A garden on wheels designed by Christina Cho

By Rachel Johnson
From Green Harvard
“A Moveable Feast”
June 24, 2010

Excerpt:

A garden on wheels may soon be rolling up to your department or dorm, thanks to GSD student Christina Cho. The project, undertaken this spring with the support of an OFS Sustainability Grant, combines food, public art, and community gardening into a unique setting: the Mobile Ethnic Garden.

Working on an assignment for an MIT course called Public Art: Issues in Spatial Cultural Identity, Cho started from the idea that food is a great way of understanding different cultures. She wanted to create a space that would bring Harvard’s community together not only around eating but growing diverse kinds of food—and came up with a garden that actually comes to the community. She designed a network of raised planter beds set on wheels that can be easily transported and fit together in multiple arrangements. The beds double as benches, offering visitors a way to gather and interact. Plus, the format benefits plants as well as people: the garden’s mobility means that it can maximize sunlight and raised beds reduce soil compaction and improve water conservation and drainage.

See the complete article here.

See Christina Cho’s blog with more photos here.

The growing interest in urban agriculture means we need to think about the city in a whole new way.

By Dorothée Imbert
Architecture Boston
Published by the Boston Society of Architects
Vol 13 No 3
August 4, 2010

Dorothée Imbert is the chair of the Master in Landscape Architecture program at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University. She is the author of Between Garden and City: Jean Canneel-Claes and Landscape Modernism (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010)

Excerpt:

The contemporary enthusiasm for urban agriculture presents a paradox: zoning regulation, olfactory and sound control, and moral opprobrium have erased almost all traces of food production within most Western cities. This contradiction reveals the difficulty of integrating agriculture into urban systems and the need for landscape architects, planners, and community activists to tackle policy. The perception of urban agriculture as a temporary land use for disenfranchised inner-city populations is also likely to hinder its potential to form a new type of open space.

It would be well worth reevaluating the mid-20th-century division between ornamental and productive landscapes, from an educational as well as an economic standpoint. As heirs to both agricultural and urbanism traditions, landscape architects are uniquely situated to bring the aesthetics of “third nature” (the garden) back into a new urban “second nature” (the farm). Productive open space will gain acceptance as an essential component of sustainable urbanism through highly visible pilot projects. The inclusion of an urban farm in Harvard University’s plan for a new campus across the Charles River would have performed such a role, had construction not been halted. The proposed Allston campus offered an ecological, spatial, and social laboratory to test ideas about urban agriculture. The interconnection of a productive and didactic landscape and urban spaces would have demonstrated Harvard’s commitment to sustainability and progressive development and taken landscape architecture and urbanism in a new direction.

But other opportunities are emerging. The 2009 proposal by Michel Desvigne and Jean Nouvel for “Grand Paris” carries implications for the redefinition of the suburban-rural interface. The periphery of Paris offers the opportunity to develop a new type of productive landscape, one performing simultaneously as an open-space system for the hyper-individualistic suburban tracts and as a test plot for the agricultural belt that lies beyond. Desvigne describes the 500-mile joint of varying width as a lisière — a term for a forest edge or a seam. Traces of a long-gone farming landscape — hedges, ditches, thickets, and paths — and an infrastructure of greenhouses, allotment gardens, recycling, energy production, composting, and sports fields organize this seam. Strictly codified, it is a terrain for exchange and experimentation, a means to make the landscape accessible to all users. In this scenario, planned indeterminacy hems the suburbanization of the countryside and allows agriculture to reenter the urban environment.

Read the complete article here.

Public Farm 1 (PF1) was the winning entry for the 2008 MoMA/PS1 Young Architect Program. Built in the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center’s courtyards, the temporary installation introduced a 1000m2 fully functioning urban farm in the form of a folded plane made of structural cardboard tubes. PF1 combines infrastructure with public space, engaging the visitor to re-imagine the city’s infinite possibilities.

Built entirely of biodegradable and recyclable materials, PF1 was powered by solar energy and irrigated by a rooftop rainwater collection system that kept the project off the city’s grid. Throughout the summer, the farm produced over 50 varieties of organic fruit, vegetables and herbs that were used by the museum’s café, at special events, and harvested by visitors.

PF1 was a testament to the possibilities of rural engagement in urban environments and proposed that cities be reinvented to become more complete and integrated systems capable of producing their own food, producing their own power and re-using their own water while creating new shared spaces for social interaction and public pleasure.

See all the details of concept and construction here at the Public Farm website.

