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.

Its drip system and water reserve provide optimal conditions that encourage plant growth.

Read the complete article here.

Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth Looking Forward to Tasty Results with Organic

By Joanne Papineau
Hotel Press Release
27/04/2011

Montréal, Québec, April 27, 2011 — At the end of May 2011, Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth hotel will inaugurate its new rooftop garden on the hotel’s 22nd floor. This project spearheaded by the hotel’s Environmental Committee was inspired by the Executive Chef’s dedication to sourcing local ingredients and his efforts to serve guests the freshest products.

The hotel has previously experimented with indoor and outdoor gardening, starting as early as 1976, when Chef Albert Schnell introduced hydroponic culture in his kitchen to grow varieties of fine herbs that were not available year-round in Montréal. In 1994, Chef John Cordeaux decided to grow aromatic herbs outdoors, on a low roof, accessible only by a window on the 4th floor of the hotel.

In 2010, the hotel reactivated the project with an indoor experiment along the windowsill of the second level of Le Montréalais restaurant. Tended by the hotel’s gardener, this organic vegetable and fresh herb garden brought in surprising results.

Encouraged by this success, the Environmental Committee decided to take up urban gardening on the hotel’s main roof which benefits from all-day full sun exposure. The hotel decided to use an innovative concept in container horticulture that was developed by experts from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and intended for professional organic greenhouse vegetable producers. This low-maintenance system is self-sufficient, and the plants are watered and fertilised automatically with a drip system.

Executive Chef Alain Pignard is looking forward to growing his own produce and explains that “If we try to grow at least part of what we need, in a healthy, low-impact way, and source the rest from small local producers, we will all lower our carbon footprint and reap delicious rewards.”

In planting the garden, the hotel also wishes to sow seeds of change, creating Montréal’s first downtown hotel rooftop garden. The culinary team at Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth wants to bring green to new heights with unique and colorful varieties of herbs, edible blooms, fruits, and vegetables that will be harvested daily for use in the hotel’s kitchens and outlets.

Naturally, where there are inspiring ingredients there are inspired chefs for the greatest pleasure of diners.

Fairmont Hotels & Resorts is committed to reducing its environmental footprint and Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth is staying true to company roots. The hotel will follow organic growing practices and compost leaves and plants at the end of the growing season.

Also see “Montreal’s Historic Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth Hotel Grows its Own Produce on an Edible Roof Garden” here.

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.

“In the spring, I plan to get some goats and start making goat cheese, and maybe some chickens to get some eggs,” he said.

“I’ve always been into gardening; about five years ago I came in fourth for a residential garden award,” he said.

Read the complete article here.

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.

The garden began to take shape on a warm fall Sunday in 1981, when 11 people met in the backyard of the newly opened centre at Maple Street and Sixth Avenue, overlooking the Burrard Bridge, which spans False Creek and leads to downtown Vancouver. Their spirits high, the volunteers marked the proposed boundaries of the beds and then lunged at the earth with their garden tools like so many horticultural break dancers. After 10 minutes, only one sturdy soul with a pickaxe was left chipping at the cement-like ground. A chemical smell brought the rest of the dejected gardeners to their knees. Was it machine oil, paint thinner or something worse? No one could be sure. Neighbours said that the previous tenants had fixed their trucks in the yard and dumped waste liquids there.

Volunteers double-dig.

A soil science professor called to the site said that radical surgery was necessary – the present soil had to go. Before any gardening could take place, the top foot of polluted soil would have to be removed and replaced with a commercial topsoil mix. A homeowner faced with a similar problem could build only one bed at a time, digging out a foot-deep rectangle the size of the proposed bed, filling that with purchased topsoil and mounding the soil a further 6 to 12 inches to construct a raised bed. But an urban agricultural project was something special, so the volunteers, whose work was financed by a hodgepodge of provincial, federal and private donations, decided to go to the trouble and expense of replacing all of the soil.

Sponsored by City Farmer (a nonprofit society that was formed in 1978) the Demonstration Food Garden was designed as a place where city people could come and see food growing in a small urban space, and at the same time, they could learn how to grow that food themselves. The would-be city farmers could gain experience by working in the garden under the direction of an experienced food gardener.

Joan MacNab (Mike’s wife, ‘Mrs. City Farmer’) and volunteer Jean raise the beds.

