Category — Education

Canadians Wally Satzewich and wife Gail Vandersteen teach city farmers how to earn money from gardening small lots.

For aspiring and practicing urban, home-based, backyard and front lawn farmers.

“Had I known about the feasibility of sub-acre farming when I started my farming career 20 years ago, I would never have bought large acreage in the country, and would have instead fulfilled my farming aspirations more easily and with less expense in the city.” - Wally Satzewich

“SPIN is the first commercial organic-based farming system for land bases under an acre in size, and it takes the challenges posed by urbanization and turns them to a farmer’s advantage by capitalizing on limited space and resources.”

Workshop Program, May 19, 20, 2008 Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

SPIN Farming web site.

May 10th, 2008 “SPIN-Gardening” Workshop in Portland, Oregon information here.

By Paris Marshall Smith and Arzeena Hamir
Richmond Fruit Tree Project, BC, Canada, 2007

“Imagine growing greens in the dead of winter and sharing the bounty with a group of eager students. Once harvested, the food from the garden becomes a resource for the kitchen, the next stop in the seed to table cycle. Students have the opportunity to further their garden experience by learning about their taste palates, culturally diverse food preparation techniques, historical methods of food processing (fermentation, canning, pickling), nutrition and food combining and, of course, the pleasure of eating and working together.”

Toolkit is available on-line. Be aware it is a large download (30MB PDF).

“Kwantlen University College, School of Horticulture and its research/outreach arm, the Institute for Sustainable Horticulture, in partnership with the City of Richmond and its citizen groups working in food sustainability, will develop and implement North America’s first formal, post-secondary centre and programming expressly focused on urban and urban-rural interface agriculture food systems.”

“The centre’s overarching goal will be to support and advance with research, expertise and educational support, a viable, sustainable, food production sector in the urban and urban-rural interface as a critical element of vital and sustainable 21st century society. Key to program function and success will be the development of a Research, Teaching and Demonstration Farm facility and emphasis on practical skill and knowledge development and application.”

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Joe Nasr, one of the authors of the classic book ‘Urban Agriculture - Food Jobs and Sustainable Cities’, spoke about city farming on CBC’s ‘The Current’ today. The show can be heard as a podcast linked below. Joe Nasr, co-founder of the North American Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture Alliance, teaches urban agriculture at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Hear the CBC show here (the second story).

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Every year in March, City Farmer head gardener, Sharon Slack, teaches classes on ‘how to grow veggies at home’. Once again in 2008, our sign-up book is filling up with eager students who will get the unique experience of learning how to garden both in a warm classroom and also in our demonstration garden, ‘hands-on’.

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