Category — Articles

Video: Lina speaks about her school’s food garden. She’s in Grade 5.

What a great thrill to revisit the school garden we (City Farmer) helped create back in 1986 in the West End of Vancouver. Twenty-two years later and the excitement is still present. Young children pick and wash lettuce, radishes and onions, cut them up carefully into small pieces before placing the vegetables in a large salad bowl. Their teacher mixes the spring harvest with dressing and serves the enthusiastic children who come back for seconds. When does that happen at home?

For a city farmer like me, this is “headline” news - kids growing and eating their food amongst the high-rises of inner city Vancouver where they live - parents watching, sometimes taking a nibble themselves, happy to see their children so focused.

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Photo of her deck garden by Sharon Slack.

Article by Isabelle Groc
“Granville Magazine” June 2008

“Mark Bomford, program coordinator of the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at UBC, has quantified the capacity of urban agriculture to feed Vancouver residents. While the city contains about 11,500 hectares of land, the total arable land is estimated to be about 4,400 hectares. However only 81 hectares of public land have urban agriculture capability, according to a 2006 inventory. On the other hand, using a “bio-intensive” method which claims high yields in a small scale, the amount of land required to sustain the population of Vancouver with a nutritionally complete vegan diet for one year would be close to 29,000 hectares.”

See complete article here.

Video: Rethinking Water: Greywater Guerillas Workshop

Petaluma home is first in the county (Sonoma) with a permitted system that uses old wash water for irrigation.

By COREY YOUNG
ARGUS-COURIER STAFF
May 8, 2008

When it goes online, the system should funnel 36,000 gallons of water a year into the back yard, Heckman said. The average four-person household in Petaluma uses more than 100,000 gallons of potable water a year, so the savings from a greywater system can be significant, he said.

Once cleaned, the water will be distributed to three locations in Heckman’s back yard, where the roots of berry bushes, shade trees and other plants will soak up it up. Heckman is growing pomegranates, blackberries, raspberries, edible flowers and more as part of a more sustainable lifestyle. “Tens of thousands of gallons of water, instead of going away, is being used to grow your food and shade your house,” Heckman said.

Link to article, “Going green with greywater”.

City Dwellers Seeking to Save Money on Food Flock to Community Gardens

By ALICE GOMSTYN
ABC NEWS Business Unit
June 4, 2008 -

As food prices continue to rise, many urbanites are beginning to share Fairman’s reasoning. From Boston to Seattle, municipal officials and community organizers are finding an increased demand for plots in community gardens as more residents look to grow their own food.

Under a common type of community garden model, users pay an annual fee for the privilege of growing plants on a plot of land within a larger garden. In Portland, Ore., the fee for a 400-square-foot plot of land is $50. But the value of food grown on that land, according to Leslie Pohl-Kosbau, the director of the Portland Parks and Recreation community gardens program, can be many times greater.

“A person, if they’re a really good gardener, can raise $500 to $1,000 worth of food on a 20-by-20-foot plot, depending on their skills and by the way they garden,” she said.

See article here.

Film Clip: Perhaps the original guerrilla (chimpanzee) gardener in this WW2 Victory Garden clip.

Article By Joe Robinson,
LA Times May 29, 2008

“The activists see themselves as 21st century Johnny Appleseeds, harvesting a natural bounty of daffodils or organic green beans from forgotten dirt. It’s a step into more self-reliant living in the city,” says Erik Knutzen, coauthor with his wife, Kelly Coyne, of “The Urban Homestead” to be released in June. The Echo Park couple have chronicled “pirate farming” on their blog, Homegrown Evolution. Guerrilla gardening, Knutzen says, is a reaction to the wasteful use of land, such as vacant lots and sidewalk parkways. He’s turned the parkway in front of his home into a vegetable garden.

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Photo: Jac Smit standing in blue shirt on far left. (photo taken in New York, 2001, at a meeting of the Support Group For Urban Agriculture. Beside Jac standing, Luc Mougeot IDRC, Yves Cabanne UNCHS/UNDP, Gordon Prain CGIAR, sitting l to r, Michael Levenston City Farmer, Olivia Argenti FAO.