URBAN AGRICULTURE

We at City Farmer knew that there was a need for such a facility. We had discovered that 70 percent of Canadians are urban dwellers whose food comes, for the most part, from supermarket shelves. Neither the public education system nor agricultural colleges, which teach large-scale commercial methods of farming, offer courses on small-scale agriculture to urban Canadians who want to learn how to produce some of their food.

The garden serves to demonstrate organic techniques and provides volunteers with a weekly share of fresh vegetables.

In 1982, City Farmer organized a special series of 18 lectures on urban agriculture to introduce Canadians to this new field of study. Subjects as varied as horticulture therapy, rabbit raising and urban air pollution were discussed indoors at the information centre, while outdoors, new topsoil was being spread over what had been an ugly 2,500-square-foot vacant lot. Attending the series of lectures and paying close attention to the work going on outdoors was artist Catherine Shapiro, who is an avid organic gardener with more than 15 years’ experience. She was hired as the demonstration garden’s head gardener, and under her guidance, the garden began to take shape.

Volunteers double-dug 3-by-11-foot beds to a depth of 2 feet, incorporating some of the original topsoil. Double-digging is a process by which sections of soil are removed, turned and replaced, providing a deeply worked subsoil. The volunteers then raised the beds eight inches above the surface, in the fashion of the Chinese backyard gardens in Vancouver’s East End. This combination of double-digging and raised beds, sometimes called the Biodynamic French Intensive Method, works well in rain-soaked Vancouver, because the deep beds leave the raised soil well drained and allow it to warm up quickly in the cool West Coast spring. In general, it is a good technique to use where space is limited, because it adds depth to the garden beds, allowing plants to be planted more closely than usual; roots gain in vertical growing room what they lose in horizontal. At the food garden, we recommend that beginning gardeners start with just one raised bed, then go to four beds be-fore expanding further.

Dan Penner moves compost.

The first four of our beds had been formed by early May 1982, but the crops planted in them did not thrive; it was clear that the beds were not complete. Despite the great efforts of the diggers, the soil was unable to support life adequately because it contained a large proportion of wood chips, a frequent problem with purchased West Coast topsoils. The chips not only stopped moisture from penetrating the surface of the beds but also stole valuable nitrogen from the soil as they slowly decomposed.

Shapiro was not perturbed. Years of organic gardening had shown her that she could make good soil out of any soil. And so, in the months ahead, she spent as much time and care in feeding the earth in the beds as in planting and weeding them. Fifteen cubic yards of rich, black mushroom manure from the prosperous Fraser Valley mushroom industry came to the garden in one large truckload. Comprised of composted horse manure, straw, peat, cottonseed meal and rapeseed meal, it immediately improved the quality of the top foot of soil in each bed, which seemed then like a soup cauldron to which each gardener added the best ingredients to make a perfect meal for the crops that would in turn feed the gardeners. The secret of the garden’s success was the city’s hidden organic waste, its horticultural wealth: mushroom manure, garden trimmings, kitchen wastes from a natural-foods restaurant nearby and plastic bags of horse manure brought to the newly built compost bins from stables in the Vancouver Southlands, just 10 minutes away. Occasional soil tests by the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture pointed out the strengths and weaknesses in the soil’s fertility.

Shapiro used blood meal and bone meal in 25-pound bags to add nitrogen and phosphorus to the newly formed beds, and dolomite lime was added to sweeten the typically acid soils of Vancouver. “To have a really good garden, you have to go a little bit further than just relying on compost,” says Shapiro. “I thought for years that just compost and the occasional load of manure were enough, and I had perfectly adequate gardens, but now, I’m not satisfied with adequate. I want Brassicas that are four feet high and three feet wide.”

Volunteers contributed potassium in the form of wood ashes from their homes and seaweed collected on Kitsilano Beach, just down Maple Street.

MARY’S MIX

Fortunately, a store featuring supplies for the organic gardener opened its doors not long after the garden got under way. Mary Ballon’s Earthrise carried bags of blended fertilizers that proved just right for growing vegetables. Mary’s Mix, as the volunteers call the blend, includes canolaseed meal, steamed bone meal, rock phosphate, greensand (a mineral-rich ocean-bottom deposit) and dolomite lime. Gardeners who do not have access to such a mix can purchase individual ingredients in garden stores or by mail order, substituting another meal for canolaseed if necessary.

L. to R. Volunteer, Catherine Shapiro with cauliflower, Michael Levenston, staff gardener.

Each time a crop came out of a bed, the volunteers raked Mary’s Mix into the surface area before another crop went in. Each time transplants were moved, Mary’s Mix went into the new soil first.

