Posts from — February 2013

Video from TEDTalentSearch. June 2012.

Fashion Innovator. Manic Collector. Renegade Gardener. Visionary. Community Activist.

Excerpt from Day 3 at TED-Vancouver
Vancouver Sun Feb 28, 2013

South Central Los Angeles community garden pioneer Ron Finley is talking about guerilla gardening in a neighbourhood, a “food desert” where “drive-ins are killing more people than drive-bys.” In salty, provocative language he points out LA has 26 square miles of vacant land.

His LA Green Grounds has made a profound difference. “Raising food is a license to print money.”

Finley’s group now has 20 different gardens. “If kids grow kale, they eat kale. If they raise tomatoes, they eat tomatoes.” Vancouver’s farmers’ markets and DTES community gardens advocates should talk to this guy. “If you want to meet with me, come to the garden witha shovel where we can plant some shit.” He describes his group as “a rag-tag bunch of renegades” who want to raise food for their community.

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“Brewed in South London for South Londoners.”

Hop plants were grown in gardens, parks, pots and community areas across South London

From Oct 2012’s debut as heard in a forum:

“I travelled to the far flung outposts of East Dulwich tonight to try out the Brixton Beer and it was well worth the trip. It had sold out in at least two pubs too. A success!”

“Prima Donna is a great pint, nice tart bitter.”

“Draft House told me it was the quickest selling pint they can remember – sold the whole barrel in less than 6 hours!”

“We’re thinking of experimenting with growing barley next year and doing a honey ale with Lambeth honey as well.”

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Indoor farm.

The Urban Farm: A New American Frontier

By Erin Sund
Food and Nutrition Magazine
February 26, 2013

Excerpt:

Growing Power’s Erika Allen is a board member of the Chicago Food Policy Advisory Council, a network working to improve Chicago residents’ access to “culturally appropriate, nutritionally sound and affordable food that is grown through environmentally sustainable practices.”

CFPAC addresses key issues facing the growth of Chicago agriculture. For example, composting is heavily regulated because it can attract rodents and generate seepage if done incorrectly. Obtaining the proper city licenses for indoor farming is also a challenge, according to The Plant’s Hoekstra. “The City of Chicago had never seen an indoor farm and wasn’t sure how to license us, but after a number of meetings and a lot of inspections, the requirements have been clarified and we’re moving forward with success,” she says.

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Photo by Hella Delicious.

Condos vs Cottonwood Community Garden – Vancouver’s City hall’s viaduct removal plan could accelerate gentrification and hit Downtown Eastside’s green space and food system

By Peter Driftmier
Megaphone
Feb 26, 2013

Excerpt:

While many community gardens have a visibly white and middle-class dominated constituency, multiracial working-class and low-income gardeners are among the community gardening movement’s active long-term membership, especially in the greater Downtown Eastside. Indeed, community gardening can be a vital survival strategy for low-income people.

With the $610 per month for an ‘expected-to-work’ adult’s social assistance payment, that leaves little for food after shelter, transit, clothes and a phone for finding work. This leaves a maximum $26 per week that the government says should be left for food after these minimum expenses. That is less than half the conservative amount deemed necessary by the Dietitians of Canada in order for an adult to sustain a basic healthful diet.

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Watch Jason and Jennifer Helvenston speak about their garden and the troubles they’ve had. Video here.

College Park residents find themselves struggling with city of Orlando code enforcement after turning their front yard into a garden.

By Mark Schlueb
Orlando Sentinel
February 25, 2013

Excerpt:

Orlando leaders moved closer Monday to allowing residents to plant vegetables in their front yards, but gardeners remain worried that City Hall’s benevolence will come with too many rules.

The City Council directed planners to come up with an ordinance that specifically allows front-yard vegetable gardens, something about which city code is now silent.

The discussion started last year, after College Park homeowners Jason and Jennifer Helvenston dug up their front lawn and replaced it with tomatoes, kale, carrots, beets and other vegetables. The owner of the property next door complained to the city, and a code enforcement officer ordered the Helvenstons to nix the veggies and replace it with grass.

