Category — Community Gardens

Photo by Chris Martin

Hayes Valley Farm – San Francisco

Our Vision

Hayes Valley Farm (HVF) is an education and research project with a focus on urban agriculture. Situated on the city-owned lots bordered by Oak, Fell, Laguna, and Octavia streets, the project is organized by an alliance of urban farmers, educators, and designers that comprise the HVF Project Team. HVF is a Parks Partner, a fiscally sponsored project of the San Francisco Parks Trust.

The project is founded on an interim use agreement between Hayes Valley Farm and the City’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development- a two to five year time frame – until which time the City moves forward with other development plans for the site.

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Sketchbook image by Anthony Zierhut. The Monterey Road Eco-Community Garden opening. Larger image here.

By Alex Chisholm
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts of Leadership
2008 – 150 pages
Email: alex.1chisholm@gmail.com

Abstract

Community gardens and other forms of urban agriculture (UA) make vital contributions to the environmental sustainability, food security, and economic prosperity of urban life. Community gardens also improve cities’ social, recreational, and aesthetic qualities. Yet growers continue to struggle for access to land and mechanisms to expand agriculture within cities. An umbrella organization that advocates and negotiates for land access and favourable government policies on behalf of growers could be an effective tool for increasing UA within the City of Vancouver.

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Illustration by Robin Tatlow-Lord

By Elise Harris
Email: eliseharris2@gmail.com
An Honours thesis submitted as part of a Bachelor in Urban and Regional Planning School of Natural and Built Environments University of South Australia
October 2008

Excerpts:

Abstract

Community gardens have been shown to have positive social, nutritional and educational benefits for their users, and improve the amenity, safety and patronage of the surrounding area. They also tie into wider themes of sustainability and food security. Despite these benefits, urban planners, as the keepers of land and determiners of land use, have had little to do with community gardens. This thesis will explain the benefits of community gardens and detail planning policies throughout the world that support community gardens. Lastly, recommendations will be made on how the South Australian planning system can better support community gardens.

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Wise Words Community Garden – Mid-City grows another urban farm

By Alex Woodward
Best of New Orleans
Jan. 22, 2010

Allison Pressimone and Allie George, students from St. Mary’s College of Maryland, are only in town for a few days but Joseph Brock is making sure they get their hands dirty.

The volunteers, part of a dozen on a service trip to New Orleans through HandsOn, are tilling soil and setting up tomato supports on the raised beds at the Wise Words Community Garden. Other volunteers are busy planting herbs and spreading fertilizer.

“If you build it, they will come,” says Brock, the Mid-City Community Garden executive director.

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Larger photo here.

Photos by Lamiot

“Bruggen naar Rabot” is the name used to designate several rehabilitation projects in Gent (Belgium), opening up the development of a district considered the poorest in Flanders. In 2008-2009 a re-development of an abandoned neighbourhood, “Rabot-Blaisantvest”, was begun behind the courthouse. A large urban agriculture community garden was established which comprised of micro-plots raised above the ground on concrete slabs that had once supported the now destroyed Alcatel factory.

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Ou and Muya. (Photo by Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Bob Ou, left, 43, a refugee from Cambodia, and Bilali Muya, a Somalian refugee who doesn’t know his age, share a laugh at the New Roots Community Farm in the City Heights neighborhood of San Diego. The two farmers have become leaders in the community, demonstrating how to bridge cultural differences and develop friendships.

In San Diego, fertile ground for the seeds of understanding

At the New Roots Community Farm, refugees plow and share — and watch friendships sprout. It’s not just a source of food, but a connection to their homelands, their new country and one another.

By Anna Gorman
LA Times
January 15, 2010

Reporting from San Diego – A slight breeze carried the scents of onion, cilantro and mint through the roadside garden.

At plot No. 17, Bob Ou picked up a well-worn can and watered rows of radishes and Asian lettuce. At plot No. 33, Bilali Muya crouched down to pull weeds from beds of carrots and sweet chard. He spotted a bright red tomato in a nearby plant, grabbed it and took a bite.

“Your tomatoes are so huge,” Ou said, warning that he might steal one when he walked by.

Muya laughed as he licked the juice off his fingers. “Don’t touch my tomatoes, buddy!”

