“When a farmer within the city limits is making $30,000 yearly out of potatoes alone, it is time to think of vacant lots in connection with the cost of living”

The New York Tribune Magazine
Jan. 14, 1917

Excerpt:

In the three metropolitan boroughs of New York – Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn – Brooklyn alone has vacant land suitable for farming and gardening purposes. The Brooklyn land has been used for hundreds of years or more by farmers, beginning with the old Dutch landsmen, and the soil has been made productive by constant fertilization. In Manhattan there are practically no vacant lots. The vacant lots in the Bronx are fast disappearing and what remain are rocky and unproductive. In Queens there are acres and acres of vacant land, but Queens to all intents and purposes is still a rural district. Brooklyn, therefore, is the only part of the metropolitan section of New York City that contains farmlands and truck gardens.

Suppose we had 7,500 acres of vacant lots in Brooklyn

A Club in Minneapolis

See full page image here. (2.2MB)

And a few facts and figures to show what an average Washington family can save by doing so

The Washington Times
April 29, 1906,
Magazine Section

Excepts:

That the best things of life are to be gathered from simple sources was never more truthfully shown than In the transformation of an unsightly debris strewn back yard into a thriving profit-bearing vegetable garden. How this evolution can be brought about, what is its beginning and its probable outcome with relation to both the cost entailed and the benefits to be derived are questions which enter the mind every spring and summer when the problem of supplying the table with fresh green vegetables becomes of household importance.

While many persons have been encouraged to try a brief experiment in backyard gardening, viewing it as a simple and healthful means of recreation, many more have given the suggestion but scant consideration because they looked upon gardening in any form as belonging entirely to the province of the farmer and requiring an expansive and fertile tract of land. Still others with ample backyard space and an inclination to try home gown vegetables have turned it aside believing the time spent in grasping the few elementary principles of planting would be to a busy person so much time wasted and that when the result of the seasons work was summed up the saving to the table would not be enough to compensate for the outlay of money and labor involved.

See a large readable image here.(5.2MB)

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.

Britton Abbot’s cottage garden near the town of Tadcaster, England, a productive quarter of an acre

Excerpts from An account of a cottage and garden near Tadcaster, by Thomas Bernard, 1797

The land required for each cottage and garden, need not be more than a rood (quarter acre); the value of which would bear no possible comparison to that of the industry to be employed upon it. The quarter of an acre that Britton Abbot inclosed, was not worth a shilling a year. It now contains a good house and a garden, abounding in fruit, vegetables, and almost everything that constitutes the wealth of the cottager. In such inclosures, the benefits to the country, and to the individuals of the parish, would far surpass and petty sacrifice of land to be required. “Five unsightly unprofitable acres of waste ground would afford habitation and comfort to twenty such families as Britton Abbot’s.”

Productive gardens to cottages would, by increased consumption of vegetables, make a considerable saving in bread corn: the same observation may be applied to cottager’s cows. Of butter, eggs, and poultry, our markets might have a regular and cheap supply from cottagers.

You can read the complete 15 page pamphlet as scanned by Google Books here.

More history of British gardens can be found in Allotments by Twigs Way.

Written by the public and gathered by the BBC

A selection of letters:

Edinburgh allotments
By Elizabeth Gray

At the beginning of the war I was registered as a botanist at Edinburgh Botanic Gardens.

I was enlisted as a gardens allotment volunteer and would go round advising people how to grow food. The same thing happened in the 1914-18 war. Ground was dug up and made into allotments at Blackford hill and Inverleith Park and round about the Meadows in the heart of Edinburgh.

Most folk in Edinburgh weren’t gardeners and we showed them what to do. There was a limited number of seeds and plants and I used to take some seed from my own garden to give to people.

To get a plot people had to apply to the headquarters at St Andrews House.
Supplies of grass seed dried up at that time completely. It was used up to sow runways all over the place.

In 1943 I went to Aberdeen and was a pioneer in working out how to store potatoes indoors because there was no wheat so there was no straw.

