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.

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.

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?”

Helga replied [Now here I must insert something for people who were not there because it is needed.  The room we were in was a large dance studio with a mirror down one side - a big mirror.]

So Helga says back to the questioner: Why you are! and points to the right and everyone turns to look in that direction and they see themselves in the mirror- well the reaction was tremendous — I felt like we could have marched the whole crowd down to city hall to demand more Urban Gardens.  I will never forget that time and the great people we met on our visit to your area. [… in Vancouver BC. City Farmer invited the Olkowskis to Vancouver twice in the late 1970’s. They spoke on national radio, to municipal leaders and at workshops. Mike]

I am happy to see you have continued the good work.  We have had gardens now for almost 40 years and I feel the same way. Now I also like some flowers to feed the beneficial insects, bees and hummingbirds.

[Helga’s now 80, Bill is 70.]

Link to Bill and Helga’s website full of history and videos here.

Introduction to “The City People’s Book of Raising Food” – March 1975, Rodale Press

By Helga Olkowski

I have always wanted to live on a farm. But I have always lived in the city. In this country, most people live in cities. In fact, all over the world, with a few exceptions, the trend is towards urbanization.

City people are a funny lot. They don’t spend much time thinking about what keeps them alive — their life-support systems. There was a time when I didn’t think about it much either. Oh, of course, I knew people need air to breathe, water to drink, and food to eat. But fresh air was obviously free and available and I didn’t worry about the water that came through the pipes to my house, or the food that I bought at the store. If the vegetables and meats looked attractive, if they were a reasonable price, if they didn’t look too hard to prepare, I bought them, took them home, prepared and ate them.

Well, we’re all a bit more sophisticated now. We’ve heard about pesticide residues on foods, fertilizers contaminating water, lead in the air we breathe, the energy crisis, and other environmental disasters. If you are like me, you may have reached a point where the list is too long and upsetting to confront. You don’t want to hear about another problem unless at the same time someone suggests what you can do about it. This is such a book — about the problem of producing food for city people and what you can do about it.

Consider the tomato. It takes large amounts of energy to produce the synthetic fertilizers used by the tomato farmer. Fossil fuels are heavily involved in modern agricultural technology and in the production of pesticides that such farming methods may seem to demand. Fossil fuel energy is also necessary to bring the tomato to the store where it is sold. How many of us walked home with our groceries this week? No doubt most used a car to bring the tomato to the kitchen, thus doing our bit directly toward energy consumption and air pollution, too.

And at the end of all that environmentally disastrous activity, what have we got? A tomato that hasn’t seen the farm in many a day, a variety with a skin tough enough to withstand lots of mechanical handling, hopefully with pesticide residues below the FDA allowable tolerances. Nothing exactly to cheer about.

So what’s a city person to do? Grow some of your own. I think that one can grow a good deal of food in the city, and have fun doing it. It was done during World War II — they were called Victory Gardens. The apartment dweller can grow tomatoes and cucumbers inside in a sunny window, citrus and bell peppers too. A window box salad, of loose-leaf lettuce, radishes, green onions, cress, baby carrots, and turnips, is a real possibility.

There may be room for a planter box of food plants on the roof or in a courtyard, and even room to raise meat rabbits. You may be able to share a backyard or patio with a friend who has some outdoor space, or join forces with your neighbors in working on an empty lot, unused city-owned land; or you might talk your local parks and recreation people into letting you use a portion of a city park. Other city people have found a way. You can too.

Of course, not every city dweller wants to raise his own food. Even if you want to, you would have a hard time trying to raise all of it. But you can raise quite a lot. I know, because for the past four years my family has raised all of its own meat and vegetables in the middle of the city. We have taught hundreds of others to do the same. You can do it too. This book is to tell you how.

This is a record of some of our personal experiences and some of the “book learning” we found essential to our success. We hope it will be useful to you.

P.S.: We’ve had a lot of help and encouragement from many friends and acquaintances, students, other teachers, and associates. To all these people whom we cannot thank individually we dedicate this book, but particularly to Drs. E. Williams, James Vlamis, and Bob Raabe, who helped us develop the Urban Garden Ecosystem class at the University of California; Tom Javits, who helped carry on the class and spread the word about city food growing; and all future urban gardeners.

You can get used copies on Amazon 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.

“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.

