from the window of my apartment,” says Miss Roberta Baker, a resident of 51st and Chester Ave. for the past five years. “And I was so jealous! I came out here and told him, ‘I’ll talk to the greens.’ I can’t dig anymore, but I can talk to the greens. ‘You can grow better than that, I’d tell them.’”

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http://www.chinacityfarmer.com/

www.ChinaCityFarmer.com

Shelley Xu, a visitor to our Compost Garden in Vancouver, looked at some Chinese language websites for information on urban agriculture.

I did some searching on the web and found a Chinese site named “CityFarmer” and some other sources, most of which have information for the public at a grassroots level. Since there’s limited residential space in urban areas, most gardeners utilize their balcony spaces. Community gardens can also be found, and there are some privately owned farms open to the public for recreational/educational visits.

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War is the natural occupation of man … war-and gardening.
Winston Churchill to Siegfried Sassoon, 1918

By George McKay
Frances Lincoln Publishers
May 2011
George McKay is a leading British author on aspects of alternative culture through music, protest, lifestyle. He is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Salford.

In the common public perception, contemporary gardening is understood as suburban, as leisure activity, as television makeover opportunity. Its origins are seen as religious or spiritual (Garden of Eden), military (the clipped lawn, the ha-ha and defensive ditches), aristocratic or monarchical (the stately home, the Royal Horticultural Society). Radical Gardening travels an alternative route, through history and across landscape, linking propagation with propaganda.

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Part 2. (Be sure to watch Part 1 on the next page.)

I decide to illegally grow a vegetable garden on a neglected patch of land in Brooklyn.

By Todd Bieber
(Found via BoingBoing.Net)

In May 2011 I decide to illegally grow a vegetable garden on a neglected patch of land in Brooklyn. The garden is located on 8th Ave and 5th Street in Brooklyn, New York. Feel free to stop by and water it if you’re in the area. I encountered a thief, a dirty old man, and GOD.

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The Harare City Council now has the blessing of the Zimbabwe Republic Police to slash crops grown in the city in an effort to curb environmental degradation brought about by urban farming. The move has received with mixed feelings from residents and political parties.

By Seven Nematiyere
The Zimbabwean
09.11.11

Excerpt:

With the coming of a new growing season, all places without buildings on them are being cultivated. These include football, netball and basketball pitches, road-sides and recreational parks as well as wetlands. This has resulted in serious environmental degradation including soil erosion and siltation. Most drains in the city in such places like Glen Norah, Tafara, Highfield, Kambuzuma and Mufakose are blocked with soil resulting in flooding that sometimes affects the sewerage system.

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Forward by Boris Johnson, Mayor of London

By Olivia Varley-Winter
City & Guilds Centre for Skills Development
Capital Growth
Oct 2011 – 59 pages

Excerpt from Executive Summary:

This report aims to:

show that many community food-growing groups and other urban agriculture projects provide community-based learning and training opportunities, and are an effective way to develop employability for people in general,

outline how such projects can help people who face difficulties in finding and keeping work in particular, and

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One of the proposed sites. 1.63 acres at 2518 Ridge Court, adjacent to the Douglas County United Way building.

14 sites totaling about 70 acres that could be used for the program

By Chad Lawhornon
Well Commons
October 31, 2011

Under her proposal, the city and county would “license” the property to the growers for a three-year period, although the city and the county would have broad authority to end the license. Horn said more discussion would be needed to determine what growers should pay the city and the county for use of the property.

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“The main difficulty in our American mode of life now is that we are tending to obliterate the distinction between work and play, by crowding work into hours which ought to be devoted to perfect relaxation of mind and body.”

Scientific American Magazine
April 6, 1878

Excerpt:

As a rule school hours are intelligently adjusted with a view of taxing the young brain to a safe limit; and to put any more upon it, by compelling children, voluntarily or involuntarily, to absorb more knowledge of the kind which should be, if it is not, taught in school, and this during their play hours, is simply continuing work. Besides play that is of any value as play has its very essence freedom.

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A Permaculture Research Institute Program (PRI)

Why Become a Certified Urban Farmer?

In 2011, PRI Cold Climate successfully completed a groundbreaking model for creating a local, just, sustainable, and economically viable food system in our cold climate region. With over a decade of experience in urban soils, water management, sustainable landscape design, high-yield urban agriculture production, and season extension, PRI Cold Climate brought together a new, comprehensive educational curriculum that launched the region’s very first Urban Farming Certification Program.

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“Saffron’s aroma is often described by connoisseurs as reminiscent of metallic honey with grassy or hay-like notes.” Wikipedia

At the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden.

Maria planted ‘Crocus sativus’ last Thanksgiving and now, a year later, the plants have bloomed. We look at the spice and its three vivid crimson stigmas used for cooking.

We asked Andrea Carlson, Executive Chef at nearby Bishop’s Restaurant, for some ideas on how she might use the spice.

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EYA harvests wheat.

Environmental Youth Alliance grows wheat on 25 small patches of land in the city

By Terry Lavender
Vancouver Observer
Oct 24th, 2011

Excerpt:

Never has pizza tasted so good. But maybe I’m biased. After all, the flour that made the pizza dough came in part from wheat that my partner grew. Not only that, but I helped grind that wheat into flour by peddling away on a bicycle-powered flour mill. And I chopped the peppers that, along with cheese, tomatoes, mushrooms and pesto made up the pizza topping.

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Developers want to replace one of the last small orchards in the county with single-family houses.

By Nicole Santa Cruz
Los Angeles Times
July 23, 2011

Excerpt:

The Sexlinger Orchard, which borders a park and sits across Santa Clara Avenue from a cemetery, has managed to remain untouched. But the orchard’s 250 trees, one of the last sizable groves in the city, could be gone by next year.

A real estate company wants to build 24 single-family homes on the land, but opponents with the Save Our Orchard Coalition say the project, currently in the review stage with the city, would destroy valuable property that could be preserved and used as an educational center and community garden.

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