Category — How to

Home-garden-sized row covers.

Sam Kass preps and plugs the winter garden

By Jane Black
Washington Post
Dec 16, 2009

First, he was profiled in Men’s Health magazine. Then it was People. Now White House assistant chef Sam Kass has taken the first step to small screen stardom. And by small screen, I mean YouTube.

Today, the White House released a video of Kass and Department of Agriculture officials readying the South Lawn garden for winter. A group of what appear to be a dozen volunteers set up hoop houses – a kind of temporary green house – in which staff will grow cold-weather greens for the White House table. The group also plant a cover crop of rye, which will help protect and enrich the soil during the cold months.

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The author’s pet rooster, 15-year-old Mr. X, checks out the cool veggie garden. Photo by Rosalind Creasy

The total value of the fresh vegetables author Rosalind Creasy grew in her 100-square-foot garden in 2008 was $683.43!

By Rosalind Creasy with Cathy Wilkinson Barash
December 2009/January 2010
Mother Earth News

In 2007, I began to get lots of questions about growing food to help save money. Then, while working on my new book, Edible Landscaping, I had an aha! moment. As I was assembling statistics to show the wastefulness of the American obsession with turf, I wondered what the productivity of just a small part of American lawns would be if they were planted with edibles instead of grass.

I wanted to pull together some figures to share with everyone, but calls to seed companies and online searches didn’t turn up any data for home harvest amounts — only figures for commercial agriculture. From experience, I knew those commercial numbers were much too low compared with what home gardeners can get. For example, home gardeners don’t toss out misshapen cucumbers and sunburned tomatoes. They pick greens by the leaf rather than the head, and harvests aren’t limited to two or three times a season.

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Watch higher quality video by clicking on the YouTube icon.

Bronwyn picks some Russian kale leaves at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden and walks us through the steps to make her unique muffins. She created this recipe last summer while working on an organic farm where there was nothing to eat but kale.

Kale-Carrot Muffins

Ingredients:
½ cup vegetable or grape seed oil
½ cup honey
1 egg, slightly beaten
½ cup milk
1 tsp almond flavouring
½ cup carrots, shredded
1 cup young kale leaves, (when steamed and pureed with 1-2 tbsp of milk, it produces approximately ½ cup of puree)

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This free version is self-paced. These courses are offered to you by the Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security (RUAF) and Ryerson University. Simply sign in as a guest and start reading.

Distance Learning on Urban Agriculture (UA)

Course 1 – Understanding UA

Module 1 – The Concept of Urban Agriculture
Module 2 – Building Blocks of Urban Agriculture
Module 3 – Types of urban agriculture
Module 4 – Direct and indirect stakeholders in UA
Module 5 – Dimensions of UA: Benefits and functions
Module 6 – Dimensions of UA: Problems and risks
Module 7 – Constraints and opportunities facing UA

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My Handkerchief Garden, 1889
By Barnard, Charles, 1838-1920
New York, Garden Publishing
62 pages

Excerpts below:

At last it was found ; a six-room house with a mere handkerchief of a garden, measuring about one-thirtieth of an acre, or about as big as a city back yard. The soil was a wet, heavy clay, full of stones, and shaded by a number of tall trees growing on the next lot. In March, 1887, we moved to the place, and on the twenty-first we paid twenty-five cents for one ounce of Tennis Ball Lettuce seed. So it was the scrap of a garden began, and thereon does hang the more or less learned remarks that make this book.

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We’ve featured this film before, both on our old site and on this web site back in April 2008. Today we feature it once again because of an amazing letter we received today from the young girl who acted in this movie almost 70 years ago! Family members spotted our posting of the video last year and surprised their grandmother with a copy of it at Christmas this year. Here is Jane’s letter, which continues on the next page.

Email from Jane Dudderar Gorsuch.

Hello, Mr, Michael Levenston. I am writing to thank you for the time and effort it took for you to post the Victory Garden movie. My name is Jane Dudderar Gorsuch and I am the girl in that movie. I had never seen the movie before, – only still pictures, so this was quite a treat. I was 16 years old then and am 83 now. The movie brought back a lot of the details that were lost over the years. My family gave it to me for Christmas, and we all (22) huddled around to see their old grandmother being a “movie star”!!!!

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Watch Growing Grains in the City – kids learn to make bread

Ian Lai, a chef and urban agriculture consultant, has been teaching children how to make bread. But what is so unusual and especially in a city, is that all the grains used to make the bread are grown in the city. Wheat, barley, spelt, flax, buckwheat, amaranth, and quinoa are grown at the Terra Nova Garden site in Richmond.

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Watch Composting in Singapore

With the sound of cicadas in the background, Esme shows us how she composts at home in Singapore and avoids attracting venomous snake such as King Cobras and vipers, and non-venomous pythons (adults grow to a maximum of more than 32 feet).

And for more about nature in Singapore, read the following article:

Wildlife’s revenge – Even in urban Singapore, it can sometimes be a jungle

Two to three times a week, Singapore police receive a call from a resident reporting a visit by one of Singapore’s many snakes.

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Photo Bill Keay, Vancouver Sun. Meeru sitting in centre with fellow club members.