Besides keeping the earth in the beds well tended, Shapiro regularly top-dressed the surface of the soil around the base of the plants with a layer of compost or seaweed. “I don’t just top-dress once a month.” The third level of soil care came in liquid form. Volunteers served drinks of fish emulsion and manure tea to the plants whenever they showed signs of hunger, such as slowed growth or discoloured foliage.

The Vancouver City Demonstration Garden’s volunteers dig fertilizer into deep beds, then raise the beds 8 inches above path level using purchased topsoil.

Throughout the year, seeds were sown, crops were harvested, and the soil was fed, all in a continuous cycle. The attention paid to their nourishment not only helped the plants produce fine vegetables but directly affected their ability to resist pests as well. While blemish-free supermarket cauliflowers grown commercially around B.C.’s Lower Mainland receive an average of 11 sprays of poison from the time they are seeded to the time they are presented to the public in the stores – sprays for diseases, root maggots, aphids, loopers, cutworms, flea beetles, thrips and weeds – no poisons are used in the Demonstration Food Garden, and yet a fine-looking crop of every vegetable is harvested.

The garden’s compost pile, is built with manure, vegetable wastes and garden trimmings. Catherine Shapiro displays an organically grown cauliflower.

“The bugs that bother Vancouver gardens are the same from year to year,” says Shapiro. “This year, the bugs in the demonstration garden have been minimal because the soil is so good. The best bug prevention is keeping the garden clean, constantly planting and keeping the nutrient level so terrific that no matter what bug comes, your plant is healthy. A plant can survive nearly any kind of bug, provided you’ve given it optimum conditions. That’s the problem, keeping human beings energetic enough to maintain that.

“Unless a bug problem is really bad, I don’t pay that much attention to it. I used to think, ‘Ooh, bugs,’ but I have a friend who was in South America staying with these people who eat caterpillars. The kids take them off the tobacco plants and eat them with delight. That changed my attitude. If you’ve got a few aphids, and you wash them off, but a few end up in your salad or stir-fry, so what? I just can’t understand our obsession with bugs. People whine to me sometimes about bugs, and I just don’t want to hear about it, because what’s your alternative? It’s a poison, isn’t it? So I’d rather eat a few bugs.”

This is not to say that Shapiro does not use alternative pest-control methods. If she sees a pest problem, she deals with it immediately. For example, when aphids began to appear on some broad beans and on the leaves of the edible chrysanthemums, she and the volunteer gardeners quickly removed all the affected parts of the plants. No further outbreaks damaged the crops.

One crop of spinach, beets and Swiss chard leaves was attacked by leaf-miner maggots, so the next crop was protected with a fine screen that covered the whole bed, preventing the leaf-miner fly from laying its eggs on the leaves. Damage was cut by 95 percent. When cabbage-root maggots invaded tar-paper collars and diatomaceous earth barriers in the cauliflower patch, volunteers top-dressed the injured plants with compost and then fed them teas of garden-grown nettles and comfrey, followed by a second course of fish fertilizer. The plants recovered and produced excellent heads.

Shapiro’s techniques for nonpoisonous control of pests vary from insect to insect and from year to year. If she reads about an interesting approach, she puts it to the test. There is more art to her method than science, and she does not like to be pressed for precise measurements: “If I say to somebody that I dip the Brassica roots in lime water, people look at me and say, ‘How much lime?’ I say I make an insect spray of garlic and chilies. ‘How many chilies?’ I don’t know. I just get a feeling.”

View from the roof.

By the end of 1983, more than 150 volunteer apprentices had helped develop the garden while improving their own skills – both scientific and intuitive – as urban food gardeners. Some of these individuals were new immigrants who brought with them skills, attitudes and even seeds from their homelands. Others were Canadians on unemployment insurance or welfare who developed a greater sense of self-worth and self-reliance by working in the garden. One beginning gardener simply followed the routine, day by day, in her own garden and thus produced a very successful home garden on her first try. The ways the demonstration garden proved profitable were as numerous and varied as the volunteers and students who came to see it.

Varied, too, were the vegetables that Shapiro grew. She ordered a selection of 150 different kinds of seeds from more than 30 mail-order seed catalogues. Red and purple crops alone dazzled the students in 1983: red Brussels sprouts, purple baby cabbages, red celery, ruby chard, golden beets, red orach (an annual cultivated as a leafy vegetable in France), purple mustard, purple cauliflower and amaranth. The vegetables that surprised most Canadian visitors to the garden were tall, vigorous globe artichokes. Seeds planted in the greenhouse in spring were later transplanted to the garden, producing about 15 large chokes per plant by August.