“It is often used to perfume or flavour subtle things like risotto or rice pudding (Persian or Indian style). We might also use it for a custard base or fruit desserts such as pear/apple/quince. If you want to make a ’tisane’ or simple syrup with them to show off the colour, that would be easy and then the ‘tea’ can be mixed in to finish rice, or the sugar syrup could be used to poach a crab apple.”

See Bishop’s Restaurant here.

‘Crocus sativus’ -Richters Catalog here.

Saffron’s story on Wikipedia 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.

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.

Photo by Michael Levenston.

One of our garden neighbours, food writer Eve Johnson, introduced us to this unusual fruit a couple of years ago. In her book “Eating my Words”, she wrote:

“Then, cleaning up a day or two after a medlar tasting, I was shocked to find that one of the medlars left on the serving plate had become tumescent, engorged. The wrinkles were gone. The skin was as smooth as a just-picked medlar, and now it shone again, in some places a dark wine red, in others, a rich purple brown with golden spots. The once recessed seeds had popped out. The pentagram was even more prominent. And the rim of the calyx had begun to leak a sweet, shiny juice.”

“I peeled it. The scent had sharpened. Instead of the muted applesauce smell, it was stronger and sweeter, the taste of apple-flavoured fermentation, but not the taste of a rotten apple. I felt, unmistakably, a little electric thrill.”

See Eve Johnson’s book here.

Also see: Medlar: The Best Fruit You’ve Never Heard Of 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.”

The Flathers responded by obtaining permission from the city to make use of the vacant B.C. Hydro right of way boulevard in front of their Kerrisdale home. The garden they planted in 1942 still flourishes today; a 37 year old artifact from a time when being a city farmer was synonymous with being a Canadian patriot.

“The ground wasn’t very good originally,” remembers Dr. Flather. “It was full of stones and bits of broken brick and glass. Apparently there’d been a big greenhouse on this site before we moved in.”

“The first year our garden was only a marginal one, we planted carrots, onions, parsnips, … that sort of thing. But it grew in size each year as we gradually built the tilth up.”

“Our front lawn at the time was reserved exclusively for raising potatoes. Our neighbours on either side of us did the same.”

Dr. Flather can recall that during the war years the B.C. Hydro right of way that extends down their street was covered with vegetable gardens. “They ran up and down the boulevard on either side of our garden for 100 yards,” he says.

Title: River Scene. See more of Donald Flather’s work here.

At the time, the Flathers had just one of the many productive gardens in the city. A report released by the Federal Agricultural Supplies Board for the year 1943 valued the 31,000 tons of produce taken from 52,000 victory gardens in Vancouver, Burnaby, New Westminster and North and West Vancouver at 4 million dollars, the equivalent of 20 million dollars worth of supermarket produce today.

In Dr. Flather’s mind, the figure of 31,000 tons of produce is likely an understatement. “In those years you could find at least one good sized victory garden on every block in the city.”

One has to wonder why people gave them up.

“In our neighbourhood,” says Dr. Flather, “there were those gardeners who died, others that moved away and some people who became too affluent.”

What was commonplace in the war years of the 1940′s is today an object of curiosity. Passerbys are constantly stopping to gawk at the Flather’s victory garden.

“So many people stop and get out of their cars to stare, one of our neighbours suggested we could put up bleachers and sell tickets,” jokes Mrs. Flather.

We don’t consider our garden fabulous,” states Dr. Flather. “I’d say it’s rather average actually. We grow for productivity, not show.”

That’s no idle boast. The Flather’s 18’ by 50’ garden supplies a harvest of over 20 different crops, including corn, carrots, onions, broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, squash, cucumbers, celery, rhubarb and parsnips.

This summer they‘ve harvested a year’s supply of potatoes, collected 15 pints of beans and canned so many tomatoes that they no longer have any shelf room left.

“We have a 22 cubic ft. freezer in our basement,” notes Mrs. Flather. “We can just get the lid closed.”

“Over half of our food we‘ll have to give away to friends and relatives. We couldn’t possibly eat it all ourselves.”

Do they ever buy any vegetables?

Yes, avocados. But not too often, we’re really not that fond of them.”

Title: Mount Robson. See more of Donald Flather’s work here.

Each year Dr. Flather tries a different type of crop in his garden. This past year he’s enjoyed success with a new type of tomato called Ultra Grow. Those varieties of vegetables that prove unproductive or unflavorful he drops from his repertoire.