Yes in My Backyard

Landscape architecture professor Karen Landman hits the road to see how people in Canada and the United States are bringing farming to the city

BY TERESA PITMAN
University of Guelph

Prof. Karen Landman, Environmental Design and Rural Development, grew up on a dairy farm, but she says her father wouldn’t recognize as farmers the people she met this summer when she travelled more than 18,000 kilometres across the western United States and Canada to study urban agriculture. They were growing food commercially in the city.

“I met with academics, social advocates, people who train others in the techniques of urban farming and, of course, urban farmers themselves,” she says.

Why study farming in cities? “Food is a fundamental issue,” says Landman. “We all need it, and food is the basis of culture because people gather together around food. But increasingly, we have concerns about issues such as food safety, food security and the impact of food transportation on the environment. Urban agriculture may be a solution to some of these concerns, and that makes it important on many levels.”

Layered on the concerns that consumers have about food are worries about the future of farming in rural areas.

Landman says it’s tough to get young people interested in farming because those raised on a farm know about the economic challenges and those raised in the city don’t know where to begin.

In Milwaukee, she spent time with Will Allen, whose Growing Power organization was established to tackle the problem of “food deserts” in that city. Food deserts are low-income areas in large cities where people have no access to grocery stores and usually end up having to buy expensive processed foods at corner stores.

Allen’s solution was to turn a two-acre plot of land in a neighbourhood in northern Milwaukee into a farm. There, he grows fruit and vegetables and raises goats, turkeys, chickens and honeybees. There’s also an aquaponics system housing thousands of tilapia and perch. In total, the farm produces $250,000 worth of food each year.

Allen has a store on site that provides fresh food to the community at reasonable prices. He also sells to local restaurants.

“Some of the middle-aged people in that community are eating fresh vegetables for the first time in their lives,” says Landman.

To make the operation work, Allen uses interns and volunteers to help with the intensive farming. He also offers tours of the facility six days a week to give people, especially children, a chance to see where their food comes from.

“Farmers want people to understand them and what they do,” says Landman. “This is a beginning.”

She recalls one young boy on a tour who had never seen a chicken before and didn’t know where eggs came from.

After her stay in Milwaukee, Landman went to San Francisco, then headed up the coast to Vancouver. She also travelled to Edmonton, where she visited the Visser farms, which are two large tracts of farmland within city limits.

“The land has excellent soil and a good microclimate,” she says. “People don’t think there is good land in cities, but there is. We’re urbanizing onto the best soil.”

Read the complete article here.

Leadenhall City Farm
By Mitchell Taylor Workshop

“Parks, allotments and markets are set to spring up across Britain on the sites of building projects that have been mothballed in the recession.

“Piers Taylor, of Mitchell Taylor Workshop, one of the practices shortlisted for the Leadenhall site has proposed a city farm, populated with colour-coded chickens. He wants to create grassy banks to picnic on and plant blackberry bushes amid the surrounding steel, granite and glass.”
- from The Times Oct 30, 2009

Mitchell Taylor Workshop: 122 Leadenhall Street

Introduction

This proposal for the site in Leadenhall addresses three key issues: public open space; views into the site from neighbouring buildings, and radically enhancing the the Leadenhall street frontage.

It does this through the creation of a city farm with public access that has a seasonal planting strategy designed using careful sunlight analysis, and a series of ‘outlets’ that sit in the hoarding on Leadenhall street selling produce grown on site, and a soup kitchen on the gantry serving food prepared with ingredients from the site.

Scale and incident are added through the addition of a number of key growing enclosures which would be constructed during the 2010 ‘Studio in the Woods’ which we would propose is held on the site.

We believe that in addition the value added to the site for minimum outlay, that there is a joy in reconnecting with the earth that would once have been on the site. We have made a place where city workers can smell/sniff/taste/touch/buy produce grown on site, walk through flowerbeds, picnic on wildflower banks, and watch the changing seasons.

Strategy for Management

Riverford Organic have indicated that they are interested in being the first ‘stakeholder’ for the site, advising on getting the site established and economically independent. It is envisaged from conversations with Riverford that there could be a number of people employed on the site, paid by the commercial sale of produce from the city farm.

Strategy for Growing

A palette of vegetables, fruits, cereal crops and flowers and has been put together to allow produce to be cropped each month and to provide plant interest and colour throughout the year.

