Category — City Farmer

Michael Levenston, executive director of City Farmer, is happy that Vancouver city council has passed a motion that as of April 22 will allow residents to dump fruit and vegetables into their yard waste bins for composting. Levenston is pictured at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden on Thursday. Photo by Jenelle Schneider, Province.

Fruits, Vegetables: Just Phase 1 of project

By Frank Luba
The Province
5 Mar 2010

Vancouver has made it easier for residents to be nice to the Earth on April 22 — which just happens to be Earth Day.

Starting then, people that live in single-family residences can start pitching their fruit and vegetable waste into their yard waste bins so it can be composted.

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Bite-It

February 2010
A C.I.P. Film

A group of Katimavik youth volunteers set out into North Vancouver and Vancouver to find out some answers about environmental initiatives on the subject of food security. They interviewed Mark Bomford, UBC Farm; Emanuel Langlois, Katimivik Participant; Heather Johnstone, Edible Gardens; Michael Levenston and Sharon Slack, City Farmer; Chef Scott Rowe, Salvation Army; Nicole Robbins, Organics@Home; Melanie ter Borg and Karen Morton, ecourbia.

Sharon and Michael, of Vancouver’s Compost Demonstration Garden, take us on a tour of their site, including the various new technologies that make composting, gardening and greening more urban home friendly.

Positively Green

By Katrina Prescott
W2CommunityTV
February 23, 2010

Through W2 we will be broadcasting shows focused on the environment during the Olympics (and hopefully beyond).

Our vision is to create a daily broadcast in which we will shine a positive light on the environmental movement of visions and solutions. We are looking to send out a positive empowering message of how people are taking initiatives into their own hands to tackle their concerns and create their visions. We want to leave the viewers empowered about how easy it is to be green, what they can do/change in their daily lives to have lower their carbon footprint.

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The City Compost process: Turning yard trimmings into high value compost. Yard and garden trimmings (grass, leaves, plant debris) are screened for metal using a magnet, ground up, and arranged in long piles called windrows. Over the next six months, the windrows are periodically turned to maintain optimum temperature, oxygen level and moisture content. The finished material is then screened for plastic and oversized pieces, before distribution as compost. Larger photo here.

Factsheet prepared by the City of Vancouver, 2010

Composting conserves landfill space, reduces greenhouse gas emissions and creates nutrient rich soil. The City of Vancouver engages residents to work toward these goals, offering educational programs, subsidized home composters, and a yard waste composting facility.

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Photo by Michael Levenston. Larger image here (4MB)

This is January!

It’s January, there’s no snow in our Vancouver garden (it’s up on the surrounding mountains). We’ve been out in the mild weather sprucing up the place for visitors from around the world who are already arriving for the Winter Games which begin February 14.

Fresh mulch is spread on the garden paths (Elm and London Plane wood-chips donated by the Park Board), our cob (clay/sand/straw) tool shed covered by a green roof is on the left next to the recycled metal entrance gate; the building in the top right corner holds our compost toilet and the new “red dragon” electric compost bin; a large Bay Laurel tree sits in the centre front of the picture; the wood-chip paths lead through the back fence into our teaching area and beyond to yet another garden, which we’ve named the “Youth Garden” where our dry-stack stone keyhole garden is located.

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City Farmer garden photos by Monalyn Gracia of Corbis Corporation

Earlier this year Corbis Corporation, the famous stock photography company, came to shoot at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden for a series of shots on ’sustainability’. Forty-one of those images are now on-line for sale. They feature shots of City Farmer’s roof garden, mason bee box, organic food garden, worm and backyard compost bins, and shiitake mushrooms.

From Wikipedia:

Corbis Corporation is an American company, based in Seattle, Washington, that sells and otherwise distributes photography and film footage and related rights. It has a collection of more than 100 million images and a footage library. Corbis is privately owned by Bill Gates, who founded the company in 1989 under the name Interactive Home Systems (a name currently held by an unrelated, slightly older company based in Concord, Massachusetts).

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Photo by Michael Levenston

Farm brings dirt without hurt to gritty Eastside

By CTV British Columbia’s Peter Grainger
Sat Oct. 31 2009

A pilot farming project in Canada’s poorest area code is bringing dirt – without the hurt – to Vancouver’s gritty Downtown Eastside.

Volunteers worked tirelessly Saturday to build a community garden. Although urban community gardens are becoming common sights across Metro Vancouver, the East Hastings Street location is quite different because it will be a fully functional farm once completed.

“They’ll be growing vegetables that will be sold to restaurants and the like in the Downtown Eastside,” Projects in Place Society’s Bryce Gauthier told CTV News.

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Carrot City: Designing for Urban Agriculture

Curators: June Komisar, Mark Gorgolewski and Joe Nasr

The exhibition Carrot City: Designing for Urban Agriculture, was shown at the Design Exchange (DX) in Toronto earlier this year. The exhibition explores the relationship of design and urban food systems as well as the impact that agricultural issues have on the design of urban spaces and buildings as society addresses the issues of a more sustainable pattern of living.