“I think it would be boring to grow just white cauliflower and green broccoli, “says Shapiro. “Being an artist, I really like to see colour and variety.”

Shapiro also planted a wide selection of Chinese and Japanese vegetables, which are well suited to the West Coast climate. Leafy vegetables such as Chinese cabbage, bok choy and mustard greens are “cold-hardy and fast-growing,” says Shapiro. ‘You plant them continuously and always have something to put in stir-frys and soups. Whenever there’s an empty space in the garden, I plant them close together and then eat the trimmings. When I make a salad at home, there are usually 15 or 20 bits of this and that vegetable in it, which is best for our health as well as our taste.”

With crops being planted in and harvested from 30 beds year-round, it would be difficult to calculate just how much food is grown in the demonstration garden. However, Shapiro, the garden volunteers and the office workers in the energy centre each took home a weekly share of full bags of garden produce. As the soil in the garden has become richer, the small urban space has become incredibly productive.

The second, third and fourth stages of garden development are now underway. A large solar greenhouse shelters cold-hardy greens during the winter and heat-loving vegetables during the summer. The front and sides of the energy centre are being edibly landscaped with attractive, useful plants such as berry bushes, and finally, the roof of the building will soon support containers of plants, demonstrating rooftop and balcony gardening techniques.

The education programme at the garden will be stepped up in 1984. During every week of Vancouver’s 12-month growing season, an organized two-hour class will be held in the garden on a subject appropriate for just that time of year. Classes will no longer be held indoors, with students sitting and teachers lecturing. Students will now have the opportunity to practice bed preparation, fertilization, pest control without poisons, and planting and caring for a wide variety of crops, all under the watchful eye of the garden instructor.

The proposed Kitsilano site of the Vancouver City Demonstration Food Garden was, so the neighbours say, used by the previous tenants as a pit stop and waste dump. Contaminated and with the texture of cement, its soil had to be removed and replaced in order to support abundant crops two years later.
The skills learned by the novice gardeners should be useful in almost any situation. We at City Farmer calculated that Vancouver people could grow all the vegetables they need on land now available within the city limits. Front and back lawns, vacant lots and rights-of-way can average as much as one pound of food per square foot if the gardener uses intensive small-scale agricultural techniques.

It is no wonder, then, that federal government futurists in both Ottawa and Washington are now studying the potential of North American urban agriculture for the coming decades or that international-aid organizations are looking to urban agriculture as a means of helping the burgeoning Third World urban populations feed themselves. They need not look much farther than the corner of Sixth Avenue and Maple Street in Vancouver, where a dedicated group of gardeners and students is proving that a city person with a bit of land exposed to sun and rain can grow some or all of his staple vegetables, and even a little red celery too.

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!

For someone like myself, who grew up cutting the lawn with a push mower, edging it with a shovel and digging out dandelions by hand, urban farming was a revelation – by pulling back a carpet of grass and planting a vegetable seed, I could put food on the table.

Bob Woodsworth, a founding member of the group, took us to his grandmother’s house to see her tidy steaming compost and then drove us to see the garden of a family friend, who cultivated fruit and vegetables in his very large yard. Bob’s philosophy of making change in society through ‘information sharing’ rather than aggressive confrontation became one of our main strategies.

Left to right: Michael Levenston, founding directors Risa Smith, Bob Woodsworth (34 years on the Board), Susan Gregory (Board member, 30 years-plus).

On a stroll down the back lanes of Chinatown, we marvelled at an elderly Asian woman planting bok choi and growing water vegetables in an old bathtub with feet. A few blocks over an Italian immigrant grew figs, bay leaves and kept chickens. These ‘mentors’ were all old people and our sixties’s generation philosophy of ‘don’t trust anyone over 30′ was given quite a jolt.

Every garden was a surprise, and our interest in all things to do with farming in the city grew. What exactly were organic fertilizers and were they really safer than synthetic ones, would car exhaust affect the crops we planted next to a busy street, and how could we change those ancient anti-livestock by-laws?

