Category — Canada

In planting the garden, the hotel also wishes to sow seeds of change, creating Montréal’s first downtown hotel rooftop garden.

By Quebecgetaways,
September 9, 2011

Excerpt:

It isn’t possible to visit this secret garden. But guests at the hotel can already taste the difference in their plates. Since the month of May, the garden has already provided different kinds of eggplant, plum tomatoes, beets, peppers, Swiss chard, endive, radishes, zucchini, Montréal melons and several kinds of mint and basil for amazing results!

This urban garden gets perfect sun for growing food. The hotel has opted for a container culture technique developed by experts from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

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Sustainable ideas: Above, Dave Carlson in the garden of his home. Carlson runs Common Ground Community Farm in Burnaby, a community supported agriculture project. Photograph by Jason Lang.

Sustainable model of farming brings together growers and consumers

By Christina Myers
Burnaby Now
January 25, 2012

Excerpt:

Last season, he grew dozens of different crops, from herbs to squash and everything in between, and had 17 members. He also sold produce at a number of local farm markets.

This year, he’s hoping to expand his membership to 60, particularly with residents in neighbouring communities like New Westminster, for the 20-week season.

And he may bring in some new “friends” as well.

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A transformed piece of city land, the Demonstration Food Garden.

Red Celery In the Sunshine – An Urban Eden: transforming hopeless backyard hardpan into a lush organic plot

A story about City Farmer’s Demonstration Food Garden
Article and photography by Michael Levenston
Originally published in Harrowsmith Magazine
April/May 1984 Number 54

It is little more than a stone’s throw from downtown, a means of measure quite appropriate for the volunteers digging, weeding and discarding rocks from the painstakingly created soil that covers the sunny backyard of the Vancouver Energy Information Centre. Here, beautifully illustrated signs identify plants and techniques for gardeners who pass by a cold frame, a large solar greenhouse, a three-bin composting system and 30 raised beds filled with healthy vegetables. Occasionally, a train clangs by almost close enough to touch, overwhelming all the other city sounds and reminding the gardeners that not long ago, this little chunk of Eden was not much better suited to growing food than the railway siding next to it.

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City Farmer Society from 1978-2003

By Michael Levenston
City Farmer – 2003

In 1978, a group of young environmentalists working at the Vancouver Energy Conservation Center stumbled across a book called The City People’s Book of Raising Food by William and Helga Olkowski. It described in everyday language how the authors grew all their own food right in the middle of the city of Berkeley. This inspiring book led us on an exploration of urban food production, which continues today, twenty-five years later.

Working at an energy center, the first thing that struck us was the amount of fossil fuel used to transport food from far away farms to our supermarkets. We quickly realized that there were real savings for people who grew food at home. Such a simple act struck us as revolutionary, especially when we saw that there were other environmental and social problems that could be addressed as well. The urban farmer became our new-found hero!

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The Metro Vancouver Small Farm Resource Manual is a project of the Richmond Food Security Society. This Manual is offered as a resource to small-scale farmers to help them source supplies, services, markets, and knowledge. The manual is a dynamic manual that can expand with your feedback and can be updated easily online.

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Photo by: photo: Victoria Taylor and Katie Mathieu.

A look at the life-cycle of a rooftop vegetable farm for a Canadian restaurant—complete with hydroponic planters, a hoop house—including the harvest of beautiful vegetables.

By Victoria Taylor and Katie Mathieu
Garden Design
Jan 4, 2012

Excerpts:

In the spring of 2010, Parks & Rec, a rooftop vegetable garden, was established on the roof of downtown Toronto restaurant Parts & Labour. It was designed and operated as a for-profit roof farm by the two of us, landscape architect Victoria Taylor, OALA, and trained chef and permaculturalist Katie Mathieu.

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Urban farm pressure. A combine harvests wheat off Fischer-Hallman Road in Kitchener. As Kitchener’s suburbs have grown outward, the once-quiet countryside has become a busy suburb. Photo by David Bebee.