Dr. Flather helps his vegetables along with a combination of compost and chemical fertilizers.

“Not many people know it, but if you ask them, the City will deliver a load of leaves free of charge to your doorstep. l’ve found them to be an excel- lent conditioner for the garden.”

His leaves are mixed into the compost pile with grass and other green vegetable cuttings. Employed as a mulch and spread in the garden as needed, the leaves have a blotter effect, helping to retain valuable moisture in the soil. As well, leaves serve as a soil texturizer, supplying aeration and retarding the growth of weeds.

“Some people will tell you that you shouldn’t use cedar needles in the garden, but that’s basically an old wives tale,” states Dr. Flather. “Cedar needles might take a little longer to rot down, but they won’t harm your plants. That was scientifically proven in a series of Saanich Island experiments done using 12 different wood mulches in 1951.”

Dr. Flather uses the more concentrated forms of chemical fertilizers such as 16-20-10 and 16-16-16. He claims the milder mixtures are mostly filler and “diluted so the greenhorn won’t kill his plants.”

He applies his fertilizer in parallel strips about 2 inches from the young plants – roots can easily reach when they need nutrients.

He doesn’t believe chemical fertilizers to be hazardous if properly applied. “A plant,” he says, “can’t distinguish between natural and artificial minerals.”

The Flathers have not restricted their horticultural efforts to the victory garden. Their backyard resembles a commercial nursery. There is a greenhouse here for starting seedlings, dozens of scattered planters, several thriving beds of flowers and dwarf fruit trees, a trellis of sweet peas and another of grapes, plus a variety of healthy fruit trees. The Flathers harvest fruit from cherry, pear, peach, nectarine, and apple trees and from their strawberry and raspberry bushes.

The 30 year old apple tree is the backyard’s centerpiece.

By careful grafting techniques the Flathers now possess a tree which provides them with no less than 28 different types of apples!

I asked ‘the doctor if he could forsee anything causing a return to the tremendous productivity of the victory garden years in Vancouver. “There’s at lot of wasted potential here,” he suggests, gesturing down the grass covered boulevard. “There could be food gardens extending all the way along here as far as 57th Ave.”

“Sometimes I wonder if the higher prices of vegetables and the slump in the economy might not be a blessing in disguise. Harder times I’ve found, usually help bring people to their senses.”

“The Secret Life Of Donald Flather”

Written by Daniel Wood
Beautiful Bc Magazine
Spring 1999

Excerpt:

As David Flather, then 28, stood in the doorway of his grandparents’ Vancouver home four years ago, he was struck by a sense of erieness. His grandmother, Grace, had just died. His grandfather, Donald Flather, had passed away in 1990. Together with his aunt and uncle, David was there to begin the task of emptying the cluttered home of 54 years of occupancy. His grandfather had been a Vancouver school teacher and packrat of the first magnitude. His grandmother had rebuffed every effort to clean the house after her husband’s death. She wanted nothing moved, believing her husband was still there, still inhabiting the place. And in a strange way, she was right.

The livingroom walls were covered with Donald Flather’s paintings — large, abstracted landscapes that had a familiarity David couldn’t quite define. A half-dozen more paintings were stacked — like a firescreen — in front of the fireplace. In the hall, in the diningroom, in the bedrooms, every wall held more of his grandfather’s artwork. When he pushed open the door to the upstairs studio, where David on occasion had watched his grandfather paint, he paused and asked himself: Where do I put my feet? Dozens of large, framed landscape paintings stood on edge, filling the room from wall to wall. They leaned against each other and against the room’s shelving where hundreds of slide trays, jammed with Flather’s travel photos, were stacked among the musty collection of art books. In the corner by the north window stood Flather’s easel.

Read the complete article here.

See Donald Flather’s bio here.

Kerry Banks – Bio

From the Trent University Alumni Magazine
Fall 2011

Kerry Banks has been a freelance writer and journalist for over 30 years. During his studies at Trent, he majored in history and wrote for The Arthur – and he credits his involvement with the student paper for giving him the exposure, confidence, and technical skills he needed to become the writer and journalist he is today.

After graduating from Trent, he applied the skills he learned from The Arthur – writing articles, creating layouts, taking photos, and writing headlines – at the Peterborough Common Press, a local weekly newspaper that was published in Peterborough in the 1970s. However, in 1977, he started working as a freelancer full-time and moved to Vancouver, where he lives to this day.