The site has three distinct growing areas; full sun, partial shade and deep shade, each with its own distinct character. The sunniest part of the site will be home to fruiting vegetables, soft fruits, herbs and root vegetables. Leafy, green crops such as cabbages, broccoli and spinach can cope with more shade, so will occupy the central, partially shaded part of the site. In the deep shade of the southern part of the site there will be a log forest of exotic mushrooms, such shitake and oysters underplanted with shade tolerant crops such as rhubarb and mint.
The garden will be a place for city workers to escape to at lunch times, a place for children to learn from and a source of food for the proposed booths along Leadenhall Street.

Strategy for Infastructure

Infrastructure is minimal and cost effective. The main planters use standard size precast drainage channels filled with soil contained in a standard ‘dumpy’ bag. This enables the planters to be flexible, recycled, and easily relocated on this site, or to another site. A modest amount of terracing is needed on the east and south facing ‘bank’ in the north west of the site, and this could simply be carried out with a mini digger and scaffold boards as retaining devices. The hoarding can be retained, albeit with the addition of cut outs in the shape of vegetables to access the ‘outlets’ contained behind the hoarding, which could also be constructed from scaffolding and boarding.

It is proposed that four larger growing ‘devices’ are located around the site, which would be constructed during the 2010 ‘Studio in the Woods’ which is hosted by Mitchell Taylor Workshop. These could also be used to house chickens and other livestock.

Strategy for Cost

Our cost plan shows that £125k covers the purchase or drainage channels, soil, dumpy bags, scaffolding and minor re terracing of the bank, the creation of the ‘outlets’ along Leadenhall Street (accessed through the hoarding) and also the construction of the ‘growing devices’ to be constructed during the 2010 Studio in the Woods. However, if budget was slashed, just the ‘booths’ along Leadenhall Street could be constructed.

See Mitchell Taylor Workshop here.

See large Presentation Boards here. They can be enlarged for better viewing.

First here.

Second here.

See Times article: Allotments, parks and urban farms are rising above Britain’s gleaming towers here.

Kitchen garden crops are gradually being reintroduced into the productive area. Visitors can climb on to a raised platform to take in the scale of the walled gardens and their unique raised beds, built to the dimensions of Noah’s Ark, as described in The Bible.

See photos of the Kitchen Garden. Follow – “Read More”.

The Kitchen Garden in June at Trengwainton Garden, Cornwall. The Kitchen Garden was created around 1814 with raised sloping beds to combat cold weather.

Head Gardener’s Cottage built into the north wall.

The Beehouse at Trengwainton Garden, Cornwall.

Kitchen Garden at Trengwainton Garden, Britain
The National Trust, Madron
Penzance,  Cornwall,  TR20 8RZ,  England
See website here.

More and larger photos here – search Trengwainton Gardens.

Franklin Park Conservatory Unveils The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company Community Garden Campus in September

(August 25, 2009 – Columbus, Ohio) – Franklin Park Conservatory announces the opening and dedication of The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company Community Garden Campus on September 9, 2009. Located on the grounds of Franklin Park Conservatory, the campus will serve as a national model for community gardening development, education and outreach.

“In communities across the country, Americans are experiencing the pride associated with the renewal of community gardening,” said Jim Hagedorn, chairman and CEO, ScottsMiracle-Gro. “At ScottsMiracle-Gro, we are equally proud to support this growing movement through the establishment of The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company Community Garden Campus, a national resource for community gardening.”
This 7-acre, state-of-the-art “living classroom” provides a platform for expanded horticulture and environmental education, along with community gardening best practices. Additionally, this comprehensive campus will provide resources for community and school advocates that are dedicated to improving the life and health of families in central Ohio and across the United States.

As a mecca for community gardeners, the campus will feature indoor and outdoor learning spaces. The new American Electric Power Foundation Education Pavilion, anchored by numerous vegetable and herb gardens, will become a learning center for horticulture and environmental programming. The campus will also feature the newly renovated Chase Community Garden Center, new home for the American Community Garden Association (ACGA) and Franklin Park Conservatory’s education department.

American Community Garden Association (ACGA) website here.

Franklin Park Conservatory website here.

“It’s very gratifying for the AEP Foundation to play an integral role in creating a vibrant education center that will help our community come together to learn more about promoting a sustainable environment,” said Susan Tomasky, president, AEP Foundation. “We are eager to see our community reap the benefits of programs and expertise that will be offered in this bright, earth-friendly setting long into the future.”