Jac Smit is one of the world’s leading thinkers on the subject of urban agriculture. His seminal book “Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities” is a classic.

The Climate-Neutral Post-Carbon City
May 30 2008

A decade ago, late 1990s, we engaged in the establishment of the urban agriculture industry. A visit to Google tomorrow will find 1,740,000 entries. It was then targeted at food security and building community. Since then we have added farming the city as an economic generator and as an element of Urban Greening.

The next step is to add carbon farming as a core or foundational element of this industry. Another turn of phrase, we are adding a core commodity to those we are familiar with such as vegetables, poultry, herbs, fruit and flowers.

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“Plants such as lettuce, peppers and tomatoes will be on the menu at Moon Base One.” Photo by CNN.

Article By Mark Tutton CNN May 22, 2008

“Wheeler sees this development of space farming as a gradual process in which space outposts become increasingly self-sufficient. “It would probably be evolutionary,” he said. “The first human missions to Mars might set out with everything stowed, but they might set up the beginnings of an in-situ production system — maybe a plant chamber — that you could use to grow perishable foods.

“So what’s on the menu at Moon Base One? Well, initial crops would need to be small in stature and grow well in controlled environments with artificial light. Plants such as peppers and tomatoes are already extensively grown hydroponically, while lettuce, with its short lifecycle, would yield fast returns for pioneering space colonists.

See complete CNN article here.

See The Controlled Environment Agriculture Center (CEAC) here.

By Marc Boucher-Colbert 2008
Email: jambrazil2@yahoo.com

I’m Marc Boucher-Colbert, the rooftop vegetable gardener at Rocket Restaurant at 1111 E. Burnside in Portland, OR. I’d like to take you on a brief tour of Rocket’s garden, but it’s a tour that will not be limited to the mere physical – the beds and crops – but will encompass the vision, history, and philosophy of that garden. After all, doesn’t everything in the outer world have its ongoing conversation with the inner?

And, yes, if you haven’t already guessed, I’m one of those gardener/farmers who came to the profession from a solidly liberal arts background, hence the philosophical musings. I have a B.A. in religious studies and a master’s in education, but my gardener’s training has come from the field, which I came to later in life. Thankfully, I had a latent talent for growing things. For many years I ran Urban Bounty Farm, a city-based CSA farm, and now, in addition to my rooftop duties at Rocket, am Garden Specialist at Franciscan Montessori Earth School in Portland. But I digress - on to the garden!

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Major Canadian newspaper starts a weekly how-to series about city farming.
Nicholas Read, Vancouver Sun
Published: Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Photo by Bill Keay

“I’m 51 years old and I can’t grow a carrot. That is a shameful thing. Growing food is the most vital skill anyone can have, and here I am, well past mid life, and I don’t have it. In many cultures, survival in the face of such appalling ignorance would be a miracle.

“But not this one. Thanks to the miracle of western civilization, I have been afforded the constant luxury of having food delivered to me on a platter. Whether in a grocery store or a restaurant, it’s always been there. And as long I’ve had the wherewithal to pay for it, I have seldom given it a thought. Until now.

Read author’s story here.

And the author’s Blog.

Photo by Kym Pokorny from her blog “Dig in with Kym”.

Article by Kym Pokorny
The Oregonian October 2007

From atop the Rocket building, there’s no doubt you’re smack in the middle of a city. Swing around in a circle and you’ll see the sun going down on Big Pink, the arching Fremont Bridge thronged with traffic, the new aerial tram creeping up the hill to OHSU and the green-and-white 7-UP building plunked down squarely to the east.

When you scrape your eyes off Portland’s skyline and focus on what’s going on just below eye level, you may begin to doubt your urban sureness. The usual flat-topped, tar-papered city rooftop has been overtaken by edible productiveness, food that ends up in front of customers at the new Rocket restaurant.

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