By Meeru Dhalwala
The Vancouver Sun, 26 Nov 2008

I certainly didn’t have an idyllic childhood, but I did gain some idyllic principles from my mom and dad. It used to drive me crazy when either one would yell at me for getting even a “ B” on a test or for not finishing my lunch, even if the bread was stale.

“ In India . . .” was how they always started the guilt trip. As I became older, I yelled back that they were the ones who had brought me to the U. S. and that I wasn’t going to feel guilty about all the poor people in India.

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We Harvest Jerusalem Artichokes from Michael Levenston on Vimeo. Click on the Vimeo link to watch a High Definition (HD) version of this video.
Also see alternative HD High Definition version on YouTube.

Maria planted lots of Jerusalem artichokes last April and now we are harvesting buckets of these tasty tubers.

Jerusalem artichokes or Sunchokes are a perennial sunflower with tasty potato-like tubers. 6-8 ft tall with daisy-like flowers, sunchokes are very hardy and can become weedy, so plant them in a bed that is permanent. Harvest from August through late Fall. Nutty tasting tubers become sweeter after frost when left in the ground!

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Cabbage to Krautini from Michael Levenston on Vimeo. Click on the video to go to the Vimeo High Definition (HD) version.
Also see alternative HD High Definition version on YouTube.

Sarah loves ‘magical sauerkraut’ and makes it regularly with freshly picked cabbages from the garden. Using her knowledge of nutrition and bartending, she shows us how to make a Krautini.

Krautini Recipe:
2 shots vodka
1 shot home-made sauerkraut juice
ice

Combine ingredients into martini shaker and pour into a glass and enjoy. Garnish with olives and a sprig of sauerkraut.

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Cover photo of Eliza and Peter.
Published by Sono Nis Press in 2007

The Garden That You Are explores that culture through the lives and stories of eight gardeners who all live within a square mile of each in other, in British Columbia’s bucolic and culturally diverse Slocan Valley. Some garden for a living, others garden as a passion, but all have fascinating personal histories and gardening lives.

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Horseradish – Fresh Today From Our Garden from Michael Levenston on Vimeo.
Also see alternative HD High Definition version on YouTube.

Maria pulled up a horseradish root today, cleaned and grated it, added a touch of white vinegar and let me taste it just minutes from the ground. Wow! If you like the flavour of horseradish on oysters, prime rib, or steaks, why wouldn’t you have a patch growing in your garden.

Blogger Durgan’s web page on processing horseradish root here.

How to harvest horseradish here.

How to plant horseradish here.

Farm Fountain is a collaborative project by artists Ken Rinaldo and Amy Youngs. See their beautiful videos, photos and a web cam!

Farm Fountain is a system for growing edible and ornamental fish and plants in a constructed, indoor ecosystem. Based on the concept of aquaponics, this hanging garden fountain uses a simple pond pump, along with gravity to flow the nutrients from fish waste through the plant roots. The plants and bacteria in the system serve to cleanse and purify the water for the fish.

This project is an experiment in local, sustainable agriculture and recycling. It utilizes 2-liter plastic soda bottles as planters and continuously recycles the water in the system to create a symbiotic relationship between edible plants, fish and humans.

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Harvesting Satina Potatoes at City Farmer from Mike Levenston on Vimeo. You can follow the links above and watch this video in HD (High Definition).
Also see alternative HD High Definition version on YouTube.

Maria pulls up a large harvest of delicious Satina potatoes at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden. We’ve boiled and baked these and made potato salad – all delicious dishes.

Tasha talks to Mike about natural lawn care at City Farmer. A push mower makes no noise, uses no gasoline and does not pollute the atmosphere. See what else you can do to become a green ‘Lawnranger’.

Visitors learn about alternatives to lawns at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden. How about a waterwise native plant garden or replacing your lawn with a variety of classy ground covers?

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Photo from ‘Cowfiles African Gardens’.

From: ‘Ideas that will catch on here.’
July 12, 2008, BBC

“Another fantastic idea I picked up – which could make its way onto my allotment before long – is the keyhole veg bed. This is a raised bed with bells on: it’s about 1m (3′6″) high, and the outer bed, where the vegetables are growing, slopes down from a central hollow column. There’s an access path to the column (giving the bed a “keyhole” shape viewed from above) and inside it is what amounts to a compost bin, held in with hessian: you fill it with kitchen waste, stable manure, grass clippings – whatever you’d put on your compost heap.

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As the rain makes a pitter-patter sound on my umbrella, Maria ‘tugs’ up some of her garlic at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden. She braids the soft-necked variety into something quite beautiful, which she will hang in her kitchen.

What do you do on a rainy Vancouver summer day? You turn to crafts in the garden. Maria picks some lavender and makes it into something useful.

Image from “Old Macdonald Had An Apartment House” by Judi Barrett (Author), Ron Barrett (Illustrator).

Mark Fonseca Rendeiro, also known as ‘Bicyclemark’, has made four podcasts about urban farming.

Vertical Farming and the New Agricultural Revolution

There is more to urban farming than just growing crops on empty lots in cities. In fact, there is a type of urban farming that involves growing a lot more food in tall buildings, making use of the latest innovations of crop growing and energy usage. My guest, Professor Dickson Despommier of Columbia Universty explains what vertical farming is and why it is so important for the future of human existance.

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