Wading Pool Gardens

The president (Dr. Job Ebenezer) of the organization, Technology for the Poor, explains his vision for the spread of urban agriculture.

In 1993, Dr. Job Ebenezer, former Director of Environmental Stewardship and Hunger Education at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) established a container garden on the roof of the parking garage of the ELCA offices in Chicago. The hope was that the roof top garden would serve as a role model for creative use of urban space throughout the country. Dr. Ebenezer proved the feasibility of growing vegetables in plastic wading pools, used tires and feed sacks.

Urban agriculture with Job Ebenzeer – part 2

The demonstration garden has proved to be highly successful. Each year since 1993, urban gardeners at the ELCA offices in Chicago harvested nearly 1,000 pounds of vegetables from nearly 40 wading pools and a dozen of used tires and feed sacks.

Visit Technology for the Poor website here.

One man’s parking garage is the same man’s garden — where he’s proving it’s possible to grow a significant portion of his own food at home, even in a San Francisco apartment building!

By Jon Brooks
Tonic.com
August 4, 2010

Excerpt:

It started three years ago with a single tomato plant. Today, he and his wife Ellen estimate that they grow 25-30 percent of their total food intake. Current crops include tomatoes, peas, blackberries, raspberries, basil, carrots, mushrooms and several types of lettuce, almost all cultivated in nine half-barrels of soil, tucked away in a corner of their San Francisco apartment’s parking garage. He is also growing sprouts in a couple of jars on his kitchen table.

Gene tells the story of his project’s germination (pun intended):

“When 9/11 happened, I thought a lot about what importance it had to me personally. At that time I was working mostly in theater and it just felt like sitting around memorizing lines wasn’t what I ought to be doing. I wanted to have my own actions be reflective of something positive with respect to what had happened. I was thinking about how oil and all the energy used in mass food production was one of the problems. That thought just evolved.”

Part of that evolution was a moment of clarity that came to him while looking at a package of frozen blueberries. “The blueberries came from Serbia,” he recalls. “I’m living in California and eating in my oatmeal blueberries shipped from Serbia. Finally, I got too bothered by my growing understanding of just what’s involved in buying a simple tomato to not do something.”

See the complete story here.

Manual of Low/No-Space Agriculture

Book by Dr. Thilak T. Ranasinghe
Dr. Thilak T. Ranasinghe, Former Director of Agriculture, Western Province, Sri Lanka
Review in the Sunday Times – Sri Lanka
April 25, 2010

It is predicted that the world population will rise to ten billion by 2050. At present, some 15 million square kilometres or around one-tenth of total land area of the earth is used for farming. In October, 2009, scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany along with their colleagues from Sweden noted that global agricultural production could increase by around one-fifth by adopting better management practices, especially water management.

However, that alone will not be enough to assure food production from existing farmlands to meet the demands of growing world population in the face of rising climatic changes. By now, two-thirds of the world population lives in urban areas while in Sri Lanka it is one third.

Considering these alarming scenarios, we need to look afresh at ways of producing food in the face of advancing environment, economic, social and political changes of the country/world. Urban agriculture can be regarded as one of the key options available in selecting different measures to mitigate the food security problems we face today.

Dr. Thilak T. Ranasinghe, Former Director of Agriculture, Western Province, Sri Lanka – addresses these aspects in his book “Manual of Low/No-Space Agriculture -cum- Family Business Gardens”. The book has been published with the support of RUAF Foundation, International Network of Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and the Food Security and International Water Management Institute.

In part one of the book, technology development in urban agriculture under the concept of the Family Business Garden [FBG] which was introduced in 2000 in Sri Lanka is discussed with its five dynamic components of family nutrition, technology adoption, crop management, post-harvest technology and value addition and, landscaping and housekeeping. Interestingly, it shows the simple methods of preparation of more than 25 creative “Vertical Cultivation Structures” for the use under low/no land, building and restricted air spaces available in urban limits.

In part two, the book discusses the technology dissemination process of low/no-space -cum-Family Business Gardening in the context of urban development. It further discusses the significance of urban agriculture in populating cultivation structures along with age stratification as well as with novel urban extension methods developed in diffusing agricultural technologies. Finally, it explains the value of establishment of urban-rural continuum in the face of rapid urbanization while addressing the improvement in physical as well as mental health of different communities.

See the rest of the review here.