“Urbanization forces farmers to become land speculators, even the ones that don’t want to be,”

By Greg Mercer,
Record staff
Jan 06 2012

Excerpt:

Flourishing cities are good for a lot of things. But when you’re a farmer, growing food in the urban shadow can also be a real pain in the neck.

Waterloo Region is home to about 1,400 farms, and the roughly $400-million sector still employs about 3,500 people directly. But as our population swells past 550,000 residents, some farmers are feeling increasingly out of place on land their families have farmed for decades.

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(From left) Niki Strutynski, Simone MacIsaac and Sarah McMillan eked out a profit last year on sales of $80,000 to farmers’ markets and local restaurants. Photo Adam Blasberg.

“I think there’s a growing demand and I think it’s going to keep growing, but it’s still a really hard way to make a living.”

Excerpt:

McMillan now runs the farm with fellow UBC Farm practicum graduates Simone MacIsaac, 33, and Niki Strutynski, 32. Having cleared the hurdle of securing land, labour is now the main limitation to business growth for Rootdown, which grossed $80,000 in sales last year. “The market is definitely there. People are interested in more than we can produce, but we can’t physically do any more than we can do,” says McMillan, noting that Rootdown hosted several volunteer workers in 2011 to help lighten the load.

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City Farmer – Adventures in Urban Food Growing by Lorraine Johnson

Urban Agriculture: Ideas and Designs for the New Food Revolution by David Tracey

Carrot City: Creating Places for Urban Agriculture by Mark Gorgolewski, June Komisar, and Joe Nasr

The Urban Food Revolution – Changing the Way We Feed Cities by Peter Ladner

Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution by Jennifer Cockrall-King

Beginning with Lorraine Johnson’s City Farmer in 2010 and including Jennifer Cockrall-King’s Food and the City coming out in February 2012, Canadian writers have produced five well-researched, well-written and fascinating books on urban agriculture. Not since the seminal Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs, and Sustainable Cities was published over ten years ago has there been such attention paid to this global movement.

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Happy New Year!

And the weather report here in Vancouver is for more rain and mild temperatures. Wear your rubber boots to visit our rubber duckies at the Compost Demonstration Garden.

Success and failure in the worldwide urban agriculture movement

By Todd Major
North Shore News
December 28, 2011

Excerpts:

This has been a year of success and failure for the worldwide urban agriculture movement that is desperately trying to atone for past abuses against the environment and to respond to growing concerns about the safety and sustainability of modern food production.

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Rick visits the 41st annual Canadian Western Agribition in Regina, Saskatchewan

Richard Vincent “Rick” Mercer is a Canadian comedian, television personality, political satirist, and blogger.

See more of Ric on his website here.

And Wikipedia here.

Market-cargo. Urban farmers riding down Main Street to the market, carrying tent, tables, produce and flowers from south Vancouver. Photo by By Bhlubarber, David Niddrie.

While urban farmers may have gotten some of the answers they were looking for at the forum, it appears they may have actually gotten more questions!

Vancouver Urban Farmers Newsletter
Dec 2011

Excerpts:

The Urban Farming Forum took place on November 25 and 26th, 2011 at Boneta restaurant and SFU Woodwards in Vancouver. Both days were well attended by an enthusiastic crowd of urban farmers, food security advocates, NGO representatives, and consumers.

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He informed the crowd that he added another $5,000 into the business to top the season at over $65,000 in sales

By Javan
Permaculture BC
2011-11-24

Excerpt:

Victoria, BC. – Over 80 people came out to listen and ask questions of Curtis Stone, a Kelowna urban SPIN farming.

Curtis has been a practicing SPIN farmer now for over two seasons. In his first season a $8,000 investment yielded $20,000 in profit. This year he informed the crowd that he added another $5,000 into the business to top the season at over $65,000 in sales.

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Community residents distribute the fruit of their labour at the Firgrove Crescent public housing development. Photo by David Trattles.

“Our main focus was to make sure that food was accessible to our community at reasonable prices.”