Sitting in a small co-op bakery, we reinvented ourselves by starting a non-profit society named, City Farmer – Canada’s Office of Urban Agriculture. The first part of the name, was a catchy, easy to remember moniker, the latter part expressed the serious side of our work – feeding people, social justice and environmental awareness. We joked that the bureaucrats in Ottawa might mistake us for an official government department and send us funds, but that never happened. However, I was once introduced as “Canada’s Unofficial Minister of Urban Agriculture”.

Eager to get the word out, we put together an eight page newspaper using the skills we had learned working on university papers – typesetting articles, pasting them onto layout sheets of cardboard and shipping them off to a printer. We loved writing the stories and seeing our names in print, but the arduous task of mailing out and delivering 2000 copies of the paper was more than we’d bargained for.

Michael Levenston and Bob Woodsworth at work on City Farmer newspaper over 30 years ago, before the Internet. Note all the paper.

Although most people loved the idea of producing food in the city, we were surprised to see opposition. Our first story titled “Chickens in Soup” was about a woman fighting City Hall to keep a few hens in her back yard. One alderman was outspoken in his attack, saying that allowing livestock inside the city was like “going back to the dark ages”. His vision of a modern city included skyscrapers, lawns and asphalt, a place far removed from the farm where so many of our Canadian ancestors grew up. The divide between the country and city was large.

It was just that divide that City Farmer wanted to end. While many of our generation dreamed of going “back to the land”, to some idyllic rural setting, we chose to bring that image of country to the city, in miniature if you like, in our gardens. We were hooked on the metropolitan lifestyle of museums, theatres and a multitude of ethnic restaurants, and wanted to add another fashion to the urban mix, both laid back and productive, something that could recycle our wastes, help cleanse the air and soil, and keep us healthy.

Our newspaper was just the beginning of our efforts to promote urban agriculture. In 1979 we invited the California guru of small-scale food gardening to town and put him on national radio. John Jeavons, the author of (a mouthful of a title for a book), How to Grow More Vegetables, Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine, received a huge and immediate response from his interview on the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC). Letters and requests for information poured in from across the country.

Seeing the reach of the larger media made a strong impression on our tiny organization and we added another tenet to our list of strategies – create interesting stories and share them with the press. By 1981 we were eager to get out of the office and get our hands black with soil rather than ink, so we created a Demonstration Food Garden on a parking lot behind a new environmental center at 2150 Maple Street. Lead by head gardener Catherine Shapiro, volunteers used a jackhammer to open the backyard hardpan, which soon turned into a lush organic plot. Our urban Eden showed the public what a garden looked like in every season. Reading about gardening was one thing, but seeing seedlings planted, finding a pest under a cabbage leaf, tasting blueberries picked fresh from the bush and unburying sweet kale in winter, these were a transformative experiences.

And so we added another strategy to our wisdom list – start demonstration projects and get hands-on experience so that we know what we’re talking about. Over the next decade we undertook several major urban agriculture experiments.

Close to where we lived in Chinatown was a large empty field. Using a year-long federal grant which paid for an organizer, we were able to help a group of interested community members get a lease from the Park Board for use of the 3 acre piece of land so that they could start a garden. Today, Strathcona Community Garden, is the most written about allotment garden in Canada and is visited by thousands of tourists as a destination point.

Strathcona Community Garden.

Dr. Gary Pennington, a University of British Columbia education professor, asked us to be part of his project, to transform the asphalt school yard of his old elementary school (Lord Roberts) into a model ‘green’ playground. City Farmer put in the food garden and hired instructors to show the kids and teachers how to grow food right in their schoolyard. One Grade 7 girl was shocked to learn that we’d spent $200 on a truck-load of smelly manure, which she thought could be better spent on a couple of attractive outfits for herself.

The highlight for the kids was making a salad for their teachers using their own garden produce. The Province’s Director of Nutrition was so impressed with the project that she organized a garden contest to judge the best school garden in all of British Columbia.

City Farmer teacher with students at the Lord Robert’s School Garden.

But how could we involve the elderly, the sick and the disabled in urban agriculture? Volunteers built a small ‘Ability Garden’ in our Demonstration Garden using raised planters, which gave access to wheelchairs. We then put a tiny job announcement in the newspaper to find staff -”must love gardening, must love people”- (the fewer words, the cheaper). The response was overwhelming and three big-hearted ‘horticulture activity coordinators’ were hired to take care of visitors.

Local care facilities were thrilled to have a fresh air destination and brought disabled children from a local hospital, 100-year-old residents from seniors’ homes and the sick from care centres. The kids, who couldn’t use their arms or legs, were fed fresh-picked strawberries and ice cream, old people plucked flower petals to decorate their hats and the more agile visitors in wheelchairs leaned into the raised beds and delighted in getting their hands in the soil. The day concluded with a civilized, afternoon tea under the shade of our large cherry tree.

