Category — City Farmer

Video: Jon Woodward on urban gardening.

Forget lofts in Gastown. The hottest real estate in Vancouver is somewhere you might not have expected: your local community garden.

By: Darcy Wintonyk,
CTV BC
Apr. 5, 2011

Excerpt:

Neighbourhood plots are springing up around the city, but not fast enough to keep up with the demand from urbanites hoping to get a healthy injection of the city farming experience.

Wait lists continue to grow as the desire to be a part of plant parenthood blossoms, says Michael Levenston, executive director of Vancouver’s City Farmer, a non-profit agency dedicated to urban agriculture.

“The more multi-family homes in the city, the more people want to get out and get their hands in the ground. It’s getting back to nature and it’s hot in terms of demand,” Levenston told ctvbc.ca from his Kitsilano community garden headquarters.

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My Garden Bag

At this time of year, our Compost Hotline in Vancouver receives lots of calls from residents who want to buy soil or compost for their gardens. We have to scramble to update our resource list so we can advise people about the various soil mixes that are on the market.

Most people who order a large quantity of soil will receive it as a pile dumped off the back of a truck. MyGardenBag.com is something different.

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“You’ve been awarded a Best of Green Award in our Food & Health category!”

See the award page here.

Early issues of Organic Gardening Magazine.

OG Magazine wins TreeHugger “Reader’s Choice” Award 1st place. City Farmer 2nd.

Started in 1942, Organic Gardening’s hard-copy magazine has a circulation today of over a quarter of a million. Founded by J.I Rodale, Rodale’s magazines reach more than 45 million readers in more than 50 countries around the world. The publisher of Men’s Health, Prevention, Women’s Health, Runner’s World, Running Times, Bicycling, Mountain Bike, and Organic Gardening, Rodale is the leader in providing actionable, authoritative, and engaging health and wellness content.

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Homeowner Michael Ackhurst (right) is letting Brant Cheetham (left) and Shauna MacKinnon (with baby Neve) grow a garden this summer in his unused backyard. Photograph by Ward Perrin, PNG, Vancouver Sun.

Avid gardeners work their neighbours’ lifeless yards and make them thrive

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
March 25, 2011

Excerpt:

Sharing Backyards was founded four years ago in Victoria by the LifeCycles Project Society and has proliferated around the globe since then, with 41 websites covering 400 municipalities from Vancouver Island to New Zealand.

LifeCycles partners with local organizations such as Vancouver’s City Farmer to help build, host and maintain the websites.

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Adult gardening class has one green thumb in grade eight

Every year in March, our head gardener teaches classes on how to start an organic food garden. The students are always adults, but this year, one young person accompanied her mother and took copious notes.

In the video above she shares some of her thoughts on the class.

Please vote for us here.

Vote: Best Website About Farming or Gardening

As food’s place in the sustainability conversation has become more prominent, so has the connection to food’s origin: Farms, or, in some cases, your backyard garden.

There are many excellent sites that explore the connection between our food and where it comes from, but these are our favorites. Vote for the one you like best.

Best Website About Farming or Gardening

The Contrary Farmer
The Greenhorns
Hunter Angler Gardener Cook
Organic Gardening
City Farmer

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Liam Robinson (right) of Watermark Gardens presents the award to Michael Levenston (left) of City Farmer.

City Farmer – Garden Communicator of the Year Award

This award is shared by all City Farmer’s staff who “communicate” from our Compost Demonstration Garden in Vancouver. Sharon Slack, Maria Keating, Lauren Welch, Farhat Khan, Sheryl Webster, Lynsey Dobbie, Arzeena Hamir, Preet Ball, Michelle Drewitz, and Sean Reynolds. And our long-time directors Risa Smith, Bob Woodsworth, Susan Gregory and Tom Mommsen.

From the awards banquet, November 5, 2010:

Garden Communicator of the Year Award

Each year, BCLNA recognizes exemplary service to the association by its members, as well as some deserving non-members, whose actions have strengthened the horticulture industry.

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City Farmer, an ‘Office of Urban Agriculture’, the forerunner to what will eventually be a standard resource in every city

Canadian Press (CP)
Brandon Sun
July 21, 1981

Vancouver(CP) – Where do you grow vegetables when you live in an apartment? On your balcony, patio or roof, of course.

Instead of nasturtiums and sweet peas, you can plant lettuce and carrots; cucumbers can climb up the wall instead of inedible ivy. And if you don’t have a balcony and the rood isn’t suitable, there’s always a window for a box of fresh herbs.

“There’s no limit to what you can grow in a container,” said David Tarrant, educational coordinator of the Botanical Gardens at the University of British Columbia.

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First head gardener, Catherine Shapiro, working in City Farmer’s Demonstration Food Garden in 1982.

City Farmer promoted urban agriculture in 1982

By Canadian Press
Lethbridge Herald
March 20, 1982

Vancouver (CP Canadian Press) – An urban agriculture group is urging Vancouver residents to save money and reduce Canada’s dependence on foreign farmers by digging up lawns, parks and boulevards.

Michael Levenston of City Farmer estimates 26 square kilometres of arable land in the city are not growing food. And he suggests some of the effort that goes into creating lush lawns would be better spent on producing vegetables.

