Category — City Farmer

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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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.

Photo of Bill in his backyard in Acton St, Berkeley, California around 1975. In March 1975 the Olkowskis published “The City People’s Book of Raising Food”.

And we’ve just heard from Bill and Helga Olkowski!

From Bill’s email:

You may remember us as the authors of the “City Peoples Book of Raising Food” back in the 1970′s.  We gave a talk in Seattle for the Pea Patch Group then encouraging people to set up community and backyard gardens.  I remember this talk as one of the high points of our life because it went like this:

We were giving a rousing talk about how important urban agriculture is and could be for the following reasons:

1) it can save money,
2) it can save gasoline normally spent going to the market and traveling for fun,
3) it produces clean food without pesticides,
4) it’s good for the ecosystem since it uses compost from food wastes, and
5) it reduces the amounts of waste vegetable matter thus saving space in dumps.

At the end we asked for questions and the great question arose: “Who is going to do all this?”

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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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“Saffron’s aroma is often described by connoisseurs as reminiscent of metallic honey with grassy or hay-like notes.” Wikipedia

At the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden.

Maria planted ‘Crocus sativus’ last Thanksgiving and now, a year later, the plants have bloomed. We look at the spice and its three vivid crimson stigmas used for cooking.

We asked Andrea Carlson, Executive Chef at nearby Bishop’s Restaurant, for some ideas on how she might use the spice.

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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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Mespilus germanica features an unusual apple-like fruit that requires bletting to eat; although not widely eaten today, consumption of these fruits was much more common in the past.

Mike: I am able to remember the tree’s name by calling it ‘Blet Medlar’ after the comic actress Bette Midler.

Today we met two people, born in Northern Iran, who were picking the fruit of a Medlar tree planted along a residential street in Vancouver. They loved this fruit, but hadn’t tasted it since leaving Iran 26 years ago.

The couple said that after taking the fruit home, they would let them ripen (blet) under a cloth on a tray in a warm place for a couple of weeks before eating. Finding these fruit brought memories back and tears to their eyes.

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Title: Cliffside Arbutus Tree. “He painted for over 50 years, totally unrecognized, every week, every month, every year.” See more of Donald Flather’s work here.

Flash from the past – 1979 article in City Farmer Newspaper

By Kerry Banks
City Farmer Newspaper
Vol 2 No. 1, October, 1979
(City Farmer began in 1978 by publishing a newspaper. Kerry is a founding member of City Farmer. He is an award-winning freelance writer and journalist. See bio further on.)

(1979) – Dr. Donald Flather and his wife Grace have one of the more unique vegetable gardens in Vancouver. It’s the last remaining ‘victory garden’ from the city’s World War Two home food production effort.

Beginning back in the early forties, the Government of Canada made a concentrated effort to get city and town folk involved in growing their own food. Large advertisements were placed in the daily newspapers.

“Plant a wartime garden,” they urged. “Home production of vegetables is needed now more than any time during the war. Help by growing the vegetables your family needs.”

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See City Chase adventurers in action in this video.

A unique urban adventure: counting worms, learning about composting

City Chase brought a few hundred explorers to the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden as part of a unique urban adventure. Participants had to dig through our worm bins and find 10 worms and also answer questions about the composting process. It was a wonderful way to introduce people to home composting.

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The string bikini tops worked best at the Vancouver Compost Garden

Sean and Maria built a small greenhouse this past spring at the Vancouver Compost Garden. The raised beds inside were filled with a soil blend that included leaves, various composts we had around the garden, and layers of ‘White Dragon’ compost made from our mid-scale electric composter that was fed food scraps from a local restaurant.

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Four videos about urban agriculture in Vancouver by Anja Schuchardt

By Anja Schuchardt
DieBioKuche
Aug 19, 2011

Mehr Gärtner in Großstädten? Der Demonstrationsgarten von “City Farmer” in Vancouver

Pflügen, Pflanzen, Pflücken – was bringt Städter dazu? Michael Levenston über seinen Demonstrationsgarten und die Probleme für Stadtgärtner in Vancouver.

Plowing, growing, picking – what makes townspeople to do this? Michael Levenston tells us about his demonstration garden and the problems which city farmers have in Vancouver.

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Watch Heidi catch a Wolf Spider!