The addition of The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company Community Garden Campus will provide a one-of-a-kind learning center to carryout the efforts of the Franklin Park Conservatory’s Growing to Green program. This community outreach program, founded in 2000, has assisted in the start-up and renovation of more than 150 community gardens, school gardens and city beautification projects. Additionally, the new Chase Community Gardener Training program features five education tracks that focus on: horticulture, nutrition and wellness, green practices and sustainability, community and garden leadership, and school gardens, will offer unparalleled learning opportunities.

“These gardens feed, beautify, teach and build a sense of shared pride – all things we believe contribute to building strong neighborhoods,” said Melissa Ingwersen, president of Chase in central Ohio. ”We hope the educational opportunities and demonstration gardens will inspire a whole new generation of community gardeners.”

The September 9 dedication of The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company Community Garden Campus is just one of several events that showcase the new campus. On September 10, Franklin Park Conservatory will host its annual Growing to Green awards, an award program honoring those who have helped promote community gardening in central Ohio. Beginning Friday, September 11, Franklin Park Conservatory will host the From Field to Table Festival beginning with an interactive dining experience followed by a weekend of live demonstrations, workshops and food sampling of locally grown foods from around Ohio.

“We are extremely excited about this first-of-its-kind facility at Franklin Park Conservatory,” said Bruce Harkey, executive director of Franklin Park Conservatory. “The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company Community Garden Campus is not only a benchmark in community gardening, but is also a resource for gardening, wellness and sustainability education.”

About Franklin Park Conservatory
Franklin Park Conservatory offers unique botanical collections, art exhibitions, plant shows, and educational programs for all ages. The Conservatory features a historic Victorian Palm House built in 1895 and 83,000 square feet of glasshouses, classrooms, and meeting and event spaces, situated in an 88-acre urban park minutes from downtown.

Franklin Park Conservatory is the only botanical garden in the world to own a signature collection of the work of acclaimed glass artist, Dale Chihuly. A permanent installation, Light Raiment II, by internationally acclaimed light artist James Turrell illuminates The John F. Wolfe Palm House every evening from dusk until dawn.

About ScottsMiracle-Gro
With nearly $3 billion in worldwide sales and more than 6,000 associates, The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company, through its wholly-owned subsidiary, The Scotts Company LLC, is the world’s largest marketer of branded consumer products for lawn and garden care, with products for professional horticulture as well.

Session 1 – Food and flower production in/for the cities: urban horticulture in developing and developed countries, for food and flower production.

The proceedings of the conference will be published at Acta Horticulturae, the website of International Society for Horticultural Science. I’ve been told that abstracts of the conference papers will be free, but a fee will be charged for downloading the papers themselves.

See International Conference on Landscape and Urban Horticulture website here.

Go to Acta Horticulturae Home Page here.

How does your backyard garden grow?

By David Colker, Los Angeles Times
September 14, 2008

Marta Teegen, who owns Homegrown, a Los Angeles-based garden consulting company, will come to your house and install a vegetable garden with your choice of plants. She generally puts in about four 4-by-6-foot raised beds.

The average cost — $2,000.

At that rate, and because this is Los Angeles, it’s no surprise that several of her clients are celebrities (whom she declined to name) with private chefs.

— a family’s well-tended 200-square-foot garden can turn out about 200 pounds of produce in a year, the National Garden Assn. said.

The garden group has never performed a detailed comparison of home garden vs. supermarket costs, but the National Garden Assn.’s Butterfield estimated that the produce grown in a 200-square-foot plot in a year could cost about $400 in a market.

At that rate, the economics of home gardening makes sense. If done right.

Link to LA Times story, ‘How does your backyard garden grow?’ here.

Visit Homegrown’s web site in Los Angeles here.

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?

Rain Barrels and Soaker Hoses on Breakfast TV

Sharon tells Tasha how we use our rain barrel and also how we irrigate the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden — with soaker hoses. It rains a lot in Vancouver through much of the year, but sometimes we have drought conditions during the summer months and residents are eager to conserve water during those times.

Interview with Jennifer Bailey, City of Vancouver, Water Conservation Program Manager.

Desk of Jac Smit
August 21 2008

Prior to the industrial revolution every village town and city had a commons for food production and marketing. In the 21st century the commons is regaining popularity and applications. My personal experience of the spatial commons is the Boston Common and Garden, a both glorious and cordial public space. My second is the Calcutta Maidan, from Hooghly River to the New Market. It incorporates fishing, goat grazing, horse racing, religious festivals and much more.