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Mark Twain Middle School, a Title 1 school where 83% of students get assistance with meals

By MeiMei Fox
Huffington Post
Feb 25, 2013

Excerpt:

Mark Twain Middle School’s Seed to Plate Program in Venice, Los Angeles is a model for school nutrition programs in the L.A. Unified School District and across the nation. The garden serves as not only a source of healthy food for the students, but also as a classroom. The children learn entrepreneurship by selling their produce at a local farmer’s market; math by counting loaves of bread baked from the wheat harvest; and history by studying Aztec and Mayan agricultural techniques.

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This video is part of Milwaukee’s entry in the Mayors Challenge Fan Favorite Selection, a partnership between The Huffington Post and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Pairing the capital assets of vacant lots and foreclosed houses with individuals and organizations promoting the growth, processing, distribution, and consumption of locally-produced food

By Mayor Tom Barrett
Huffington Post
Mayors Challenge Finalist: Milwaukee, WI
Feb 2013

Excerpt:

What if cities like Milwaukee that have significant portfolios of foreclosed real estate could leverage those properties to improve public health and re-knit struggling neighborhoods into the tapestry of a thriving city?

American cities need a new model and vision for the management and future use of foreclosed properties that turn vacant lots and boarded-up buildings into a foundation for improved community nutrition and neighborhood revitalization.

Imagine vacant lots becoming orchards, gardens, and small farms. Envision foreclosed houses repurposed as small-scale food processing centers and neighborhood nutrition education sites where people connect to prepare and share healthy food. Imagine neighborhoods where foreclosed properties become assets in a campaign to improve healthy food access and demand.

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Forthcoming May 21, 2013

By Forrest Pritchard (Author), Joel Salatin (Foreword)
Lyons Press,
May 21, 2013
288 pages

With humor and pathos, Forrest Pritchard recounts his ambitious and often hilarious endeavors to save his family’s seventh-generation farm in the Shenandoah Valley. Through many a trial and error, he not only saves Smith Meadows from insolvency but turns it into a leading light in the sustainable, grass-fed, organic farm-to-market community.

There is nothing young Farmer Pritchard won’t try. Whether he’s selling firewood and straw, raising free-range chickens and hogs, or acquiring a flock of Barbados Blackbelly sheep, his learning curve is steep and always entertaining. Pritchard’s world crackles with colorful local characters—farm hands, butchers, market managers, customers, fellow vendors, pet goats, policemen—bringing the story to warm, communal life.

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When we eat food that’s been grown without chemicals, close to where we live, we reduce our fossil inputs and our emissions by 70%.

By Philip Be’er
Home Harvest Farms

Excerpt:

What are we not being told about the short term impacts of global warming on the Vancouver area!! Learn how urban farming will contribute to the deceleration of global warming and could protect the value of property in Richmond and Delta while creating a billion green jobs around the world.

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Sugar Hill Housing in Harlem will provide 124 units of affordable housing. It will finish construction in December.

A Role Model for New York City’s Affordable Housing

By Ronda Kaysen
Architectural Record
Feb 14, 2013

Excerpt:

An urban farm on the rooftop of a David Adjaye–designed affordable-housing project in Harlem will provide fresh produce and income for the building sometime after construction has been completed in December. An $80 million development in the historic New York City neighborhood, Sugar Hill Housing will offer 124 units of rental housing for low-income adults and families. Adjaye’s stepped-profile design, with a rose-embossed, textured precast-concrete facade, makes it the latest example in a trend to replace bland institutional architecture typical of affordable housing with creative and striking design.

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Standing 70 stories and nearly 1000 feet, is a new proposed development at 80 South Street.