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The Garden of Happiness

By Erika Tamar (Author), Barbara Lambase (Illustrator)
Harcourt Children’s Books, 1996

From Publishers Weekly:

Tamar, the author of such tough-minded YA novels as Fair Game, turns dewy-eyed in her first picture book, an idealistic tale about a community garden in a rundown part of New York City. A studiously multiethnic coalition of neighbors claims an empty lot, and there Mrs. Willie Mae Washington plants black-eyed peas and greens “like on my daddy’s farm in Alabama”; Mr. Singh raises valore, as he did in Bangladesh; etc. Young Marisol, pining to grow something, too, plants a seed she finds on the sidewalk and waters it faithfully. She is ecstatic when a sunflower finally blossoms and then grief-stricken when, at the end of the season, it dies.

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See larger map image here.

Celebrations As Bristol City Farm Is Saved By Hitting £50K Target

Bristol Evening News
December 21, 2009,

A city farm in Bedminster has been saved from closure thanks to the public, who have helped raise £50,000 in just five months.

The four-and-a-half-acre farm was started on derelict land in 1976 as a result of the demands of local people, and has grown to an attraction visited by 200,000 people every year.

Windmill Hill City Farm, which currently employs 80 people, is a registered charity, so there is no charge for entry, but every donation helps to keep the farm operating as a free community facility for the enjoyment of the public.

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By Mr. Brown Thumb of Chicago Garden
See more great urban agriculture stories by Mr. Brown Thumb by following the ‘reading more’ link.

Excerpt:

The last place you expect to see a vegetable garden is behind tall fences topped off with razor wire, but at the Cook County Jail there is a 13 thousand square-foot vegetable garden grown by inmates. This vegetable garden is a joint effort by The Cook County Sheriff’s Department of Community Supervision and Intervention and The University of Illinois Extension. The inmates who work the garden are non-violent offenders serving time under county sentencing guidelines for cases involving drugs or a DUI.

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NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. June 8th, 2009.

New Growth in Ledroit Park

by Amanda Abrams
DC NORTH
September 2009

Last year, when Common Good City Farm found out it had to leave its home on 7th Street, co-founder Liz Falk wasn’t sure where the project would wind up. Her feeler emails soliciting suggestions resulted in a response from someone she barely knew. “Call me,” it said.

Thirteen months later, the urban garden and education center is part of the redevelopment of Gage-Eckington School in Ledroit Park. Not simply a side project, the farm wound up being an integral element that kept the redevelopment plans moving forward.

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High in iron and a mainstay in Southeast Asian cuisine in stir fries, Kokong or Vietnamese water spinach is traditionally grown along the edges of rice paddies. Gardeners in New Orleans East grow it along the canals near Michoud.

Battling the Chef Menteur Landfill

By Kari Lydersen
Colorlines
December 9, 2009

Tung Duc Tran’s backyard is a lush tangle of life. On a steamy New Orleans summer day, Tran, 80, leaves the cool of his small home to stroll under the trellises hung with bitter melons and fuzzy squash shading an assortment of carefully tended crops. The garden consumes the modest yard sloping down to the Maxent Lagoon, a canal whose waters are nearly obscured by an explosion of aquatic vegetation laced with a few old tires and other trash.

Like many elderly Vietnamese American people in the close-knit Versailles neighborhood on New Orleans’ east side, Tran grows his own vegetables to eat and share with friends and neighbors. But in recent years he has felt less confident consuming his produce, because he fears contamination from the lagoon that often spills over onto his land, and in the soil itself, which was swamped by the toxic floodwaters of Katrina four years ago.

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Noah Sheetz, Executive Chef of New York State picks some fresh produce from his plot at the Lincoln Park Community Garden in Albany. Photo by Michael P. Farrell

Gardens ripe with tales of Albany – Urban community plots are a fertile ground for diverse crops and a variety of people

By PAUL GRONDAHL
Times Union
August 23, 2009

ALBANY — Dressed in his formal chef’s whites, Noah Sheetz, Gov. David Paterson’s executive chef, ambled across Eagle Street from the Executive Mansion and picked his way through the bounty of the community garden that borders Lincoln Park.

From neatly ordered, weed-free rows in a corner plot he tends, Sheetz yanked up a fistful of ruby beets the size of baseballs and sliced off a head of broccoli as wide as his palm.
“This has worked out really well and it’s great to learn from the other gardeners,” said Sheetz, a Culinary Institute of America graduate with solid restaurant credentials.

As Sheetz commiserated about tomato blight and an influx of pesky beetles, gardener Euthia Benson, who grew up in the Deep South, told a story about how her mother taught her to grow tasty okra when she was a young girl.

