Category — Book

The New Urban Farmer
By Celia Brooks-Brown
Quadrille Publishing Ltd
March 2010

As the New Urban Farmer, Celia has been detailing the day-to-day goings on at her North London allotment since April 2007 through her blog for the Times Online, and March 2010 sees the launch of her monthly column, “Grow to Eat’, in BBC Good Food Magazine.

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Garden number 5. Cuba – Alberto’s Huerto, Havana. An urban vegetable garden in the space left by a collapsed building.

Around the World in 80 Gardens – BBC

Around the World in 80 Gardens was a television series of 10 programmes in which British gardener and broadcaster Monty Don visited 80 of the world’s most celebrated gardens. The series was filmed over a period of 18 months and was first broadcast on BBC Two from 27 January to 30 March 2008. A book and DVD based on the series were also published.

These food gardens were featured the series:

Garden number 32. USA – Liz Christy Garden, Manhattan, New York. The first community garden in New York City, founded in 1973 by local resident Liz Christy on a vacant lot on the corner of Bowery and Houston Street.

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Out of the Scientist’s Garden – A Story of Water and Food

By Richard Stirzaker
CSIRO Publishing
January 2010

Out of the Scientist’s Garden is written for anyone who wants to understand food and water a little better – for those growing vegetables in a garden, food in a subsistence plot or crops on vast irrigated plains. It is also for anyone who has never grown anything before but has wondered how we will feed a growing population in a world of shrinking resources.

Although a practising scientist in the field of water and agriculture, the author has written, in story form accessible to a wide audience, about the drama of how the world feeds itself. The book starts in his own fruit and vegetable garden, exploring the ‘how and why’ questions about the way things grow, before moving on to stories about soil, rivers, aquifers and irrigation. The book closes with a brief history of agriculture, how the world feeds itself today and how to think through some of the big conundrums of modern food production.

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Forthcoming May 2010

By: Lorraine Johnson
Greystone Books
Forthcoming May 2010
(Note: This book is not about our organization, “City Farmer”.)

City Farmer celebrates the new ways that urban dwellers are getting closer to their food. Not only are backyard vegetable plots popping up in places long reserved for lawns, but some renegades are even planting their front yards with food. People in apartments are filling their balconies with pots of tomatoes, beans, and basil, while others are gazing skyward and “greening” their rooftops with food plants. Still others are colonizing public spaces, staking out territory in parks for community gardens and orchards, or convincing school boards to turn asphalt school grounds into “growing” grounds.

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To be published April 2010

by Manny Howard
Scribner (April 27 2010)

“With My Empire of Dirt, Manny Howard has created a new job category, gonzo agriculturalist. The squeamish and the vegan-hearted shall enter at their own risk, for this is no gentle Farmer’s Almanac. It’s more like war reportage—on one side, angry rabbits, crazed chickens, and a patch of backyard clay so dry it makes concrete seem loamy; on the other, a Brooklyn-raised City Boy, who won’t take crop failure for an answer. Howard takes living off the land to an urban extreme that will make people think even harder about where their food comes from. Ultimately, though, as tornadoes come and fig trees nearly go, he discovers a marriage that needs tending to, proving that when it comes to love, at least, you shall definitely reap what you sow.”
—Robert Sullivan, author of Rats and Cross Country

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The Garden of Happiness

By Erika Tamar (Author), Barbara Lambase (Illustrator)
Harcourt Children’s Books, 1996

From Publishers Weekly:

Tamar, the author of such tough-minded YA novels as Fair Game, turns dewy-eyed in her first picture book, an idealistic tale about a community garden in a rundown part of New York City. A studiously multiethnic coalition of neighbors claims an empty lot, and there Mrs. Willie Mae Washington plants black-eyed peas and greens “like on my daddy’s farm in Alabama”; Mr. Singh raises valore, as he did in Bangladesh; etc. Young Marisol, pining to grow something, too, plants a seed she finds on the sidewalk and waters it faithfully. She is ecstatic when a sunflower finally blossoms and then grief-stricken when, at the end of the season, it dies.

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NPR Excerpt: ‘Farm City’ by Novella Carpenter

From Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter. Copyright 2009 by Novella Carpenter. Published by Penguin Press.

Chapter One

I have a farm on a dead-end street in the ghetto. My back stairs are dotted with chicken turds. Bales of straw come undone in the parking area next to my apartment. I harvest lettuce in an abandoned lot. I awake in the mornings to the sounds of farm animals mingled with my neighbor’s blaring car alarm.