Link here.

Dig for Victory.
By Dr. Colin Pounder

One major ploy of the enemy was to starve the population and U boat attacks on the Merchant Fleet were horrendous. As elsewhere Cotmanhay had allotments on which we grew our own food. This was called the Dig for Victory Campaign. At the top of Wesley Street across to Ash Street were allotments. Just below where Truman Street joins Bridge Street was a shop and nearer the bridge an old Smithy (With all the Blacksmiths forge and bellows). Between the Smithy and the Laundry was a track leading to allotments which reached from behind the Bridge Inn to those reached from Richmond Avenue. These latter were bounded by Bennerley Rec. Most are now the schools playing field. Potatoes were a staple crop along with cabbage and peas, rhubarb, celery, lettuce, runner beans, black currants, leeks and one year my Dad grew something called sweet corn which everybody watched come to fruition – though it tasted nice it was eaten with some suspicion because we hadn’t a clue what it really was. Each year the mayor or some such character came to judge the efforts of men who worked, fire-watched, and Dug for Victory. Prizes I cannot recall but Dad had several red 1st prize cards and we got something to eat of course.

Various livestock had always been kept in the back gardens to provide eggs and a cockerel for Christmas – though the murder, feather plucking and disembowelment of one of my friends leaned me heavily towards vegetarianism at an early age! It is not that people were cruel necessity demanded it. We also had a pig but the end of her I leave to the imagination. Apart from some ancient fantail pigeons my favourites were Banties (Bantams). Each day I went to the top of the garden with my Mam to feed them in their wired run. On Wesley Street a telegraph post stood next to the first houses above Len James` garage. Wires from it crossed the end of our garden to a post in a garden of a house on Milton Street and from that post to one in Milton Street itself. I remember it was a bright sunny day and Mam was throwing feed to the black bantams strutting and clucking in their run. I cannot accurately describe the noise, a kind of scream combined with a monstrous roar and a German plane just cleared the top of the house, went overhead and out of sight over the houses in Wesley Street. Immediately afterwards was a high pitched screaming roar as a British fighter plane came after it.

In my memory is the sound, the dark shapes, the panic stricken cackle of the bantams hurtling themselves upwards and my Mam clutching my shoulders. It was a moment of total and absolute terror in which we were powerless. Later Mam told Dad, Grandma and her brothers that both planes went beneath the telegraph wires and the bantams seemed to have reached as high as the planes. (I have gone cold and tearful writing this now — realisation as to what might have been I suppose.)

Link here.

Location of story: suburbs of London, England
By Joyce Gibson

During the first few months of World War II, known as the “Phoney War” we prepared for the worst. We lived in the suburbs of London and, in response to the admonishments to “dig for victory”, my mother grew more vegetables in our small garden, although she didn’t know how to control the maggots and they were often inedible. Amongst her successes was a twenty-two pound pumpkin, which, when displayed in the window of a small café in Central London, (incidentally next door to Sweeney Todd’s barber shop) raised over twenty pounds for the Red Cross. Customers, in return for a small donation, were asked to guess the weight. The prize? To become the proud owner of the huge pumpkin.

My mother was also a great fan of Dr. Charles Hill, the Radio Doctor. Every morning he would broadcast food tips to ensure the best possible use of the little food we had. One message got across very well. We ate raw white shredded cabbage every day for the rest of the war! I have only recently been able to look raw white cabbage in the eye, no doubt because I am lucky enough to be able to obtain the ingredients for a tasty dressing. I remember too, a terrible yearning for a big juicy orange! Sadly, they wouldn’t grow in our garden.

Link here.

Location of story: Denbigh
By Emrys Williams

In 1942 the Government brought out a theme ‘Dig for Victory’ which was intended to encourage everyone to grow their own vegetables.

