New Stories From 'Urban Agriculture Notes'

Rhonda Teitel-Payne is a Green Hero

By Rhonda Teitel-Payne
Manager of urban agriculture at Stop Community Food Centre
Green Heroes
Sept. 4, 2010

Excerpt:

Knowing that there is nowhere near enough greenhouse space in the city to meet the demand for seedling production, The Stop built a 3,000 square foot greenhouse known as the Green Barn at St. Clair and Christie. The greenhouse keeps us growing organic produce year-round, and also allows us to start long-season seedlings such as tomatoes and peppers to share with community gardens across the city.

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Brandy Humes now enjoys a lush garden full of tomatoes, watermelon, peppers and raspberries, but it took replacing all the soil on her property to make her feel comfortable about growing food. Photo by Richard Lautens, Toronto Star.

Lead poisoning in children can cause neurological damage

By Theresa Boyle
Toronto Star
September 3, 2010

Excerpt:

“My neighbourhood has a long history of contamination,” Armstrong says of the south Junction Triangle, once a highly industrialized area. “We have a 2½-year-old and a 6-year-old and we don’t want them eating anything that is questionable.”

It is for residents like Armstrong that the city is developing a soil-contaminant protocol. To be released next year, the protocol will help urban gardeners determine if their soil is contaminant-free. If it’s not, the protocol will explain how they can still grow edible fruits and vegetable on their property. This might involve doing raised-bed gardening or having their soil remediated.

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US First Lady Michelle Obama harvests vegetables from her garden June 4, 2010 at the White House. The First Lady recruited chefs from across to join her anti-obesity campaign and help schools serve healthier, tastier meals. Mrs. Obama is calling on the chefs to partner with individual schools and work with teachers and parents to help educate kids about food and nutrition. She said healthy meals at schools are more important than ever because many children get most of their calories at school. AFP Photo by Paul J. Richards.

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Urban Farm – Fall 2010 – Voume 2 – Number 3

Contents:

Sustainable Communities
Is cohousing a fancy name for a hippie commune? Not at all. Read about the cooperation and sustainability moves that make these modern communities work.
by Jenise Aminoff

Bee Flys Into a Bar
Top bar beekeeping is taking flight as a low-maintenance, small-space beekeeping method.
by Cherie Langlois

Mix It Up
Seasonal crop rotation will make your garden grow right round, baby, right round, no matter the size of your garden plot.
by Jessica Walliser

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Gene Fredericks of Big Green Boxes imagines fish ponds, waterfalls, and racks and racks of edible greens and herbs in defunct spaces like this one. Photo by Bart Nagel.

Grist interviews Gene Fredericks of Big Green Boxes

By Bonnie Azab Powell
Grist
Sept 1, 2010

Excerpt:

Q. OK, so walk me through a Big Green Box.

A. We’ll take a freestanding vacant retail space or warehouse space, around 30,000 square feet, climate-control it, and set up some ponds and tanks for the fish — pleasant ones you can see, not unlike the goldfish and Koi ponds in an office-building lobby or a park. There’ll also be small waterfalls, which in addition to looking nice help aerate the water. The water from the ponds and tanks will go into settling tanks as well as a few bio-filtering tanks that will make sure no elements that might harm the plants or the fish get through. The nutrient-rich water then flows into the growing areas. The plants and growing area then filter the water, which gets recycled back to the fish.

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Some new crops being started, protected by shade cloth barriers to the west. The 1.5 acre parcel that City Farm sits on is owned by the City of Chicago and provided, rent-free, to this non-profit initiative. The property is valued at $8 million. (2008) Photo by Linda N.

How many “urban agriculturists” are there?

The Why Files
The Science Behind the News
Sept. 2, 2010

Excerpt:

There are many explanations for the dearth of data on urban agriculture:

Definitions: much of the new-found interest in urban agriculture concerns “local food,” but that is often grown in the countryside — even if the farmers live in the city.

Size: Urban farms are small and their output is diverse and hard to measure.

Age: Many urban farms are young, and any record of success would be short.

Motivation: Urban farms often aim beyond food to social and psychological benefits, which are not captured by the yield and profit measures used to evaluate farms.

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The Offshoots Farm is a multi-site urban and suburban agricultural enterprise that grows healthy food throughout our community inside the Capital Beltway in Prince George’s County, Maryland.

The Business of Sustainability

By Cheryl Kollin
Marc Gunther blog
Sept. 2, 2010

Excerpt:

Urban farming may sound like an oxymoron, but judging from the 375-person sell-out crowd at the first Urban Farm Summit in Washington, D.C., the idea is catching on like organics at Walmart.

The recent one-day event called, Sowing Seeds Here and Now, was organized by Engaged Community Offshoots (ECO), a fledgling non-profit urban farm based just outside D.C. in Prince George’s County, Maryland. The summit agenda spotlighted the reasons why urban farms are sprouting up all over: They increase food security by growing food locally. They give under-served urban neighborhoods access to fresh foods. They strengthen local economies by keeping dollars circulating within the community. They engage consumers, who learn how food is grown. They reduce ‘food miles’ and fossil fuel use. And they create jobs.