The tower will feature “vegetative roofs,” which won’t just be for show — ”we’re working with Don Pintabona, Robert DeNiro’s chef. We’re working on a shared kitchen and vertical farming,”

By Stephen Jacob Smith
New York Observer
Feb 8, 2013

Excerpt:

Santiago Calatrava’s 1,123-foot tower of cubes at 80 South Street has been dead for almost five years, but Cord Meyer (of Forest Hills fame) has selected a local designer to revive the site: Morali Architects.

Anthony Morali released elevation drawings of his 998-foot, 300,000-square foot design, which will feature apartments rising from a hotel base with garden space integrated into the tower.

In a phone conversation with The Observer Mr. Morali described his design to us. “It has some of the features of segmentation” in common with Calatrava’s tower, he said, “but what we’re really trying to do is integrate sustainability and gardens.”

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(Brilliant concept. Mike)

Corrugated iron and timber need not represent poverty and oppression.

By Stephen Lamb and Andrew Lord
Touching the Earth Lightly
Feb 2013

Excerpt:

To explain the concept, hold in your mind a cube. Like the shack, the cube has six sides. Human-hearted design looks to address the issues of fire, flooding, food security and insulation by exploring design opportunities for each of these six sides.

The first side of the cube is the floor. We raise the shack off the ground to respond to the issue of flooding. Communities around the world have been doing this for thousands of years. This is not a new concept.

The next two sides of the cube represent the sun-facing walls of the shack. On these two sides The Green Shack suggests they be wrapped with a fire-proof boarding, covered by a vertical thriving organic vegetable garden. This wall garden creates food for the household. This wall is drip irrigated using a low tech, slow-release gravity fed system via a pipe made of re-cycled car tires. Rain water is also captured off the roof and stored on site. The slow-drip nature of the irrigation system ensures that the wall is constantly wet.

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Click on image for larger file.

“Local, fresh, nutritious food is what the people of the cities need. And there is no reason why we can’t turn all of these rooftops into living farms.”

From AGRI-TECTURE:
Buildings That Grow Food
Feb 21, 2012

Excerpt:

A new Bronx building will soon have residents going green in more ways than one. Known as “Arbor House”, the nearly $38 million project built on land purchased from the New York City Housing Authority’s Forest Houses property in Morrisania boasts a hydroponic rooftop farm for growing fresh vegetables. The eight-story building located at 770 East 166th Street features 124 units of affordable housing and a variety of green perks like a living green wall in the lobby and “stair music”, in the hopes that people will take the stairs and get some exercise.

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‘A Real Urban Farm’ in Hong Kong. Pokfulam is a residential area on Hong Kong Island, at the western end of the Southern District.

“Pokfulam is like an oasis in the desert, and there is nothing else like it on Hong Kong Island.”

By Grace Tsoi
Hong Long Asia Cities
Feb 21, 2013

Excerpt:

The death of agriculture in Hong Kong is an unquestionable fact. It is hard to believe that farming is still a regular activity in Pokfulam Village—a place that is so close to the urban heart of our city.

While a few households are still tilling the soil in Pokfulam Village, Chan Kwan-tin’s farm is the most eye-catching of them all. There is a large patch of green in front of his little house where he grows a dozen varieties of vegetables, ranging from turnips to watercress. This is Chan’s proudest project; he single-handedly transformed the barren land into a flourishing farm. He carefully carved the fields into rows and planted different vegetables in each area. Across the fields he has hung some colorful, fluffy dolls to keep the birds at bay. Chan’s farm is comprised of two parts that are connected by concrete paths and stone steps. Chan built them all by himself, and the stone stairs are a special point of pride.

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Book forthcoming April 2013

Edited by Francesca Miazzo, Mark Minkjan
Valiz/Transcity
240 pages

The Farming the City project began in November 2010 as an initiative of the Amsterdam-based organization CITIES, bringing city dwellers and urban farmers together to explore inspirational ways of producing, storing, cooking, preserving, distributing and sharing food. Since then, it has fostered urban farming projects all over the world, to great acclaim, and with considerable press coverage. Farming the City: Food as a Tool for Today’s Urbanization looks at this booming global phenomenon, considering in detail 30 projects, from City Growers’ transformation of empty spaces in Boston to Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in New York and FarmScape in Los Angeles; from the People’s Supermarket in London to cultivating the interiors of shipping containers in Rotterdam.