See also: Sri Lanka: Lessons of Urban Agriculture for Rural Applications with Family Business Gardens”.

2007 – Winner of the 2nd International Competition for Sustainable Housing by Knafo Klimor Architects and Town Planners, Israel

Excerpts from Living Steels’ competition design website.

Agro-housing, the winning design for construction in China, blends urban and rural living by creating vertical greenhouse space within high-rise apartments. Designed by Knafo Klimor Architects, the Agro-housing concept allows tenants to produce their own food, reducing commuting needs and providing a green neighbourhood.

Knafo Klimor Architects developed this concept with concern for predictions that 50% of China’s one billion people will live in its cities, a trend mirrored in many developing countries in the world. The architects observe that massive urbanisation displaces communities, dissipating existing traditions and heritage, as well as placing a strain on energy resources and infrastructure.

The Agro-housing concept presents a new urban and social vision that addresses this chaotic urbanisation problem by creating a new order in the city and, more specifically, in the housing environment. The idea behind Agro-housing is to create a space close to home where families can produce their own food supply according to their own abilities, tastes and choices to promote independent living, freedom and potentially provide additional income. In addition, these greenhouse spaces become a natural gathering place for the community to interact. Agro-housing is a place for living, but in essence, it is a model for a new urbanity, contributing to the preservation of traditions and community values and diminishing the trials of rural migration.

Agro-Housing is composed of two parts: the apartment’s tower and the vertical greenhouse. The greenhouse is a multi-floor structure for cultivation of crops such as vegetables, fruits, flowers and spices, equipped with a drip irrigation system that re-uses grey water. The greenhouse climate is controlled through natural ventilation and a heating system. A roof-top terrace garden offers open-air green space for recreation and informal gathering. A sky club on the roof is designed to host social gatherings and celebrations, and a kindergarten on the ground floor keeps young children close to home and family. The individual apartments allow maximum flexibility to arrange interior spaces to accommodate family changes over time, including integration of a work space. The building has a minimal footprint in order to free the ground surface for gardening and rainwater harvesting. Paving is limited and made of recycled materials.

With Agro-housing, Knafo Klimor Architects envisions a community that can provide its own food, jobs and saleable goods right where the people live, gifting residents with the resources for self-reliance within an urban setting.

The roof-top terrace garden provides additional garden area, as well as grassy areas for community activities. The roof-top sky club provides a location for community celebrations and social gatherings. The sky club’s roof houses solar energy panels and a rainwater capture system while providing shade for the spaces beneath.

Agro-housing’s inner vertical space in the building functions as a thermal chimney, ventilating the apartments in summer months and circulating heat during the winter months. In summer, the roof-top windows are opened to allow the apartments to benefit from the natural cross ventilation, and the balconies and shades reduce heat absorption. The greenhouse floors with their vegetation act as vertical screens and shades for cooling the inner part of the building. South facing apartments have shaded balconies to block the summer sun. In winter, the roof-top windows are closed, trapping warm air inside the building. The low-angle winter sun penetrates the building and heats the high mass elements during the day, which in turn warms the apartments at night. A solar heating system delivers heat energy from the collectors on the roof to each apartment through a forced circulation system. The greenhouse’s glazed walls further warm air that can circulate through the thermal chimney.

See the complete Agro-housing concept in this 6MB PDF.

See the architects Agro-housing web page here.

Competition website here.

by Mike Lieberman (Canarsiebk)

My goal of having this site is to inspire you to start gardening and growing your own food. If I’m doing it, why can’t you?

Don’t have the space? Check out my fire escape garden. Not much room there, but I’m getting it done.

I have my vegetable garden on my fire escape set up with 3 self watering containers and 3 hanging herb planters.

Here’s what in the containers:

Kales, swiss chard and lettuces
Cherry tomatoes and lettuces
Jimmy Nardello’s sweet pepper and Chile Releno
The herbs that I have planted are
Apple mint
Greek oregano
French tarragon

See Mike’s site, Urban Organic Gardener, here.

Ginza rice farm

By Jared Braiterman, PhD.
Tokyo Green Space examines the potential for micro-green spaces to transform the world’s largest city into an urban forest that supports bio-diversity, the environment and human community.

Excerpt:

On a side street in Ginza, I noticed a rice farm and met Ginza Farm’s CEO Iimura Kazuki and his assistant who were tending the rice and two cute ducklings. Shop clerks and construction clerks stopped by to admire the rice in its mid-summer glory.