In our back yard there was a piece of land with a large plum tree – but it never seemed to produce any plums. My brother and myself were encouraged by our parents to dig the land around the tree and to plant vegetables. Our biggest problem, as I recall, was the tree roots, which we had to cut out in order to achieve a good patch of soil. As children we were afraid that the tree would fall down, but that did not happen of course. To our surprise, not only did we have potatoes, beans and the like, from the new garden under the tree but for the first time the branches hung heavy with large ‘Denbigh plums’. A good crop resulted from our having pruned the roots of the tree!

In response to the government’s call to ‘Dig for Victory’, the mayor of Denbigh town arranged for prominent gardeners of the town to hold Flower and Vegetable show in the County Hall, Denbigh in summer 1942, with a view to encouraging local people to contribute and to nurture an interest in gardening. This was the launch of the Denbigh Flower show.

I was honoured to be the show day President when the show celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1992, in recognition of my having been secretary of the Flower Show for 40 years.

The show celebrated 63 years on 27th August 2005.

Link here.

By Twigs Way
Shire
2008

The humble allotment has a surprisingly turbulent history. Initially the right to an allotment was proposed as a charitable means by which the poor could grow their own food and stave off starvation, but it quickly entered political and social debate. During the World Wars the allotment became the focal point on the home front, as families took part in the Dig for Victory campaigns. The post-war years saw a decline in the popularity of the allotment as the supermarket took over from home-grown produce. Successive governments condemned allotments in favour of new housing.

Recently, however, with increased concerns about the environment and the organic movement, allotments are in vogue once more. This book charts the rise and fall of the allotment – and the factors behind its most recent resurgence. Drawing on original documents and illustrations, the author explores the fascinating and surprising history of the allotment within the context of its social and political history.

Contents
Introduction
Plots and Politics
The Allotment Army
The Post-War Slump
A Future for Allotments?
Allotments Worldwide
Organisations
Index

See the book here.

Gardening Inspiration from Wartime Garden Guide

‘Allotment and Garden Guide’, written by Twigs Way

November 02, 2009, Press Dispensary. ‘Allotment and Garden Guide’, written by Twigs Way and published in December 09 by Sabrestorm, brings to the 21st century Britain’s essential month-by-month wartime gardening guide , as relevant to today’s amateur gardener and vegetable grower as it was in 1945. Twigs Way has compiled a full 12 months’ editions of ‘Allotment and Garden Guide’ – the flagship title in the wartime government’s ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign – and adds commentary and insight, not only into gardening but into the war years, with the urgent threat that food might simply run out counterbalanced by the timelessness of seasonal routines.

In 1938, Britain imported 55 million tons of food. Just a year later the country was at war, shipping lanes were closed and the country’s larders had to be filled by amateur growers: householders who tore up garden lawns, public parks and town squares to grow cabbages and potatoes. Under ‘Dig for Victory’, the ‘nation of shopkeepers’ had to transform itself instantly into a nation of gardeners, entailing a massive educational programme which took these novices through the basic tasks for each month in the near-desperate hope that sowing and planting by the inexperienced would actually lead to productive harvests.

See the book here.

See Twigs Way’s website here.

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.

“The main difficulty in our American mode of life now is that we are tending to obliterate the distinction between work and play, by crowding work into hours which ought to be devoted to perfect relaxation of mind and body.”

Scientific American Magazine
April 6, 1878

Excerpt:

As a rule school hours are intelligently adjusted with a view of taxing the young brain to a safe limit; and to put any more upon it, by compelling children, voluntarily or involuntarily, to absorb more knowledge of the kind which should be, if it is not, taught in school, and this during their play hours, is simply continuing work. Besides play that is of any value as play has its very essence freedom.

Sweden, which is the the home of garden schools, takes the lead and has 2,000 of them.

Scientific American Magazine
Oct 27, 1900
Scientific American, the oldest continuously published magazine in America, began life on August 28, 1845.

From a Department of State pamphlet:

In France school farms increased rapidly, and in 1852 there were seventy, the number allowed by law.