Over his career, he has won several national Magazine Awards and Western Magazine Awards. His work has appeared in Vancouver Magazine, Equinox, Western Living, WestWorld, and Maclean’s. In addition to writing articles on business, arts, culture, travel, and the environment, he has written several sports books.

Link here.

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.

City Chase money goes to Right To Play

Right To Play is an international humanitarian organization that uses sport and play programs to improve health, develop life skills, and foster peace for children and communities in some of the most disadvantaged areas of the world. Working in both the humanitarian and development context, Right To Play builds local capacity by training community leaders as Coaches to deliver its programs in over 20 countries affected by war, poverty, and disease in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America.

City City Chase here.

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.

Now in August, tomatoes and cantaloupes are crowding the plastic shelter and the heavy, growing cantaloupes need some support. They are “EarliChamps” from West Coast Seeds. Using a tip from a visitor, Maria visited a local Sally Ann thrift store and bought a variety of different sized brassieres to help hold up the growing melons.

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.

Gurken vom Hausdach: riesiger Rooftop Food Garden in Vancouver

Biogemüse vom Hausdach, könnte das zu einem Gemeinschaftsmodell für Unternehmen werden? Ted Cathart von der Organisation YWCA über das Projekt in Vancouver.

Vegetables from the rooftop, could this be a model for companies? Ted Cathart from the charity YWCA tells us about the project in Vanvoucer.

Zwischen Würmern und Wolkenkratzern: Wie grün ist Vancouver?

Vancouver behauptet, die grünste Stadt Kanadas zu sein, stimmt das wirklich? Wieviel Bio gibt es dort?

Vancouver claims to be the greenest city of Canada, is that true? How much organic can you find there?

Chance für Bio in der Stadt? Farmers Market (Biobauernmarkt) in Vancouver

Wen trifft man auf dem Farmers Market (Biomarkt) in Vancouver?

Who do you meet at the farmers market in Vancouver?

Link to DieBioKuche

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.

I asked Sheryl, one of our City Farmer gardeners, why she is unnerved by the Wolf Spider.

“Is it a mouse or a spider? Is what I ask when I see something dark move out of the corner of my eye. Wolf spiders are big and move fast. And it seems (to me) that they are always running at me, which is why I’d prefer it to be a mouse because at least they always seem to be scared and run away. Wolf spiders also appear when you least expect it, opening a door, under a blanket or towel, behind things hunting for their prey.”

And Farhat our wormshop instructor says:

“There are always quite a few them in the tool shed along with many of their nests. I’m always a bit worried one is going to land on my head while I’m feeding my worms or getting the supplies for a wormshop out.” )

And from Laura, a long time City Farmer gardener:

“Wolf spiders: they are not like wolves at all. They are not regal, fluffy or dog-like – all things I can admire in an animal. Instead they are long-legged, fast and menacing. They look like they could outrun me. Okay, that also sounds a bit like a wolf, but still they give me the creeps. I can deal with small spiders, but somehow when they get big enough to warrant their own seat at the dinner table, that is my cue to freak out.”

And Sharon, our head gardener, remembers one spider incident 40 years ago:

“We were remodeling the house and the floor in the living room was the subfloor, which had lots of cracks. I was walking in my bare feet when I stepped on one of these spiders. It didn’t get squished, but was trapped between my toes and was frantically trying to escape. I was frantically trying to shake it free! I was hopping around the living room, screaming! Finally, it fell out. I can’t remember what happened after that!”

Sharon’s spider tale #2:

When I was quite young, we lived in a house that my Dad was building, so some of the floors were not finished. Spiders would come up from the crawl space. During the night I would dream that a spider was walking across my pillow towards me, and I would wake up screaming! Mom would come in and turn on the light, but I wasn’t convinced all was well and as soon as she turned the light out, I would sit up until I finally fell asleep.

Sharon’s spider tale #3:

When I was just married in the early 60′s, we lived in an apartment. Sometimes, a spider would come in the window. One night as I turned the blankets back, I saw a spider. I couldn’t catch it, lost sight of it, and immediately panicked! There I was in my baby doll pj’s, with my big fluffy slippers (Laverne and Shirley style!)… so I quickly put my husband’s work boots on in case the spider was somewhere on the floor. I pulled every blanket off the bed without finding the beast, but as I put everything back, I found the spider in the last blanket where it had been hiding all along. I attacked with fury! Poor thing never knew what hit it.