I didn’t always call this place a farm. That didn’t happen until the spring of 2005, when a very special package was delivered to my apartment and changed everything. I remember standing on my deck, waiting for it. While scanning the horizon for the postal jeep, I checked the health of my bee colony. Honeybees buzzed in and out of the hive, their hind legs loaded down with yellow pollen. I caught a whiff of their honey-making on the breeze, mixed with the exhaust from the nearby freeway. I could see the highway, heavy with traffic, from the deck.

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Keeping Micro-flocks of Laying Hens as Garden Helpers, Compost Makers, Bio-recyclers and Local Food Suppliers

By Patricia Foreman
Good Earth Publications, Inc.
October 2009

Green city managers wanting to save money on solid waste management expenditures need only to encourage residents to keep laying hens. Why? Because one chicken eats about 7 pounds of food “waste” a month. A few hundred households keeping micro-flocks of laying hens can divert tons of yard and food biomass “waste” from trash collection saving municipalities thousands, even millions of tax payer dollars.

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by Elaine F. Weiss
Potomac Books Inc. 352 pages
December 31, 2008

“From 1917 to 1920 the Woman’s Land Army brought thousands of city workers, society women, artists, business professionals, and college students into rural America to take over the farm work after men were called to wartime service. These women wore military-style uniforms, lived in communal camps, and did what was considered “men’s work”– plowing fields, driving tractors, planting, harvesting, and hauling lumber. The Land Army insisted its “farmerettes” be paid wages equal to male farm laborers and protected by an eight-hour workday. These farmerettes were shocking at first and encountered skeptical farmers’ scorn, but as they proved themselves willing and capable, farmers began to rely upon the women workers and became their loudest champions.”

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Forthcoming (mid/late February 2010) – Special issue: Urban agriculture: Diverse Activities and Benefits for City Society (Craig Pearson)

Editor in Chief: Jules Pretty OBE, University of Essex, UK
The International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability (IJAS) is a cross-disciplinary, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to advancing the understanding of sustainability in agricultural and food systems

Most of us live in cities. These are becoming increasingly complex and removed from broad-scale agriculture. Yet within cities there are many examples of greenspaces and local food production that bring multiple benefits that often go unnoticed. This book presents a collection of the latest thinking on the multiple dimensions of sustainable greenspace and food production within cities. It describes the diversity of “urban agriculture” and seeks a balanced representation between the biophysical and social : agriculturists, environmental scientists and social scientists: planners, landscape architects and community development specialists dealing with issues such as resource use, aesthetics and social cohesion. It deals with urban agriculture across scales -from indoor plants to farm-scale filtration of greywater – although it does not include greenhouse production.

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An artist’s sketch illustrates the possibilities for rooftop urban agriculture and the rich potential for community connection. Credit: Durante Kreuk, 2009

The Challenge Series tells the story of Vancouver’s Olympic Village at Southeast False Creek: Millennium Water. Published in eight monthly installments, available on the web and in print, it focuses on the visioning, planning, design and construction processes and celebrates collaboration and sustainable innovation.

By Roger Bayley Inc.

Excerpts below.

Community Demonstration Garden

Located west of Parcel 4, the community demonstration garden will be designed and constructed after the Olympics. “The idea isn’t to have little plots for people to garden, but rather a space that is programmed with the school, community centre and neighbourhood for all to use and to learn about urban agriculture,” says Robin Petri from the City of Vancouver. Specific designs and programming have not yet been determined. Because of the site’s historic industrial use, the City has begun investigating how to handle nearby contaminated soils. The garden will be separated by a membrane from the contaminated industrial soil that underlies Hinge Park.

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Jac Smit Passed Away Sunday, November 15

From Joe Nasr, co-author with Jac of Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities.

Jac Smit, often referred to as “the father of urban agriculture”, passed away on Sunday November 15th at his Washington, DC home, a few days after his 80th birthday. After working initially in the US (notably Chicago), Jac had a long career as a planner around the world, with assignments in Egypt, Iraq, Tanzania, and across South Asia, among others. Jac was a pioneer in advocating for the cause of urban agriculture, first publishing on it in the 1960s. He was the lead author on the seminal book on the subject: Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities (1996). Jac founded The Urban Agriculture Network (TUAN) in 1992; the unique library that he collected for TUAN will form the foundation of a new Urban Food and Agriculture Learning Centre in Toronto, to be managed by MetroAg – Alliance for Urban Agriculture. For more information on Jac’s contribution to the field of urban agriculture, see www.jacsmit.com. Jac is survived by his wife Elise Fiber Smith. He will be greatly missed.