Ability gardeners with City Farmer horticulture therapy staff.

In 1990, the provincial government began a program urging citizens to cut the amount of waste they send to landfills and suddenly composting was recognized as a useful technology for everyone, not just organic gardeners. The City of Vancouver and the Regional Government asked us to use our teaching garden to promote backyard and worm composting which we were happy to do because making rich soil is the foundation of urban agriculture.

Ironically at the same time that a local performance artist was being chased out of town for planning to crush a rat named “Sniffy” between two canvases, we introduced a rodent-resistant compost bin to prevent rats from dining out on compost piles. The bin was designed with both a top and bottom and no holes larger than 1/2 inch, and was adopted by cities across North America.

The new sustainable city involves more than just having a job and being a good consumer. It demands that we become resource conservers, protectors of the environment and producers. One of our early mentors summed up his economic reason for planting a food garden by reminding us that people pay taxes on both back and front yards as well as the house they live in, so why not make the vacant land pay for itself in food.

‘New hats’ are added to our teaching garden every year as we show residents what they can do to help solve urban problems. Technologies such as rain barrels to collect water for the garden, composting toilets to save thousands of liters of water used by flush toilets, and mulching lawn mowers to help cut yard waste trucked to the landfill are demonstrated at the site.

But perhaps the biggest change in our work has taken place away from the garden soil in a mysterious part of the environment named ‘cyberspace’.

In 1994, City Farmer went on-line publishing, “Urban Agriculture Notes” the descendant of our paper tabloid. The World Wide Web (www) was in its infancy, but already the promise of what was to come was clear. New countries connected to the Internet weekly, faster than anyone expected, and people from around the world discovered that they could read reports, share stories and put questions to an audience, the size they’d never dreamed of before.

In barely ten years, that promise has proved truer than we expected and the virtual world is part of the day-to-day life of millions of people. It is perhaps no coincidence that the concept of urban agriculture has been accepted so quickly.

The City Farmer web site is visited by hundreds of thousands of people – 4 million hits in 2002, 186 countries visiting. But more telling then these indicators is the “site visibility”. According to ‘Marketleap .com’, ‘Cityfarmer.org’ ranks in the same category as ‘Coke.com’, a brand name, which is known around the world, and which spends millions on advertising. The Web has evened the playing field and allowed tiny groups, who do not have the huge resources available to corporations and governments, to place their ‘product’ in front of people.

Because of the Internet, our backyard now includes the global community. City Farmer’s work involves traveling ‘virtually’ via the computer from country to country, documenting, communicating and networking. This is a long way from delivering a few thin newspapers to corner stores.

In 1999, City Farmer was honored to be made a partner in the Netherlands’s based Resource Center on Urban Agriculture and Forestry (RUAF). Funded for five years to “facilitate the integration of Urban Agriculture into the policies and programs of national and local governments and international funding agencies”, the RUAF has already set up regional focal points in Africa, the Middle East, South America and Asia.

Twenty-five years ago we could barely find a single reference to the term ‘urban agriculture’. Today, whether it’s at the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, or at the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg, development specialists are talking about city farming as a strategy to address rapid urbanization and growing poverty.

Recently, in an attempt to better document the urban agriculture potential within metropolitan areas, we purchased the latest aerial photos of the City, and, using GIS software, discovered that 1/3 of the total area of a typical residential block is landscaped and has the potential for food growing. At the same time we hired a market research company to poll residents and found that 44% of people in Greater Vancouver live in households that produce some of their own food.

It has been said that the easiest way to predict the future is to invent it. In our tiny office greenhouse next to the garden, City Farmer staff dream up never-ending lists of exciting ideas, which they then turn into reality.

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.

The website is now online and loaded with resources for farmers!  The website contains 39 resource categories and currently has 306 resources listed.  