The rice farm occupies an empty lot. At the end of the afternoon Iimura-san was draining the rice paddy, and his assistant was collecting the ducklings to take back to the office for the evening. On the left is a beautiful table and benches, on the back and right side a huge photo mural of rural Japanese rice farms, and in front a bamboo fence, some live bamboo, vines, a black pine, and a few cucumber plants.

Link to Ginza rice farm here.

Also see Jared’s followup, Interview with Iimura Kazuki at Ginza Farm

Excerpt:

Iimura-san told me that he is very interested in urban farming in Japan and worldwide. His background has given him unique skills for pulling off something that at first seems impossible: creating a ground level rice farm in one of Tokyo’s most expensive neighborhoods.

How did Iimura-san secure a site that is on a small side street west and north of the intersection of Chuo Dori and Yanagi Dori (not far from the twisty De Beers building)? Using connections with tax accountants and attorneys, he located the plot and spent six months negotiating with the landlord. Although I do not know the details, apparently lending land between demolition and construction confers some significant tax advantages, yet still it took a long process of negotiation.

See the interview on this page.

Tokyo Green Space has some wonderful urban greening stories. For example, see the Ginza Honey Bee Project here.

Grow your own food in your apartment year round

Window Farms are vertical, hydroponic, modular, low-energy, high-yield edible window gardens built using low-impact or recycled local materials.

In February 2009, through a residency at Eyebeam, Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray began to build and test the first Window Farms prototype. Growing food inside NY apartments is a challenge, but within reach. The foundational knowledge base is emerging through working with agricultural, architectural and other specialists, collecting sensor data, and reinterpreting hydroponics research conducted by NASA scientists and marijuana farmers.

We have been researching and developing hydroponic designs that are inexpensive and made from relatively inexpensive materials. The working prototype is a drip system made from recycled water bottles, holding 25 plants. Beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, arugula, basil, lettuce and kale are thriving.

Interview with the window farmers.

Visit windowfarms.org here and learn more about their project.

Japanese Government to boost indoor cultivation

The Yomiuri Shimbun
Apr. 10, 2009

The government is set to launch full-scale efforts to promote indoor agricultural facilities to ensure stable cultivation of fruits and vegetables, government officials said.

As part of a three-year plan to boost the number of indoor growing facilities about fourfold, to 150, and raise production about fivefold, the government will offer incentives including low-interest financing and a capital investment tax credit, the officials said.

Besides responding to rising industry demand for safe and reliable food supplies, the government hopes the move also will create employment opportunities. The plan is expected to be included in the additional economic stimulus package currently being compiled by the government and ruling parties.

Indoor growing facilities use air-conditioning to maintain consistent temperature and humidity. Computer controls ensure optimal conditions are maintained for cultivating produce, including the proper mix of carbon dioxide, light and water, appropriate temperature and nutrients for growth.

Indoor cultivation also makes it easy to maintain uniform quality and shape, and renders pesticide use unnecessary.

Industries including major food producers already are operating 40 such indoor growing facilities nationwide. About 10 types of produce, including lettuce, tomatoes, strawberries are being cultivated inside them. Officials added it is possible to cultivate lettuce 20 times a year in the indoor factories.

Meanwhile, the government envisages further indoor agricultural facilities being set up on demolished factory sites, unused or abandoned farmland, or even inside vacant stores within shopping districts.
The government hopes the measures will make use of idle land and help farming villages affected by the aging population, and in turn, lead to a rise in job opportunities.

The government also is set to introduce new legislation to address the problem of vague zoning restrictions for factories that combine agricultural and factory functions, which until now have not been clearly defined, the officials added.

Construction costs for a large indoor growing facility can easily reach hundreds of millions of yen. In addition, air-conditioning costs push the retail price of vegetables and fruits cultivated in indoor growing facilities two to three times higher than ordinary produce.

The government aims to bring down production costs by about 30 percent over the project’s three-year time frame by introducing measures to promote the adoption of energy-saving technologies.

Link to article here.

James Scale of Celtic Stonescaping is building our keyhole garden for us out of local basalt rock. The video shows progress by day two after volunteers hauled six tons of rock and gravel into our back Youth Garden yesterday. What a contrast, sun and mild one day, snow and cold the next; well it is December and the rest of the country is minus 30 degrees.