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Montford Farmers: Bea McGahee, Larry Mahr, Norman McGahee, Aicha Mahr (L-R)

Montford in Asheville, North Carolina

by Hilary Drake
Montford
August 30th, 2010

Excerpt:

In March 2009, with Mrs. Hamilton’s go-ahead, E.V. began manually transforming the land. Once the trash was cleared, she began by buzzing everything down with a weed-eater, then digging out all of the unwanted seedlings by hand. She hand-dug rows for spring planting by May 1. The first full garden season brought strong yields of watermelon, cantaloupe, hot peppers, bell peppers, zucchini, squash, winter squash, corn, eggplant, cucumber, lima beans, green beans, tomatoes, garlic, spinach, turnips, lettuce, chard, kale, and potatoes.

Late that summer, after a smooth first season with strong yields and only minor glitches, tragedy struck at the garden’s edge. Amidst all of this new life and growth, Angela Hart was murdered in an act of domestic violence on Mrs. Hamilton’s property adjacent to the garden.

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Backyard Bounty garden growing in their front lawn in Guelph, Ontario.

Backyard Bounty

Backyard Bounty is a unique community-based agriculture project. We cooperate with participating community members to convert their yard space into productive vegetable gardens. We currently have over 40 lawns being cultivated throughout Guelph!

Meet the Backyard Bounty Team

Robert Orland, the founder of Backyard Bounty was inspired to create Backyard Bounty in response to lawns. He saw that lawns are detrimental to the environment and that they are very resource dependant. Lawns are essentially monocultures and a desert for biodiversity.

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Novella Carpenter turned her backyard in Oakland, California into a small farm to feed herself. Now she’s selling produce and trying to make a small profit. Photo by Mark Richards

Taking root in the city

Casey Miner
Ode Magazine
July/August 2010 issue

Excerpt:

If the ’60s was the decade when back-to-the-landers fled cities for farms, the ’10s is the decade when they—or, more likely, their offspring—are coming back. There is no official count of how many urban farms exist in America, but agricultural entities like the Bells’ have counterparts across the country. Urban farmers work in Houston, Dayton, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York, Oakland, San Francisco, Detroit, Portland, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Seattle, to name just a few. Location matters, and the farms’ business models are different, but they have two things in common: They are committed to feeding their communities with fresh, sustainable food, and they insist on establishing themselves as normal features of city life.

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Seattle’s P-Patch garden management system, which oversees 73 P-Patches distributed throughout the city, equals approximately 23 acres and serves about 2,000 households.

Urban farming entrepreneurs spread their seeds

By Ashley Deforest
Sustainable Industries
Sept. 1, 2010
Ashley Deforest is Community Relations Planner at King County Department of Transportation and a Director at Woonerfs Consulting.

Excerpt:

Skeptics are quick to note that, in the current economic climate, where many developable properties remain fallow, urban agriculture presents itself as an attractive interim use. But, as Kalin of Virtually Green notes, as the economy improves urban farms may be dislocated and left to the wayside unless the green building movement can absorb these farms and produce a similar level of food.

Kalin is putting his energy toward what he considers a more sustainable solution. In nearby Concord, Calif., a city of about 125,000 people located just 31 miles east of San Francisco, Kalin, through the Sustainable Commercial Urban Farm Incubator (SCUFI), is trying to create a commercially viable urban farm model that can be replicated elsewhere.

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Sara Mullin waters the vegetable garden she and her fellow tenants at a Quebec Street apartment building set up in the rear parking lot — despite the protestations of their landlord.
Photo by Jessica Barrett

Renters and condo dwellers also want to be city farmers

By Jessica Barrett
West Ender – WE
09/01/2010

Excerpts:

I can’t help but laugh watching Sara Mullin water her crop of just-planted winter vegetables — beets, parsnips, and kale — in the parking-lot-turned-garden behind her Quebec Street apartment building, Quebec Mansions. Garden hose in one hand, iPhone in the other, the ringletted, Western-shirt-wearing 27-year-old sprays her plants to an indie-rock soundtrack, only it isn’t a recorded accompaniment — the local band Bend Sinister is practicing in one of the building’s suites.

It’s this classic East Van hipster cliché that makes me laugh, but I have to admit: I’m envious.

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Agropolis combines hydroponic, aeroponic and aquaponic farming

By Alyssa Danigelis
Discovery News
Sept. 1, 2010

Excerpt:

There’s a big push lately for eating local. Restaurants like to promote menus with ingredients harvested locally and grocery stores advertise produce grown on nearby farms.

A concept for a grocery store that actually grows its own fruits and vegetables on site is taking the “local” adage to an entirely new level.

The do-it-yourself grocery store concept called Agropolis combines hydroponic, aeroponic and aquaponic farming to grow vegetables without soil in an urban environment. Shoppers will come in and see all the produce growing on-site and point to what they want. Nutrients from fish in aquaculture tanks goes to feed the plants, and the whole place becomes an ecosystem. A restaurant there will also serve produce from the urban farm.