I spotted a rather large Wolf Spider in the compost toilet shed yesterday and knew that the gardeners wouldn’t be happy to come across it unexpectedly. Heidi volunteered to move the unwanted eight-eyed Arachnid and I caught the daring act on video.

During my 30 years at the Compost Garden, various staff have shared with me their fear of the spider, a great insect hunter. Theirs is a common phobia, some feeling it more than others.

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Mike Levenston of the City Farmer Society puts meat and fish scraps, dairy and waste food paper such as pizza boxes in Vancouver’s yard waste bin. Photograph by: Ian Smith, PNG, Vancouver Sun

If it is successful, there are plans to expand it to all neighbourhoods next year

By Jeff Lee
Vancouver Sun
July 12, 2011

Excerpt:

It can take years for recycling programs to catch on. It took 15 years for Vancouver’s blue-box recycling program to achieve a 77-per-cent participation rate. San Francisco, which brought in its food-scraps program in 2000, has a 30-per-cent participation rate. Seattle, which began diverting food scraps in 2005, has a success rate of 50 per cent.

But the incentive is there, says Chris Underwood, Vancouver’s manager of solid-waste management. Fully 35 per cent of the city’s garbage – or about 129,000 tonnes – is made up of kitchen and compostable wastes, he said. Of the more than three million tonnes of garbage produced in the region, 55 per cent is already diverted to recycling and composting.

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The connection between compost and food, and the education of children

Young people come to volunteer at Vancouver’s Compost Demonstration Garden as soon as summer holidays begin. Claire and Blair visited this week and helped us harvest our weekly donation basket of produce. They then delivered it to West Side Family Place.

Head Gardener Sharon Slack supervised the collection of vegetables and herbs, and provided the kids with a huge lesson in what lies beyond our supermarket shelves.

Created by artist Jodie Mayne

Local artist Jodie Mayne created this sandwich board for our Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden.

Jodi Mayne is a Vancouver based artist who grew up in the beautiful Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island. At the age of twenty she moved to Vancouver to study visual art at The Emily Carr University of Art and Design. During her schooling Jodi was mainly focused on Printmaking techniques and developed a real love for line and shape, which is now evident in her painting and drawing. Living and growing up on the West Coast of British Columbia has given Jodi an appreciation for the rich surroundings she is so fortunate to be a part of everyday.

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Photo © Maria Keating.

At City Farmer’s Compost Demonstration Garden 2150 Maple Street, Vancouver BC.

2011 Classes
Instructor: Maria Keating, City Farmer’s own Bug Lady

Adults:
Learn how to safely deal with insects in your backyard. This two-hour garden seminar includes; insect identification and lifecycles, attracting native pollinators, predators and butterflies to your garden, hands-on pest control methods and how to make, use and take home handy tools of the insect trade. Turn over a new leaf and see what the macro world is doing in the city and in your own backyard!

Adult Classes: $20 per person
Friday June 17 – 1pm – 3pm or Saturday July 23 – 10am -12pm
(space is limited to 10 people per class – please contact the Compost Hotline (604) 736-2250 for availability)

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Seeds of self-sufficiency

By Monique Beadin
Montreal Gazette Environment Reporter
May 20, 2011

Excerpt:

MONTREAL – On the sidewalk in front of Marci Babineau’s house, I craned my neck to see if I could spot the birds.

In the backyard, just beyond her root-vegetable garden and several fruit trees, a chicken stretched out a wing, then ruffled her black feathers back into place.

Not exactly what a passerby would expect to see on a quiet, tree-lined street minutes from downtown Montreal (I can’t say exactly where; more about that later).

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Video by BCIT Magazine, Liz Craig.

Nothing really brings together people like food – especially when that food is locally grown!

Article by Julia Smith
Dunbar Life
Feb. Apr. 2011

Excerpt:

My son gave me a sign he had hand-carved for Christmas. “Dog Gone Farm”, it reads, in jaunty red letters (inspired by our fence jumping dog). With the sign hung proudly on the front door, it was official. We were farmers. We grow fruits and vegetables, build soil, and raise chickens, which wouldn’t be unusual if it weren’t for the fact that we do all this in the middle of the city.

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The Face Behind CityFarmer.org – Interview with Michael Levenston from The Socio Capitalist on Vimeo.

Socio Capitalist Interview with Michael Levenston

By Luke Miller Callahan
The Socio Capitalist
05/04/2011
(Disclaimer: The audio and video quality is not great -Luke)

More information here on The Socio Capitalist.