Celtic Stonescaping
James Scale 778-858.2276

See our previous Keyhole Garden page here.

City Farmer Keyhole Garden Project – Day One

Saturday Morning Day 3

Sunday Morning Day 4

By JACOB ADELMAN
Associated Press Writer
Nov 21, 2008

Terry Fujimoto sees the future of agriculture in the exposed roots of the leafy greens he and his students grow in thin streams of water at a campus greenhouse.

The program run by the California State Polytechnic University agriculture professor is part of a growing effort to use hydroponics _ a method of cultivating plants in water instead of soil _ to bring farming into cities, where consumers are concentrated.

Because hydroponic farming requires less water and less land than traditional field farming, Fujimoto and researchers-turned-growers in other U.S. cities see it as ideal to bring agriculture to apartment buildings, rooftops and vacant lots.

“The goal here is to look at growing food crops in small spaces,” he said.

Long a niche technology existing in the shadow of conventional growing methods, hydroponics is getting a second look from university researchers and public health advocates.

Supporters point to the environmental cost of trucking produce from farms to cities, the loss of wilderness for farmland to feed a growing world population, and the risk of bacteria along extensive, insecure food chains as reasons for establishing urban hydroponic farms.

However, the expense of setting up the high-tech farms on pricey city land and providing enough year-round heat and light could present some insurmountable obstacles.

“These are university theories,” said Jim Prevor, editor of Produce Business magazine. “They’re not mapped to things that actually exist.”

The roots of hydroponically produced fruits and vegetables can dangle in direct contact with water or be set in growing media such as sponges or shredded coconut shells. Most commercial operations pump water through sophisticated sensors that automatically adjust nutrient and acidity levels in the water.

Hydroponics are generally used for fast-growing, high-value crops such as lettuces and tomatoes that can be produced year-round in heated, well-lit greenhouses. So far, production is not large enough for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to track.

The country’s largest hydroponic greenhouse is Eurofresh Inc.’s 274-acre operation in southeastern Arizona, where more than 200 million pounds of tomatoes were produced in 2007. Most large-scale commercial operations are in the arid Southwest, where water-efficiency is prized, or the sometimes frigid Northeast, where the method can be used year-round in heated greenhouses.

The technology has benefited from nearly three decades of NASA research aimed at sustaining astronauts in places with even less green space than a typical U.S. city.

Hydroponics bears the dubious distinction of being a growing method for marijuana.

Fujimoto said one of his research assistants got a call from the FBI after using a credit card to buy nutrients for the campus greenhouse at a hydroponic-supply store.

There’s clearly nothing illicit going on at the greenhouse, where thin streams of water pass silently though dozens of long white plastic tubes arranged in rows across chest-high stands. Rose-shaded lettuce leaves, pale-green stalks of bok-choy and sprigs of basil poke from the holes in the tubes.

Fujimoto aims to prepare his students to operate the urban hydroponic businesses that he thinks will gain importance in the future. They sell their lettuces, peppers, tomatoes and other produce to an on-campus grocery store and at a farmers market.

In Ohio, the ProMedica Health System network of clinics used a Toledo hospital roof to grow more than 200 pounds of vegetables in stacked buckets filled with a ground coconut shell potting medium. The tomatoes, peppers, green beans and leafy greens were served to patients and donated to a nearby food shelter, hospital spokeswoman Stephanie Cihon said.

When the project resumes in the spring, the hospital plans to expand into at least two community centers in economically depressed central Toledo, where fresh produce is hard to come by.

Cornell agriculturist Philson Warner, who designed the program’s hydroponics system, said his students harvest hundreds of heads of lettuce a week from an area smaller than five standard parking spaces by using a special nutrient-rich solution instead of water.

The numbers have some researchers imagining a future when enough produce to feed entire cities is grown in multistory buildings sandwiched between office towers and other structures.

Columbia University environmental health science professor Dickson Despommier, who champions the concept under the banner of his Vertical Farm Project, said he has been consulting with officials in China and the Middle East who are considering multistory indoor farms.

He is also shopping his concept to engineering teams in hopes of having a prototype built as he seeks funding.

“Most of us live in cities,” he said. “As long as you’re going to live there, you might as well grow your food there.”

See more about Terry Fujimoto and Using Nutrient Film Technology (NFT) in Increasing Productivity of Vegetables here.

PowerPoint presentation by Dr. Thilak T. Ranasinghe (See next page.)