The following are some of the advantages of the system: The children obtain an intimate knowledge and intercourse with nature, they learn about the cultivation of fruits and vegetables. It educates boys beyond the tendency to pilfer fruits and flowers in orchards, and instills in children a fondness of rural life.

There were many poultry magazines 100 years ago, perhaps as common as our computer magazines today. They were full of photos, stories and ads for a large audience. The North American population was closer to its rural roots then. But even during the First World War, people looked back to a time when they were more involved in agriculture. Mike

From the Editorial
Everybodys Poultry Magazine
September 1917

“… to increase the production of poultry and eggs, to increase the general interest and especially to, in some way, bring back the thousands upon thousands of small and backyard breeders who flourished years ago, who kept high grade standard-bred stock, and were in part at least, producers as well as consumers.”

“There are great questions requiring consideration and united action, but this one of the backyard breeder in city and village alike is foremost of all.

This year thousands have come back, necessity has best illustrated their worth to themselves but we want more, all should return and thousands more, there is room for all and if fifty percent of the families kept from 15 to 25 fowls each it would total half a billion dollars in value to our national resources and a billion dollars more to the value of the food supply.

You can look back through issues of Everybodys Poultry Magazine here.

1918 Advertisement

Uncle Sam Expects You To Keep Hens and Raise Chickens

Two Hens in the Back Yard for Each Person in the House Will Keep a Family In Fresh Eggs

EVEN the smallest back yard has room for a flock large enough to supply the house with eggs. The cost of maintaining such a flock is small. Table and kitchen waste provide much of the feed for the hens. They require little attention only a few minutes a day.

An interested child, old enough to take a little responsibility, can care for a few fowls as well as a grown person.

Every back yard in the United States should contribute its share to a bumper crop of poultry and eggs in 1918.

In Time of Peace a Profitable Recreation

In Time of War a Patriotic Duty

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.

Today is the day to return as the dressers and keepers of the garden

By Uriah Yisrael
Truly Living Well Urban Harvest
Oct 4, 2011

Excerpt:

In 2008, I was directly affected by the Recession. For months I survived off of severance pay, and unemployment benefits, the months became years and all hope and money seemed to fade. I then remembered a sharecroppers words “everyone needs something to eat”. This sharecropper escaped the Jim Crow south and moved to the city of Boston, Massachusetts, where he continued to grow his beloved crops in a vacant lot next to his home. With no fanfare, grant money, or nonprofit status and while working 3 jobs with a family of 6 to feed he nurtured a trash filled plot into the envy of the neighborhood.

Presently he feeds family, neighbors, and strangers from this plot and daily gives advice from his garden in the hood. This sharecropper was the first urban farmer I ever met, this sharecropper is my father.

Like many African Americans, who fled the south in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, my parents worked the soil. We were the cheap labor force brought to this country and hemisphere to till the land, plant the crops and harvest these crops for 350 years without reward or pay day. Nonetheless just like my father, the love of agriculture runs in the DNA and so where ever the black migrant landed urban farm and gardens sprang up.

Read the complete article here.

Shantalla scheme will make up to 30 garden plots available

By Dara Bradley
The Connacht Sentinel
September 13, 2011

Excerpts:

Plans for city garden allotments are beginning to bear fruit.

For years garden allotments were an aspiration for Galway City Council but at last concrete proposals have emerged that could see between 25 and 30 plots available for public use later this year.

The site earmarked is less than an acre and has been idle for years. At the most recent meeting, members of the development company presented a site layout and detailed design for the proposal.

The drawings show the proposed four metres wides gate access to the gardens, with gravel access paths around the individual garden plots. Fencing will be erected around the site; and timber fencing may also separate the individual gardens.

Read the complete article here.

Town and country, rich in agriculture

Commentary By Braun: “Barth has a large market at which one can buy all the necessities of daily life at a fair price, thanks to its fertile land and its favourable location by the sea. For since there are fertile soils not only all around the city but in the whole duchy, it has an abundance of salt water and other fish, game, cattle, grain, butter, honey, wax and other such things. The wealth of the citizens comes from livestock farming and from trade, which they conduct very profitably with the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and other distant lands far across the ocean. They brew a tasty beer, which they also trade in.”