Urban agriculture exploits the commons more than rural agriculture, and is increasingly doing so, in some places. The best known application is Community and Allotment Gardens. Community or Cooperative aquaculture is significant in ponds, and bays. Less well known is aquaculture in urban waste water lagoons. Community Forest Gardens in Nepal and Kenya are deservedly receiving attention as women’s cooperative ventures. Community irrigation, neighbors deciding who gets how much water when, is well documented in Spain and Taiwan. Urban farmers’ collaboration in production within utility rights-of-way is worldwide and particularly noted in Brazil and the Ivory Coast. In African towns cow share is widespread.

See Jac’s complete article here.

Urban agriculture, commons and commoners in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the case of Sudbury, Suffolk

By H. R. FRENCH
British Agricultural History Review
Volume 48 Part II 2000 pp. 171-99

Abstract Urban agriculture and town commons have been largely overlooked in the existing literature, and have never been systematically surveyed. This study lays out a typology of urban commons, citing examples from across the country. It focuses on the uses and users of one urban common, in the cloth-producing town of Sudbury, Suffolk, between 17m-28. It details the occupational profile of commoners, distinguishes differences in their use of the commons, and compares them with those freemen who did not common animals. The study explores corporate management of this resource, in response to economic uncertainty, and in the context of wider urban agriculture. It concludes that the importance of urban agriculture and agrarian resources has been under-estimated, as has their survival and significance into the ‘modern’ period.

Link to complete paper here.

Urban common rights, enclosure and the market: Clitheroe Town Moors, 1764-1802

By H. R, FRENCH
British Agricultural History Review
Volume 51 Part 1 2003
p.40

Abstract
The social and agrarian impact of parliamentary enclosure is again in dispute. However, the effects of enclosure on urban agriculture and commons have yet to be examined. This detailed case study of the small borough of Clitheroe, Lancashire, examines the usage and the social profile of users between 1764 and 1779. It also depicts the local enclosure process, and argues that little redistribution of land or extinction of rights occurred. Access rights and stints had been subverted before enclosure by the creation of a ‘market’ in entitlements that reflected the distribution of property and resources in commercial agriculture beyond the commons. Urban sources provide unique detail to illustrate how fundamental change could occur in the management of commons before their abolition by enclosure.

Link to complete paper here.

See a short-documentary on guerrilla gardening starring Richard Reynolds, the author of “On Guerrilla Gardening.” The piece basically shows the process, preparation and troops needed to go out on a gardening mission.
From Current TV.

Link with comments on Current TV here.

Report Published by the BC Ministry of Agriculture and Lands
July, 2008

“Currently, land being farmed in British Columbia produces just over half of our food requirements. There is, therefore, tremendous potential to expand agricultural production so that it plays a greater role in feeding our growing population. However, a major challenge we face is to effectively manage urban growth in a manner that protects existing farm operations and provides opportunities for the agriculture industry to continue to grow. Part of this challenge in ensuring urban and agricultural land uses can successfully co-exist will require that the interface between these land uses is effectively planned.

“The Guide to Edge Planning offers tools and techniques that can be applied to the urban-agricultural interface to promote compatibility. By increasing public awareness, employing landscaping and spatial buffers and encouraging neighbourhood-friendly land management practices on both sides of the ‘fence’, concerns and complaints that may arise between farmers and their neighbours can be minimized and at the same time allow farming to operate in a viable manner.”

Download the complete report here. (3.2 MB) 79 pages.

Publisher: New Village Press
(January 1, 2008) 376 pages

Places of peace
Gardens of green
Standing together, we’re growing
Visions of wholeness coming.

Friendship can be a reality
Harmony can be for you and me, Oh!

Places of peace
Gardens of green
Standing together, we’re growing.

Building Commons and Community documents 45 years of the late Karl Linn’s legacy creating neighborhood spaces for communities and by communities. Projects include community gardens, playgrounds, parks and other gathering places built on derelict or unused property by the people who use them.

Landscape architect and child psychologist Karl Linn (1923-2005) was a beloved, down-to-earth, visionary leader of grassroots community building, who brought life to economically disenfranchised neighborhoods in cities from Boston to Berkeley. His book documents the creativity and ingenuity of working-class citizens, students and volunteer professionals who transformed derelict vacant lots and drab institutional settings into colorful and lively community commons in Boston, New York, Newark, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Louisville KY, Pittsburgh, Columbus OH, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco and Berkeley.

Link to ‘Building Commons and Community’.

Link to Karl Linn website.

Karl Linn’s Berkeley Community Gardens.

Interview with Karl Linn – Community Gardens: Reclaiming a Commons