Sri Lanka National Agriculture Policy Documents

Statement – 29 (2003)
Implement a special urban agriculture promotion
program designed to ensure supply of home
consumption needs and environmental protection.

Statement – 17 (2007)
17.1 Promote home-gardening and urban agriculture
to enhance household nutrition and income
17.2 Promote women’s participation in home-gardening.

Government Programme for Promotion of Home Gardening – 2007 (Let us Cultivate to Uplift the Nation)

1. Rural and urban home-gardens
2. School gardens
3. Home-gardens of school children
4. Gardens and model farms in office premises
5. Gardens in security forces camps
6. Private home-gardens of state officials
7. Gardens in office premises of the private institutions
8. Home-gardens of public representatives

See Dr. Thilak T. Ranasinghe’s well-illustrated Powerpoint presentation describing the concept of Family Business Garden (FBG) in the field of urban agriculture and the urban-rural continuum in Sri Lanka.

Here is the complete PowerPoint presentation. (Large download 6.6 MB)

Also see: Family Business Gardens: Agricultural Options in Remodeling & Modernising Tsunami Devastated Townships in Sri Lanka (.doc file)
by Dr. Thilak T. Ranasinghe, Director of Agriculture (Western) Sri Lanka

The Urban Potato: It’s Time Has Come
By Jac Smit
October 29, 2008
From the Desk of Jac Smit

A few years ago I stood on the roof of a hospital in Port au Prince, Haiti. The surface was half straw and other half organic thrash and half potato foliage. A week later I visited a friend in Washington DC. He took me out to his porch and there was a bale of hay [wire bound] with potato foliage on three sides.

I soon learned that these two cases were examples of “Lazy Man Farming”. Lazy Man was invented in Germany in the 19th Century. Its most cited practice is roadside cultivation in Newfoundland Canada. There the farmers collect seaweed, off load it on the side of the road, and insert seedlings.

Potatoes, sweet and sour, do not need soil. Potatoes can be produced soil free on any flat surface: roofs, roadsides, off-season ski resort parking lots, and-so-forth. And its not just hay or seaweed; supermarket and restaurant waste work as well or better.

On a recent visit to Mexico City I discovered the “Potato Tree”. I learned that potatoes grow up and sideways, not down. Home owners and shopkeepers were planting potatoes in a waste filled discarded automobile tire; in a few weeks they added a second tire and within three months had a six-tire high “tree” full of potatoes. The ‘Potato Tree’ is also practiced in garbage cans, black plastic bags and in wooden boxes.

On a visit to a health care center in Nairobi, Kenya I learned of the many benefits of Sweet Potato production. Not only does the sweet potato have the benefits listed above but the foliage is edible and very healthy. The more you harvest the leaves the more the root is stimulated to expand. Sweet potato also lasts longer in storage than most regular potatoes.

A lot is happening in the arena of the potato. The United Nations declared 2008 to be “The Year of the Potato”. In China potato production was up 50% from 2005 to 2007. In India yields increased on demonstration farms from 4 tons to 8 tons per acre, when they bought better seeds. In Peru, where the ‘Potato Center’ research includes 200 varieties, yields were up 20% from 2007 to 2008.

I am sorry that none of these stats report on the Urban Potato. They do hint at what’s possible in the bag, the tire and on the roof.

A rural acre of potato delivers more protein than an acre of wheat in half the time. Urban potato technology produces ten to twenty times as much per square yard as the rural potato patch and it requires both less storage and less shipping.

Urban Potato References:

1. UNFAO, UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Bambi Lotalado, Italy
2. CIP, International Potato Center, Pamela Anderson, Peru
3. McCain Food Ltd., David Caldiz, USA
4. AGRITECH, Bangalore, India
5. AVRDC, Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center, Taiwan
6. Univ. Of Idaho, Potato Production Systems Program
7. www.ehow.com/how Grow-Potatoes-garbage-can
8. Mother Earth News: Grow Potatoes in Hay

See more of Jac Smit’s writing here.

The International Year of the Potato 2008 website here.

See ‘A History and Social Influence of the Potato’ by Redcliffe Salaman here.

Edible of the Month: Potato – National Gardening Association.