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The Square-Inch Gardener’s Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting

by R. J. Ruppenthal

With this book as a guide, people living in apartments, condominiums, townhouses, and single-family homes will be able to grow up to 20 percent of their own fresh food using a combination of traditional gardening methods and space-saving techniques such as reflected lighting and container “terracing.” Those with access to yards can produce even more.

Author R. J. Ruppenthal worked on an organic vegetable farm in his youth, but his expertise in urban and indoor gardening has been hard-won through years of trial-and-error experience. In the small city homes where he has lived, often with no more than a balcony, windowsill, and countertop for gardening, Ruppenthal and his family have been able to eat at least some homegrown food 365 days per year. In an era of declining resources and environmental disruption, Ruppenthal shows that even urban dwellers can contribute to a rebirth of local, fresh foods.

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My Ordinary Extraordinary Yard

By Greg Peterson

You can create your own urban farm. Creating your own urban farm is as simple as planting you flowerbeds with edibles. The payoffs can include home grown food and a deeper connection to the earth. In this unique mini-book, Greg Peterson shares how his yard went from grass and hedges to his very own Urban Farm, full of vegetables and fruit trees with plenty to share. His motto ‘food grows abundantly – lets grow it and give it away.’ This insightful book about how Greg’s Urban Farm came to be will inspire you to create your own urban farm.

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The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, 1954

“For fourteen successive years the gardens at Bilignin were my joy, working in them during the summers and planning and dreaming of them during the winters. The summers frequently commenced early in April with the planting, and ended late in October with the last gathering of the winter vegetables.
Bilignin surrounded by mountains and not far from the French Alps —”

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Author Steven McFadden Releases “An Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century”

Lincoln, NE – “Food and farms are involved in a blitzkrieg of changes,” writes veteran journalist Steven McFadden in The Call of the Land, published this month by NorLightsPress. The book joins a growing chorus voicing a new vision for food and agriculture. Picking up where Food Inc., the recent documentary on industrial agriculture, leaves off, the volume presents dozens of creative responses to the crisis.

Dubbed “An Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century,” the sourcebook documents a range of positive pathways to food security, economic stability, environmental health, and cultural renewal. To McFadden and others, the call of the land now is an SOS. The responses—from individuals, communities, cities, and institutions—are both imaginative and practical.

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By Darrin Nordahl
Island Press (September 23, 2009)
200 pages

Public Produce makes a uniquely contemporary case not for central government intervention, but for local government involvement in shaping food policy. In what Darrin Nordahl calls “municipal agriculture,” elected officials, municipal planners, local policymakers, and public space designers are turning to the abundance of land under public control (parks, plazas, streets, city squares, parking lots, as well as the grounds around libraries, schools, government offices, and even jails) to grow food.

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Beatrix Potter, ‘Benjamin Bunny nibbling lettuce leaf’ © Frederick Warne & Co. 2006

The Real Mr. McGregor’s Garden

Written by Victoria and Albert Museum

“Before she married in 1913, Beatrix Potter would accompany her family on three-month summer holidays in the countryside. In 1903 the Potters rented Fawe Park, a large, comfortable house in the Lake District, on the edge of Lake Derwentwater. Here, Potter was able to escape outdoors, sketching the terraced gardens that sloped down towards the lake and the beautiful fells beyond. The kitchen garden, with its greenhouses, cold frames and potting shed was a favourite retreat and inspired the setting for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (1904).

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Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives
By Carolyn Steel: Food urbanist
Published: 26 Mar 2009

“The question of how to feed cities may be one of the biggest contemporary questions, yet it’s never asked: we take for granted that if we walk into a store or a restaurant, food will be there, magically coming from somewhere. Yet, think of it this way: just in London, every single day, 30 million meals must be provided. Without a reliable food supply, even the most modern city would collapse quickly. And most people today eat food of whose provenance they are unaware.

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From the book: Marigold Garden

Pictures and Rhymes by Kate Greenaway
Engraved and printed by Edmund Evans, the first edition was published in 1885 by George Routledge and Sons, London & New York.

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