Barth today on Google maps. The original town plan is evident. See here. Might have to zoom out.

The bird’s-eye view of Barth presents the spacious town and harbour on the Barther Bodden, a bay that is separated from the Baltic Sea by an island. With its medieval fortifications, the town appears impregnable. The fortress (top left) beside the ramparts to the east was originally built around 1315 by King Wizlaw III, but was transformed into a Renaissance palace at the end of the 16th century. The Gothic St Mary’s church can be recognized on the market square. Barth arose as a German market settlement between two Slavic fishing villages and is first mentioned in records in 1159; it received its charter in 1255. In 1369 Barth became part of Pomerania and served for periods as the residence of the Dukes of Pomerania. (Taschen)

See more here.

Gardening as politics: Digging the Founding Gardeners

America’s Founding Fathers knew the importance of gardening and the environment. Today’s efforts — urban farming, composting, even drought-tolerant yards — echo their ideals.

By Andrea Wulf
LA Times
May 29, 2011
Andrea Wulf’s book “Founding Gardeners — The Revolutionary Generation, Nature and the Shaping of the American Nation” is published by Knopf.
Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

Excerpt:

Most people today, however, don’t regard gardening as an overtly political act, as it was for the Founding Fathers. But it can empower people and local communities. The rise of urban farming and gardening across the country in the past decade and the increasing interest in local produce is one example — it gives Americans control over their food and its production, which for the most part is in the hands of industry and huge conglomerates.

In big cities like Los Angeles, if you grow vegetables on “edible” food-producing wall panels and on roofs, or subscribe to weekly boxes of fresh produce from local farms, or even plant drought-tolerant frontyards, you’re making a political statement. Keeping a compost pile eliminates the need for chemical fertilizers; organic gardens that invite useful insects avoid the use of harmful pesticides; and local produce can reduce carbon emissions associated with industrial food production and long-distance transportation.

Over the years, the founders have been invoked by almost every politician and every political movement across a wide spectrum. Now it’s time for the gardeners and environmentalists, who are already following in the footsteps of the Founding Gardeners, to claim their stake in the ideals and the heroes that formed the nation.

Read the complete article here.

See also “Thomas Jefferson’s horticultural legacy is on view at his home, Monticello” here.

Wyck Historic House and Gardens in Philadelphia

By Meghan Gelardi Holmes
Rutgers University
May 26, 2011

Excerpts:

This season marks the fifth year of an urban farming experiment at Wyck Historic House and Gardens. The 18th-century homestead, located in the heart of upper Germantown in Philadelphia, has been a museum since the early 1970s. With the help of an extensive collection of artifacts and documents, the house relates three hundred years of history – the daily trials and tribulations of one family of Philadelphia Quakers. Except it hasn’t always been clear who’s listening.

By developing a small urban farm in Germantown, Wyck is providing a crucial service to its neighbors. The Home Farm is both an agricultural and an educational space. The weekly farmer’s market – Fridays throughout the summer (starting this Friday!) if you’d like to stop by and pick up some local produce – is one of the only local options for fresh fruits and vegetables. When I visited last August, women were appraising late-summer tomatoes while their kids waited impatiently to visit the chickens. This neighborhood is particularly in need of such a service; there is no supermarket within walking distance and access to healthy foods is limited. Wyck ensures that the products it sells are accessible to everyone, both by controlling price and by encouraging conversations about creativity in the kitchen. The Home Farm allows the staff to work with the local community to address issues of nutrition and equitable access to fresh foods.

Read the complete article here.