The exhibit generated a huge amount of interest, including press articles, blog entries, YouTube submissions, and thousands of visitors.

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This electric, indoor compost unit comes from Korea. Photo Michael Levenston

The Red Dragon

You plug it in and hook up the exhaust pipe so that it vents outdoors. Then add a sawdust/enzyme mix and 2 litres of water to the machine. That’s it. You can add any food waste AND DOG WASTE to the mix and it will decompose the organic material.

That’s the promise. We are presently testing the machine at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden to see if it lives up to that promise.

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Photo by Michael Levenston. Chestnuts up in the tree. Porcupine quill-like burs encase the nuts.

Most people find Horse Chestnuts (Aesculus hippocastanum) lying on the ground in the Fall. They are a beautiful, shiny brown nuts but inedible. However, there are in Vancouver a few Spanish Chestnut or Sweet Chestnut trees (Castanea saliva), the nuts of which are edible, and elderly Asian and European residents are quick to harvest them as they fall to the ground. They often use long poles to hit them out of the trees.

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Photo by Michael Levenston

Bears are a part of city life in many municipalities in and around Vancouver. Our Hotline receives calls from residents about bears strolling into yards and knocking over compost bins in North Vancouver, Port Coquitlam, Whistler, Squamish and parts of Vancouver Island.

Laurie Chambers of Lund, BC, designed and built this beautiful bear-proof composter and we are lucky to have one at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden.

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By Bronwyn Smyth

My dad makes this juice every year from our small, Alberta grown purple grapes. We then freeze it. At Christmas time, we take it out and have it with Christmas dinner or at New Years. Sometimes, we add sparkling water, soda or ginger ale to it for fizz and flavour.

1. Place your grapes in a bucket and fill the bucket with water. Let your grapes stand for an hour, so that any insects and insect bodies will come floating to the surface. Skim these off, then remove your grapes.

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Photo by Michael Levenston

Maria grew three colourful varieties of corn this year at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden. Visiting six-year-olds from a neighbourhood after-school program were fascinated by the new colours of their favourite food and each child got to taste a kernel from a freshly picked cob.

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Home Grow-in Grocer Ltd.

Home Grow-in Grocer sells food products from around British Columbia, but what makes it unique is the store sells veggies and fruit grown in the gardens of residents only blocks from City Hall. This is recognition of the value of home grown urban food.

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See larger photo here. Photo by Michael Levenston

Our garden veggies and fruit go to West Side Family Place

Head gardener Sharon Slack drives five minutes from the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden to donate freshly harvested organic food to Family Place.

West Side Family Place in Kitsilano is a resource centre dedicated to supporting families with young children. It is a place to meet new friends, gain a sense of community, and to receive ongoing assistance that helps families to raise healthy, happy children.

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This year, Maria experimented to see if she could grow wheat, flax and quinoa at our Vancouver Compost Garden, and she succeeded. The wheat and flax were purchased from a local seed company, Salt Spring Seeds. The wheat varieties are named Red Fife, Marquis, Kamut and Blue Tinge Ethiopian. The flax is named Golden Flax. The quinoa was purchased from a local organic bulk food store.

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Minister of State, Trevor Sargent (centre) visits Vancouver’s Compost Garden. City Farmer’s Lauren Welch and Michael Levenston welcome him.

Why I grow my own food

by Trevor Sargent
From his blog, February 1, 2009

I’m lucky to have a front and back garden that’s big enough to grow some food but not too big to manage. Before I cook a meal I always see what I can add to the meal fresh from the garden. Growing food to me is richly satisfying – a healthful pursuit for mind, body and spirit.

George Bernard Swaw, even though he earned his money writing plays, stated “gardening is the only unquestionably useful job”. The same can be said for farming. Indeed, food production is not just useful, it is essential.

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Photo by Michael Levenston

On a sunny weekend, as I take a stroll with my wife, I see lots of yard sales in my neighbourhood. But on a recent walk I counted three people selling something other than old records, books and clothing.

Honey, flowers and plums!

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Photo by Michael Levenston

Can this be our Compost Garden?

Maria takes us on an “Alice Through the Looking Glass” type journey around our demonstration garden using her tiny HD digital camera and her equally tiny teleidoscope.

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Watch higher quality video by clicking on the YouTube icon.

Bronwyn picks some Russian kale leaves at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden and walks us through the steps to make her unique muffins. She created this recipe last summer while working on an organic farm where there was nothing to eat but kale.

Kale-Carrot Muffins

Ingredients:
½ cup vegetable or grape seed oil
½ cup honey
1 egg, slightly beaten
½ cup milk
1 tsp almond flavouring
½ cup carrots, shredded
1 cup young kale leaves, (when steamed and pureed with 1-2 tbsp of milk, it produces approximately ½ cup of puree)

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