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Daina Mileris, of Chicago’s West Ridge neighborhood, picks dead leaves off a tomato vine at the garden at Peterson and Campbell avenues on Sunday. The vibrant urban garden is something of a historical monument in Chicago, having once been the site of a World War II victory garden. Photo by Heather Charles.

Project re-cultivates urban agriculture in West Ridge

By Robert Channick,
Chicago Tribune
September 2, 2010

Excerpt:

A vacant lot at Peterson and Campbell avenues in Chicago’s West Ridge neighborhood has blossomed this summer into a vibrant urban garden — and something of a living historical monument. Once the site of a World War II victory garden, the long-fallow property near the northern edge of the city is blooming again with everything from tomatoes to corn.

Reviving the nearly 70-year-old wartime campaign to replenish scarce produce, the Peterson Garden Project is true to its roots, but also reflective of a growing trend toward localized, community-based agriculture.

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Urban farming continues to grow across Mid-Michigan

Marc Jacobson
ABC 12 News
August 31, 2010

Excerpt:

GENESEE TOWNSHIP – Locally grown organic tomatoes, corn, potatoes and peppers are coming from the city, not the country.

Urban farming continues to grow across Mid-Michigan and as ABC12’s Marc Jacobson shows us, the recent national egg recall has resulted in a big business boost at King Karate’s Harvesting Earth Farm.

Go green and go natural. In recent weeks, Jacky and Dora King, with the help of their 20 free-range chickens, have been producing and selling organic eggs priced at $3.50 a dozen.

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New book on African urban agriculture

Gordon Prain, Diana Lee-Smith, Nancy Karanja
300 pages
Publisher: Springer
1st Edition. edition (August 24, 2010)

How much does urban agriculture help feed and support the billions of people living in the world’s towns and cities? How could it do this better? Crop cultivation and livestock- raising have long histories in urban Africa, as in other areas of the world, but broad awareness among researchers and policy makers of either the history or the contemporary facts of life in African urban development is much more recent. With a majority of the continent’s population expected to be classified as urban in about 20 years, and its urban population spending as much as 80 percent of their household budgets on food, this book seeks to answer the two timely questions above with practical proposals for technical interventions and policy support.

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Ceasia Williams, 14, left, and Jayda Harden, 14, water newly planted seedlings in a raised bed for the Lots of Hope gardening project at The Pittsburgh Project on the North Side. Photo by Rebecca Droke/Post-Gazette.

“It helps people to have clarity about what’s allowed and what isn’t.”

By Rick Wills
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
September 1, 2010

Excerpt:

Pittsburgh’s Planning Commission gave its final approval to legislation that would regulate small-scale, urban agriculture.

The proposed legislation, which goes to City Council for action, applies to honeybees, poultry and community gardens, for which no permitting has been required. The commission passed the proposal 6-1, with Commissioner Monte Rabner voting against.

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Sarah Nixon, whose floral service is called, appropriately, My Luscious Backyard. Photo by Aaron Harris.

Local bouquets offer rarer, pesticide-free blooms

By Katie Hewitt
Globe and Mail
Aug. 27, 2010

Excerpts:

In Vancouver, Megan Branson of Olla Urban Flower Project maintains at least three backyard flower farms, from which she and partner Dionne Finch source dahlias, rudbeckia, giant sunflowers and even winter blooms such as Christmas roses. Constantly on the lookout for beautiful material, they also sometimes knock on doors to acquire blooms, approaching gardeners with particularly fecund inner-city plots.

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Photo by Annie Novak

Each bird lays a distinctive egg

By Annie Novak
The Atlantic
Aug. 31, 2010
Annie Novak is the founder and director of Growing Chefs, a field-to-fork food education program; the children’s gardening program coordinator for the New York Botanical Gardens; and co-founder of Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn.

Excerpt:

The eggs from our hens are given to the Rooftop Farm’s community supported agriculture (CSA) shareholders. Each bird lays a distinctive egg. The most fancy bird (the Polish) lays the most innocuous white egg, while plain white-feathered Francis lays eggs of a very pale blue. Tiny Beebe lays petite and perfect eggs with a distinctly narrow top. Lila’s are medium-sized and off-white. Wren and Pecked, regular layers both, produce brown and white eggs of a more substantial size. Between the six hens, we get about four eggs on any given day. Right before the eggs comes out, they crow and fuss, vying with the buzz of biplanes circling in to land on the stretch of water south of the United Nations.

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Sustaining an Urban Fruit Gleaning Program. Photo by City Fruit.

So far this year, we’ve harvested 5,775 lbs. of fruit

By James
City Fruit
August 31, 2010

Excerpt:

One of the main reasons we started City Fruit was to develop ways  to become more financially sustainable, rather than depend on an ever-shrinking pool of grant money for funding.

As part of that, we’re experimenting with selling a small portion of the fruit we harvest – with a goal of selling no more than 20% of the usable fruit we harvest. So far this year, we’ve harvested 5,775 lbs. of fruit and have sold 448 lbs., so about 8%.

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