Wyck Historic House and Gardens

1794 – 1814
Caspar Wistar Haines (1762-1801), great, great-grandson of Hans Milan, moved his wife, Hannah Marshal Haines, (1765-1828), and their family to Germantown. His mother, Margaret Wistar Haines, had died in Philadelphia of Yellow Fever during the epidemic the year before and he wished to move his family to a healthier climate. He made quite a few improvements to the property including building a brew house and barn, and updating the house with stucco. The first reference to the garden at Wyck is in letters written by the fifth owner, Hannah, to her son, Reuben. Over a period of four months, beginning in January 1797, she describes a “productive garden filled with vegetables and fruit trees.” This was likely located to the north, or rear, of the house and probably was organized in a typical early Colonial parterre design, perhaps with a fish pond in the center. Her letters also document Caspar’s purchase of 100 fruit trees, using cold frames for seedlings and laying tan bark on the garden paths. The trellises for which Wyck is so well known that cover the south (front) façade of the house were added sometime during this era, probably in the first decade of the 1800s.

See the museum and farm site here.

Edward Henry Potthast (1857 – 1927) was an American Impressionist painter.

He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. From June 10, 1879 to March 9, 1881 he studied with Thomas Satterwhite Noble. He later studied at the Royal Academy in Munich with the American-born instructor Carl Marr.

After returning to Cincinnati in 1885 he resumed his studies with Noble. In 1886 he departed for Paris, where he studied with Fernand Cormon. In 1895 he relocated to New York City and remained there until his death in 1927. (From Wikipedia)

Visit the Potthast website here.

Detroit’s food system seems to get richer and more complex everyday.

Patrick Crouch
Model D Media
Apr. 26, 2011

Excerpt:

Detroit’s current vibrant urban agriculture movement attracts people to this work for multiple reasons.

For some it’s the political act of increased food sovereignty for peoples in the city of Detroit, exhibited by groups like Feedom Freedom, the Detroit Black Food Community Security Network, and the Capuchin Soup Kitchen’s Earthworks Urban Farm.

For others the motivation is the simple act of trying to improve their neighborhood though beautifying and reusing vacant lots, such as the Georgia Street Garden, and Growing Joy on the East Side. The Backyard Garden, straddling the Detroit/Grosse Pointe Park boarder seeks to heal the wounds of divided urban and suburban communities. Still others are focused on making models of profitability, including Brother Nature Produce, the Garden Resource Program’s Grown in Detroit Co-op, Edgeton Farm, and Rising Pheasant Farms. Art is the focus of projects like the Detroit Mural Factory and Artist Village. Entire neighborhoods such as Briggs, Brightmoor, and the Farnsworth community are being shaped by the gardens springing up everywhere.

Read the complete article here.

Also see: “little house on the urban prairie – country living in the city” blog here

Interview with the author by Amy
Garden Rant
April 9, 2011

Excerpt:

It was in Bartram’s letters that I first realized a remarkable connection to the founding fathers, for he was a good friend of Benjamin Franklin. As I read on through letters, diaries and other manuscripts, I came across a visit of the delegates of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to Bartram’s garden and an invoice to George Washington, who had ordered hundreds of trees and shrubs for his garden at Mount Vernon, as well as accounts that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson had visited. As I read on, I realized that America s first four presidents – Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison – had used nature, though in different ways, in their fight for America.

AMY: It’s amazing to think that they had time for gardening or even farming. I mean, there was a revolution going on!

ANDREA: They not only created the United States in a political sense, they also understood the importance of nature for their country. Golden cornfields and endless rows of cotton plants became symbols for America’s economic independence from Britain; towering trees became a reflection of a strong and vigorous nation; native species were imbued with patriotism and proudly planted in gardens, while metaphors drawn from the natural world brought plants and gardening into politics.

In fact, I believe it’s impossible to understand the making of America without looking at the founding fathers as farmers and gardeners. But the greatest surprise for me was that James Madison is the forgotten father of American environmentalism. He regarded nature as fragile ecological system that could easily collapse. Man, he believed, had to find a place within the balance of nature without destroying it — words that remain as important today as they did when he spoke them.

Read the complete article here.

Find out more about the book here.