City Farmer sprouted with a 1978 grant from the federal Department of Energy, Mines and Resources. The original members were not gardeners but people hoping to cut 12 to 15 per cent of Canadian energy consumption devoted to producing food.

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Video shows us adding restaurant food scraps to the Dragon.

Trying out a mid-scale composter at our Compost Garden in Vancouver

We finally started up the White Dragon composter and have been adding garbage bins full of food scraps to it from a local restaurant for the past three weeks. We’ve successfully been using its younger brother, the Red Dragon, a smaller, family sized bin, for the past 12 months. Both bins change food scraps into compost in 24 hours using microbes in a heated holding tank in which stirring wings mix the material a few times every hour.

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Jennifer Garner and Timothy Olyphant filming “Catch and Release” in Vancouver, BC. Photo by Michael Levenston.

Paparazzi alert! Garner photographed in the community garden next to City Farmer’s garden in 2005

Along 6th Avenue in Vancouver, next to our Compost Demonstration Garden, is the Maple Street Community Garden on city boulevard land next to the no-longer-used CPR railway tracks. In July, 2005, Jennifer Garner and crew turned up to film a segment of “Catch And Release”.

Of course we were there, gawking from the rooftop of our building. I got a few zoom shots off before they spotted me and yelled “stop”. The larger versions of the photos include a good number of unusual models of compost bins that we’d donated to the gardens over the years.

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Sara Mullin waters the vegetable garden she and her fellow tenants at a Quebec Street apartment building set up in the rear parking lot — despite the protestations of their landlord.
Photo by Jessica Barrett

Renters and condo dwellers also want to be city farmers

By Jessica Barrett
West Ender – WE
09/01/2010

Excerpts:

I can’t help but laugh watching Sara Mullin water her crop of just-planted winter vegetables — beets, parsnips, and kale — in the parking-lot-turned-garden behind her Quebec Street apartment building, Quebec Mansions. Garden hose in one hand, iPhone in the other, the ringletted, Western-shirt-wearing 27-year-old sprays her plants to an indie-rock soundtrack, only it isn’t a recorded accompaniment — the local band Bend Sinister is practicing in one of the building’s suites.

It’s this classic East Van hipster cliché that makes me laugh, but I have to admit: I’m envious.

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Gate by metal sculptor, Davide Pan.

Photo by Naomi Clement

Internationally acclaimed local metal sculptor, Davide Pan designed our gate. Pan welded together old gardening tools and bits of rusty metal to create the piece that locks down by night and lifts up above the garden by day. Creaking chains and “rocks in bondage” counterweights give medieval flair to the old-fashioned pulley system.

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Urban farmer tending his crops in Burnaby BC. See the larger image here. Photo by Michael Levenston.

Chinese market farms in the Big Bend area

Extremely productive Chinese market farms, (today’s urban agriculture ‘commercial’ farms) thrive in the City of Burnaby’s Big Bend area. You can drive along Marine Way today, through residential neighbourhoods, and stop at Sun Tai Sang Farm (4886 SE Marine Dr), Hop On Farms (5400 Marine Dr.), Wing Wong’s Nursery (4978 Marine Dr.) to buy both wonderful flowers and local vegetables. These farms and others in the area may be the longest running ‘commercial’ urban farms in North America. They are models of intensive growing that can boast more than 100 years of experience and success.

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How we compost at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden

Sharon Slack, head gardener at our Demo Garden, explains briefly what you need to do to make excellent compost at home. Using just your fruit and veggie scraps, some leaves and some garden waste, you can have great finished compost in 5-8 months. This cold composting method lets you use whatever organic waste you have on hand.

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Bishops’s Executive Chef Andrea Carlson talks with Maria about fava beans

Maria loves to cook with the ingredients she grows in our Compost Demonstration Garden. What a treat to be able to chat about different recipes with the Executive Chef of one of Vancouver’s famous restaurants.

Andrea Carlson is Executive Chef at Bishops Restaurant in Vancouver. The restaurant is recognized for its delicious food and its efforts to support organic, local farming.

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Cardoons at City Farmer’s garden

For years we’ve grown cardoon as a beautiful ornamental with purple flowers. But many people have told us that it is used in Italian cooking. Visitor, Andrea Carlson, Executive Chef at Bishops Restaurant in Vancouver, shares with us how she uses the plant in the kitchen.

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Brian describes how the Red Dragon works.

The Red Dragon has surprised us!

Six months ago, we sceptics reluctantly agreed to test out a plug-in composter from Korea at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden. We’d already had a bad experience with one electric bin and were quite sure that this one would act badly too.

We put in the required mix of sawdust and microbes supplied with the bin, added some water and plugged the attractive machine into the wall. Then periodically we put in food waste brought from home.

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Michael Levenston, an early advocate of urban agriculture, in Kitsilano’s City Farmer demonstration garden. Photo by Doug Shanks.

Vancouver’s urban agriculture

By Jackie Wong
Westender
04/21/2010

Excerpt:

While urban agriculture may appear to be a relatively new trend in Vancouver, everybody knows that people have been growing their own food for centuries. One crucial development, however, is that the City of Vancouver is now providing more municipal-level infrastructure for people to grow their own food, dispose of food waste, and learn about food-security issues. The City marks this year’s Earth Day (Apr. 22) by making it the launch date for a new curbside compost pick-up program, which is initially restricted to homeowners but will expand in the future to include apartments and businesses.

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