By Clifton Joseph
with photography by David Trattles
Canadian Geographic
Oct 2011

Excerpt:

Jamaican-born single mother Janet Young and her teenage daughter Andrene are working opposite ends of their plot. Andrene has gloves on and is pulling out weeds from around the tomatoes, while Janet is disentangling big leafy green vines from some of the other plants. “Steups!” she hisses, kissing her teeth. “I gotta tell you, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s never plant the zucchini next to the callaloo or the peppers, because it takes so much space that it overpowers anything else that’s too close to it. You’ve got to give the zucchini space!

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Montreal community garden. Photo by Andreas Sundgren.

They announced they had amassed 25,000 signatures

By Monique Beaudin,
Montreal Gazette Environment Reporter
November 15, 2011

MONTREAL – A coalition of 50 organizations has made history in Montreal by collecting the required 15,000 signatures on a petition to force the city to hold public hearings on the state of urban agriculture here.

Members of environmental, gardening and social groups spent the last three months gathering the signatures from Montreal residents. On Tuesday, they announced they had amassed 25,000 signatures.

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2011 Gardens for Good grants – three programs share $65,000 in funding

By Danielle Wong
The Spec
November 7, 2011

Excerpt:

Hamilton, Ontario – Oliver Allen-Cillis’s plan was simple: grow vegetables in his home garden so other children don’t have to rummage through the blue bin.

But the seven-year-old’s homegrown project to raise funds for local youth charities has outgrown his back yard, as his idea was awarded a $20,000 grant from Nature’s Path Organic.

The Cumberland Avenue resident and his family found out they were one of three winners of a North American contest and the most-voted-for Canadian entry last week.

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Almost 30 years ago Karin created our ‘Urban Gardens’ poster

How thrilling — to meet for the first time Karin Yager, whose beautiful poster has graced our office walls for three decades. Over the years, we’ve mailed this colourful rooftop vision out to hundreds of gardeners around the world. Many of them have told us how much they love it.

Karin was hired by Environment Canada in the early 1980’s to create a poster for us soon after she graduated from design school. Some years later she was hired by the United Nation’s World Food Program (WFP) to design their logo, a masterpiece in my view, depicting a hand holding rice, maize and wheat. The idea that our tiny non-profit society is somehow related to the massive WFP is wonderful, – both organizations aiming to make food accessible to those in need.

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Mayor Gregor Robertson debates with NPA mayoral candidate Suzanne Anton.

The urban agriculture movement is gaining strength across B.C., enthusiastically adapted by everyone from businesses to backyard growers to pot-growers. So why is it being used as a wedge issue in Vancouver’s latest election?

By Peter Ladner
Crosscut
Nov 7, 2011
Peter Ladner is the founder of “Business in Vancouver” newspaper and a former Vancouver City Councillor. He is currently a Fellow at the Simon Fraser University Centre for Dialogue. His new book is named: The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way We Feed Cities.

Excerpt:

As the Nov. 19 municipal election deadline nears, the struggling right-of-center Non-Partisan Association (NPA) has been challenging the ruling Vision Vancouver party’s misspending through its Greenest City Action Plan. The one project singled out for high profile ridicule is the “wheat fields” — a modest $5,000 grant to the Environmental Youth Alliance dedicated to planting enough wheat in numerous front yards to harvest 100 pounds, redefine the notion of the “city farm,” and teach young people how bread is made. It’s definitely a stretch of taxpayer dollars, but hardly significant for a city with a $1 billion budget.

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Maria holding wasp nest. Photo by Michael Levenston.

Sheryl: “… A dark shadow that looked like an alien head.”

When staff aren’t giving tours, answering the Compost Hotline, or talking to the media, they are gardening our 1/4 acre ‘office’ in Vancouver. Our front garden is landscaped with native British Columbia plants that we don’t have to water in the summer.

This week Sheryl was doing some Fall clean-up out front on an attractive bush. “It was quite the feeling to be pruning away and then to reveal this dark shadow that looked like an alien head, but upon closer inspection it was a beautiful, perfect, huge wasp nest.”

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