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Photo by Southernpixel. Spring-time at The Jones Valley Urban Farm – a community-based non-profit organization in Birmingham, Alabama. Utilizing over 3 acres of vacant downtown property, JVUF grows organic produce and flowers, educates the community about healthy food, and helps make Birmingham a vibrant community. Alabama is growing greener. See larger image here.

Birmingham’s Jones Valley Urban Farm – Making a Difference

By Mary Christiansen
Tannehill Trader
Publication of Eagle Media
August 12th, 2009

Urban farming is on the rise along with an interest in making food choices that enrich individuals and communities. Birmingham’s Jones Valley Urban Farm is a shining example of this movement that is reconnecting people with food. VUF, a non-profit community-based organization, not only grows organic produce and flowers, but offers a wide variety of programs that teach youth and communities about sustainable agriculture and nutrition.

Over 5 acres of vacant downtown property, along with a 25 acre farm at Mt Laurel, have been transformed into community gardens that grow organic produce that is sold at local farmers markets, restaurants, grocery stores and food stands.

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Linking the 1931 Thrift Gardens with the 1894 Potato Patch Plan through Mrs. Hazel Pingree Depew, the former Mayor’s daughter

Mayor Frank Murphy – the Detroit Years
By Sidney Fine
1984 Vol 3

Excerpt:

The outstanding popular success of the Mayor’s Unemployment Committee (MUC) and, in the opinion of the mayor, “perhaps” its “most important undertaking,” was the Detroit thrift-garden program. The suggestion that the MUC undertake this activity came from Murphy himself, who had been reading George Catlin’s The Story of Detroit and had been impressed with the account of Hazen Pingree’s famous “potato patch plan” and the manner in which a substantial number of welfare families in Detroit during the depression years 1894-1896 had grown a portion of their food on vacant lots donated to the city for that purpose. The MUC decided in March, 1931, to undertake a similar program of “vacant lot gardening.”

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Photo by Chris Steele-Perkins, 1999

Detroit Mayor Hazen S. Pingree

From Reform in Detroit – Hazen S. Pingree and Urban Politics
By Melvin G. Holli
1969

Excerpt Page 70:

During the second summer of the depression (1894) Pingree launched his “potato patch plan,” which, as a work relief measure, has been described as one of the original contributions of the nineties. The Mayor’s scheme envisioned the cultivation of vacant lots by the city’s unfortunate, who were, in many cases, but a few years removed from a peasant agricultural economy of Europe. Since Detroit’s poor commission was near insolvency and the city treasury almost empty, Pingree called upon the churches to contribute funds for the purchase of ploes, implements, and seed. “the Mayor proposes to find out if those elegant churches are only for show or for doing some real good,” a Pingree aide told a reporter.

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A Food Revolution – Urban Communities Growing Fresh Food

November 24, 2009

Fresh vegetables and fruit can be hard to find in the inner cities, but one man is trying to change that.

Photo by Jared Braiterman PhD

Reported by Jared Braiterman PhD
in Tokyo Green

I visited Odakyu’s Agris Seijo rental farm in Seijogakuenmae in Setagaya and was prepared to be charmed by a community vegetable farm built by a rail company above their tracks. Three years ago, the Odakyu corporation rebuilt the station, undergrounded the railway, and used some of the new land to promote urban farming. But I left feeling somewhat strange that reclaimed land could be gated and restricted. Although it is the rail company’s property, I think they missed a huge opportunity to create a great space for the neighborhood.

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See larger image of the Farm plan here.

By sydneycityfarm
18th November 2009

Sydney siders are one step closer to having a City Farm and Sustainable Living Centre with the unanimous support of the City of Sydney Environment & Heritage Committee to fund an investigation into potential sites and models.

City of Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore spoke in support of the proposal which goes before a full sitting of Council on Monday November 23.

“City Farms provide real, hands-on experiences to teach residents, businesses and schools about sustainable living. City Farms demonstrate the simple ways that everyone can Live Green and give the community access to local organic produce.”

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“Sow and Grow” poster, Cleveland Public Schools Horticulture program.

Feeding Cleveland: Urban Agriculture

Cleveland State University Libraries presents The Cleveland Memory Project

A recurring theme in 20th century Cleveland that continues to the present day is that during difficult economic periods communities of people have come together to  raise food crops on city land. The working men’s farms during the Great Depression, the victory gardens during World War II, community gardens established during the years of urban renewal, and the present day market gardeners of the local food movement, all provide examples of revivals of urban agriculture as a response to economic difficulties. 

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