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Nick Hermes is the founder of green-tech startup Urban Stream Innovation that has created a way to eliminate organic waste. Photograph by: Mark Van Manen.

Self-contained system is small enough to fit in a single parking space

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
February 22, 2013

Excerpt:

Urban Stream Innovation, a Vancouver-based sustainable tech firm, has installed its first self-contained prototype composter and vertical growing system designed to eliminate kitchen waste and produce restaurant-quality herbs and greens.

The staff at Luke’s Corner Bar & Kitchen will donate about 45 kilograms of vegetable waste, old coffee grounds and used tea bags each day to the micro-farm’s two-stage composter housed in a shipping container, parked behind the Granville Street eatery.

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Cullen Naumoff, left, project manager of Charleston Area Alliance Vision 2030, and Kelly Cline, organic agriculturalist, right, are working on the “Sustainable Urban Agriculture Initiative,” which is designed to train people to grow produce for use by local restaurants. In the middle is Tighe Bullock, who is allowing them to use the backyard of his West Side apartment complex for the program. Link here.

The back-to-the-land movement of the ’70s brought hundreds, maybe thousands of counterculture types to West Virginia to try their hand at farming. Now the trend has moved into the cities.

By Jim Balow
West Virginia Gazette
Feb 18, 2013

Excerpt:

“You can go across the country,” Plagemann said, “all the large cities are looking at urban agriculture. The American Planning Association has several pamphlets on the subject. Planning Magazine, they did a whole issue dedicated to urban agriculture.”

Last year, city Planning Director Dan Vriendt asked Plagemann to look into the matter.

“Already in the city we have a lot of little plots, community gardens,” Plagemann said. Tom Tolliver has several gardens on the West Side, he said, and is planning another on a Rebecca Street site the Charleston Urban Renewal Authority originally planned to turn into a small park.

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Part 1/3 – 2013 Feb. 16 – Urban Agriculture Series Week 1: What is urban agriculture? – Richmond, Virginia

Duron Chavis, Coordinator at McDonough Community Garden opened the series with introductory comments on urban agriculture then introduced Vickie Campbell, Coordinator of Community Gardens for the City of Richmond, Virginia. Vickie showed slides of local community gardens in Richmond and variety of other images related to the benefits of organically grown food.

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The link between sustainable farming and sustainable communities

By Kaid Benfield
Switchboard
Feb 20, 2013

Excerpt:

Although an excellent recent article refers to Peaceful Belly as an “urban farm,” it’s actually something better: an urban-serving farm, located just outside the Boise region’s development footprint. I clearly support gardens and small-scale “farms” inside cities when they support city density, function and walkability and don’t interfere with them. But 60-acre operations belong outside the city, ideally amidst other farming so that rural land is contiguous, urban land is compact, and collectively the farms reach a scale that supports elements of a farm economy, such as feed and equipment stores.

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The Vegetable Orchestra recording their third album ONIONOISE.

The parts of the vegetables which are left over after preparing the instruments go into a vegetable soup which is served to the audience after the concert.

Worldwide one of a kind, the Vegetable Orchestra performs on instruments made of fresh vegetables. The utilization of various ever refined vegetable instruments creates a musically and aesthetically unique sound universe.

The Vegetable Orchestra was founded in 1998. Based in Vienna, the Vegetable Orchestra plays concerts in all over the world.

There are no musical boundaries for the Vegetable Orchestra. The most diverse music styles fuse here – contemporary music, beat-oriented House tracks, experimental Electronic, Free Jazz, Noise, Dub, Clicks’n'Cuts – the musical scope of the ensemble expands consistently, and recently developed vegetable instruments and their inherent sounds often determine the direction.

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