And our “Bug Lady”, Maria, has a spider story:

I moved to Vancouver in 1996 and lived in a typical Kitsilano rental house with 5 other transients. My room was in the basement with 2 others and we shared a bathroom. We always used the shower upstairs and the tub in the basement was only ever used by one of my roommates who enjoyed a good soak.

On getting to know him, me being a “Bug Girl”, I learned he had a a fear of spiders. I asked one day how he could take such longs baths knowing that the broken corner tile of the tub had a deep dark hole where a huge spider lived. He looked at me in shock and replied he never noticed it. He always took his glasses/contacts out when soaking.

The next day I came home after work to a chemical smell in the basement. It seemed my roommate couldn’t bare the thought of an eight-legged tub mate and took matters into his own hands by scouring the cleaning cupboard and pouring a chemical cocktail down the hole, which included, but was not limited, to a foaming oven cleaner!

I was so mad at him. I knew he didn’t realize that random household cleaners, when mixed, can be lethal. I had to do something to get him back. So while he was out to work at his night shift, I visited a local dollar store and purchased the largest most realistic plastic spider I could find and strategically placed it just underneath the side of his pillow. I went to bed snickering, that will show him. I worked days and would be gone before he was up.

Later that night around 3 am when he got home from the club he worked at, I was awoken to a loud cry, a whack and a grunt, a whack and a grunt over and over again. Seems that plastic spider was killed by a skateboard in the middle of the night!

Bug Trapper

An ideal device for trapping flies, wasps, spiders, etc.
You simply place the transparent pyramid over the insect on a wall or window, rotate it 180° (causing a door to slide closed), carry the insect outside, rotate the pyramid 180° again (letting the door slide open) and release the captive.

Find here at Lee Valley Tools.

More on the Wolf Spider here.

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.

The vast majority of the city’s compostable garbage comes from commercial operations, including restaurants and food processing facilities. Those companies will be targeted at a later date in the third phase as part of a larger campaign.

The first phase has met with only limited success. About 12 per cent of households recycle raw vegetable and fruit scraps, well down from the 35 per cent the city is shooting for. That may be in part because nearly six in 10 Vancouver homes already have a backyard composter where they dump their vegetable and fruit scraps, Underwood said. “They don’t see a need to put them in the green cans because they already do it themselves,” he said.

Read the complete article here.

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.

Artist, Jodie (left) discussing the sandwich board with City Farmer Bug Lady, Maria.

She has also lived in Australia and Europe and has taken elements from those environments to develop a universal feeling in her paintings that many people identify with. Her work demonstrates a love and devotion to trees and plants and the beautiful, ancient processes they encompass.

See her Facebook site here.

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)

Kids:
Let’s go on a Bug Safari at the City Farmer Demonstration Garden! Children aged 5-12 (accompanied by a parent only) can come and explore the garden with City Farmer. We will discover the relationships between insects, plants and the food we eat. Learn to identify and attract our urban insects and win buggy prizes!

Kids Bug Shops: $20 per child
Monday June 20 – 1pm – 3pm or Saturday July 23 – 1pm -3pm
(space is limited to 10 kids per class – please contact the Compost Hotline (604) 736-2250 for availability)

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).

But it’s what urban agriculture enthusiasts across North America would like to see – micro-farms where city dwellers could produce fruits, vegetables, eggs and honey, milk from goats, and meat from rabbits.

Some Montrealers have already enthusiastically embraced the growing urban agriculture movement, which took off after Michelle Obama planted a vegetable garden on the White House lawn two years ago.

Read the complete article here.

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.

We have joined a small but growing number of urban farmers who are working to produce healthier food in a more sustainable way that builds community resilience and we’re having a great time doing it.

Our property already had several fruit trees on it when we moved in and we learned from the neighbours that the former owners had been passionate gardeners. Neither of us had any gardening experience but a couple of years after we moved in we shared the yard with a neighbour who didn’t have a garden of her own. She taught us a lot and we grew a little bit of corn, carrots and some tomatoes. Turns out that these were only gateway drugs as by the end of the summer we were completely hooked.

Read the complete article in “Dunbar Life” here. Click through the magazine to page 28.

Visit City Farm Girls here.

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.