CATEGORIES

Agriculture Support Programs (15)
Bees (20)
Books (1)
Business Planning (20)
Education & Training (30) Toggle
Farm Help & Volunteers (5)
Farm Supply Stores (4)
Farmer’s Market (9)
Finding Land (3)
Foodservice Equipment (5)
Fruit & Nut Trees (14)
Greenhouse & Season Extension (12)
Irrigation (9)
Labour and Safety (3)
Legal and Insurance (3)
Listservs & Message Boards (5)
Livestock (9) Toggle
Local Food Organizations (4)
Marketing (1)
Metro Vancouver Urban Farms (4)
Nurseries (57)
Packaging (5)
Plant and Animal Disease Identification (2)
Seeds (60) Toggle
Soil Compost & Manure (17)
Soil Testing (6)
Tools & Equipment (17) Toggle
Water Microbiology Testing (12)
Workshop/Meeting Space (5)

Visit the site here.

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.

The 1,800-square-foot farm, run free of chemicals, focused on growing produce for use by its primary client—the restaurant downstairs—and to study the feasibility of a for-profit, pop-up farm-restaurant relationship in an urban rooftop setting.

During the garden’s two-year run, from the beginning of 2010 to the end of 2011, we had lots of interaction and feedback from the restaurant and various other collaborators, and we both became acquainted with the challenges of this unique practice for landscape design and urban agriculture. We also learned a lot about how to build a rooftop garden for other businesses who might be interested in a similar venture for expansion, education, and public relations.

See the photos here.

“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.

And no wonder — Waterloo Region has lost about 32,375 hectares (80,000 acres) of working farmland since the 1920s, according to Statistics Canada.

It hasn’t all gone to urban sprawl, but much of it has. In the 1950s, the region’s built-up urban areas totalled 38 square kilometres. Today, they’ve swollen to over 202 square km, according to a study by the University of Waterloo’s map library.

Many farmers who own land near this region’s urban areas have had experiences similar to Henhoeffer’s. People trespass through their fields and tear up their land joyriding.

Read the complete article here.

“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.

Rootdown turned a profit in 2010, but like the majority of farmers in B.C., the three women supplement their income with off-farm work. And although McMillan estimates that 60 per cent of the farm’s profits come from farmers’ markets, the manpower required to staff market stalls makes it their least efficient source of income. Rootdown supplies about 10 restaurants, including Whistler’s Araxi, Four Seasons Hotel and Nita Lake Lodge, accounting for another 30 per cent of profits. Thanks to regular orders in bulk quantities, restaurants and hotels can be a small farm’s greatest security and most efficient source of income.

Read the complete article here.

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.

City Farmer – Adventures in Urban Food Growing

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.

See more about the book here.

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

You don’t have to journey to a rural paradise to find the farm of the future. It’s your neighbor’s suburban lawn, the roof of your uptown condominium, or the co-op market garden in the vacant lot down the street. Urban Agriculture is a detailed look at how food is taking root in our cities. It offers inspirational advice and working examples to help you dig in and become more self-sufficient with your own food choices.

See more about the book here.

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

Appealing to both design professionals and individuals curious about current ideas and initiatives for growing food in close proximity to the point of consumption, CARROT CITY: Creating Places for Urban Agriculture by Mark Gorgolewski, June Komisar, and Joe Nasr presents 40 projects, created by designers from the United States and around the world, that explore innovative approaches to making space for urban food production.

See more about the book here.

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

Producing food locally makes people healthier, alleviates poverty, creates jobs, and makes cities safer and more beautiful. The Urban Food Revolution is an essential resource for anyone who has lost confidence in the global industrial food system and wants practical advice on how to join the local food revolution.

See more about the book here.

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

One answer is urban agriculture. Food and the City examines alternative food systems in cities around the globe that are shortening their food chains, growing food within their city limits, and taking their “food security” into their own hands. Award-winning food journalist Jennifer Cockrall-King sought out leaders in the urban-agriculture movement and visited cities successfully dealing with “food deserts.” What she found was not just a niche concern of activists but a global movement that cuts across the private and public spheres, economic classes, and cultures.

See more about the book here.

And a link to Urban Agriculture: Food Jobs and Sustainable Cities by Jac Smit Joe Nasr Annu Ratta, 2001, 2nd edition here.

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.

Kate Murphy of the New York Times told of Frank Meuschke of Brooklyn New York, who tested his boulevard veggie soil and found it had lead contamination at 90 times the natural amount. “You won’t know if you’re at risk unless you test your soil,” said Murray McBride, a professor of soil chemistry at Cornell University. “It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, lead knows no socioeconomic boundaries.” said David Johnson, a professor of environmental chemistry at New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, where he has found lead concentrations as high as 65,000 parts per million in the yards of upscale homes.

Read the complete article here.

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.

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.

See details of Discussion Sessions:

The afternoon session was the discussion session, where ideas collected from the morning were grouped to form the following discussion topics

Business Support and Development
Community Connections
Finance and Managing Risk
Government Support #1
Infrastructure and Operation
Land Access
Land Utilization
The Big Picture
Government Support #2

See the complete summary here.

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.

This year Curtis is continuing to farm through out the winter challenging the common held beliefs that farming in Canadian winters is impossible.

Read the complete article here.

Green City Acres here.

“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!

“But my plot was very successful,” she continues. “I planted callaloo, zucchini, cabbage, chili peppers, Scotch bonnet peppers, tomatoes, thyme, collard greens, broccoli and onions. It’s fresh, all-natural organic stuff; no pesticides or anything like that. It tastes better than what you get at the supermarkets.”

The plot next to the Youngs’ blooming bed is brimming with hot chili peppers, eggplant, bitter melons, mint, okra and more. It belongs to Pakistani immigrants Qamar Sadiq and Muhammad Vaseer and their three daughters Javaria, Sadaf and Marriam.

“I always bring my daughters when I come here to work,” says Sadiq, “because I want them to know that they can grow some of their own foods.” Sadiq speaks quietly, with humility, but also with some glee, about her veggie bounty. “It’s not so much economics, because the batches are tiny, but the vegetables are so crisp and so tasty. I make mint chutney, I cook an eggplant dish that’s fried in chickpea flour and my husband makes his salsa every day with fresh chili.”

Read the complete article here.

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.

“This shows the interest that Montrealers have in urban agriculture,” said Marie-Eve Chaume, a spokesperson for the Groupe de travail en agriculture urbaine, which organized the signing drive.

“We would like the consultations to happen as quickly as possible.”

Link here.

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.

The grant will go to the Hamilton Community Garden Network (HCGN) and Green Venture, which will work with the family to expand Oliver’s idea across Hamilton.

“I felt awesome,” Oliver said Sunday, adding he was confident about their chances. “On the first day, we had already a lot of people voting. And then the next day, we had even more.”

Read the complete article here.

And another story about Oliver here. “An urban sprout nourishes the community”

2011 Gardens for Good grant recipients

GroW Gardens is volunteer-led program at Washington DC’s George Washington University. Harvest from the gardens serves local Miriam’s Kitchen, a social service agency that provides nutritious meals, case management, and art therapy to local homeless and at-risk citizens. The Gardens for Good grant will help enhance the existing garden infrastructure and expand the project to other sites in order to maximize yields and serve more people.

The Hamilton Community Garden Network (HCGN) is a vibrant but small group of committed garden enthusiasts who provide a wide array of support to emerging and established community gardens in Hamilton, Ontario. The Gardens for Good grant will be used to fund Oliver’s Garden Project, a program inspired by a young boy that provides individual citizens with the knowledge and resources needed to share their backyards and homegrown produce with the wider community.

CAPI, is a Minneapolis-based organization focused on social justice and anti-poverty initiatives among immigrants and refugees in the Twin Cities. They support their community in many different ways, from providing gardening tools and supplies to securing site permissions and assisting residents in preparing the community garden site for planting. The Gardens for Good grant will help CAPI create new gardens in poverty-stricken neighborhoods and make improvements to existing gardens. A portion of the gardeners’ harvest will also benefit the wider community through CAPI’s food shelf and Elder Care program.

See more here.

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.

And 30 years later Karin’s students are at our Demonstration Garden to help us design new promotional material.

Poster for sale.

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.

In another attempt to create a wedge issue, NPA has challenged Vision’s approval of urban chickens. Candidates for the party make public appearances with a chicken mascot, holding up a sign that says, “Chickens for Gregor” — a reference to Vancouver’s mayor, Gregor Robertson.

“Chickens. They love the mayor,” NPA mayoral candidate Suzanne Anton wrote in the Vancouver Sun last summer. “Their chicken brothers, sisters, and cousins can all retire to Vancouver. And if they wear out their welcome in somebody’s backyard, they can always move to the mayor’s $20,000 shelter for homeless chickens.”

Read the complete article here.

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.”

Sheryl turned the job of removing the nest over to our Bug Lady, Maria. “It is the most massive one I have seen in a while. I cannot believe it was so close to the sidewalk all summer!”

The wasps are gone/dead and the Queen has hidden herself somewhere nearby awaiting a new season.

We’ve hung the beautiful nest up to dry – a perfect welcome to those Halloween visitors who have a fear of wasp stings.