The Book of the Potato

By T. W. SANDERS

Early 1900′s book cover: The Book of the potato. A practical handbook dealing with the cultivation of the potato in allotment, garden and field; also the pests and diseases thereof; together with selections and descriptions of the most productive, best cooking, and disease-resisting varieties, etc.
By T. W. SANDERS, F.L.S., F.R.H.S. (Thomas William), 1855-1926
Editor of “Amateur Gardening” ; Author of “Allotment and Kitchen
Gardens,” “Vegetables and their Cultivation” etc.)
See flip book edition 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.

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.

Photo by Michael Levenston. Link to larger photo here.

Up five floors at the YWCA in downtown Vancouver, amongst skyscrapers, is a spectacular rooftop food garden. Our two videos feature an interview with Ted Cathcart, Operations Manager and Rooftop Food Gardener at the YWCA.

Email Contact: tcathcart@ywcavan.org

Link to YWCA Vancouver Rooftop Food Garden website.

Downtown Deck Turned Into Fruit-and-vegetable Patch to Feed Needy

Andy Ivens, The Province
Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Stand on any street corner in downtown Vancouver and it’s easy to spot a BlackBerry.

But you need to take an elevator to the roof of the YWCA Health plus Fitness Centre to spy blackberries — the fruit that grows on bushes, not the hightech cellphones glued to so many ears — in a patch with raspberries, strawberries and blueberries.

Surrounded by skyscrapers, a handful of hardy volunteers till the soil and cultivate an organic rooftop garden to feed families in Canada’s poorest neighbourhood.

Ted Cathcart, YWCA’s facilities manager, got the idea to turn the decorative flower garden on the roof of the Hornby Street edifice into a more productive enterprise.

“When Bentall Five [the office building immediately to the west of the YWCA] was completed, it became less interesting to be up here,” Cathcart said yesterday as he showed off his cornucopia amidst the concrete.

So, in his spare time, he began turning the flower beds into vegetable gardens.

In 2006, the first year of the conversion to a food garden, Cathcart and crew harvested 150 kilograms of produce.

Last year, as more beds were added, that haul ballooned to 450 kilograms.

“The goal is to grow one tonne of food. That’s my ‘one-tonne challenge,’ ” said Cathcart.

“That could take another three to five years.

“What we’re looking at is rotational crops — things that can be grown quickly, then get it out of there so we can plant something else in the space.”

Cathcart has been loading the produce into his car and driving it the 14 blocks to the YWCA’s Crabtree Corner community kitchen on East Hastings Street, where the staff turned it into nutritious meals for deserving families five days a week.

Yesterday marked the inaugural run using a specially designed bicycle and cart donated to the cause by PEDAL, a non-profit organization.

“The YWCA supports the garden by providing a budget, if we need to buy anything,” said Cathcart.

“But we’ve been very lucky so far. We’ve had a lot of our plants and seeds donated by various companies,” said Cathcart.

“And we’ve had support from the University of British Columbia and the Environmental Youth Alliance.”

Cathcart said there are 15 to 18 volunteers who do the planting, watering and harvesting of the garden, but unlike a normal community garden, no one takes home the produce.

Link to article here.

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.

Then tip on water saved from your washing up, and that’s it. “The idea is that the water will drain through and take all the nutrients with it,” explains Kirstine. “It’s feeding from below the topsoil, so rather than watering on the surface and all the water evaporating, everything’s coming up from underneath.” In Africa, this garden will feed a family of six through the three-month dry period, when crops in the fields simply dry out.”

Keyhole Gardens at Send a Cow.

Below, a video titled: Lesotho – Make a Keyhole Garden

“A great little video made in Lesotho, showing how a group of schoolchildren made a keyhole garden. The charity Send a Cow showed them how to make it and the children can now make their own at home and have more food.”

“We are three young women dedicated to promoting urban agriculture in Mexico City, working under the name Sembradores Urbanos (“Urban Cultivators” in English). In August 2007, we inaugurated the first urban agriculture demonstration center in the country, believing that people need to see real examples of how to grow food in the city. The Romita Urban Garden has become our “show garden” – an office, edible garden, education center, workshop site, and a gardening supply store, all on less than 80 square meters of concrete.”

Sembradores Urbanos (“Urban Cultivators” in English)

By Lily Foster, Carolina Lukac and Gabriela Vargas

Mexico City is one of the urban centers that generate the most garbage in the world, with over 20 million inhabitants producing an average of 1.35 kilos every day. This translates into a massive 12,000 tons of garbage per day and serious environmental imbalances. However, this garbage is actually a valuable resource, especially in the language and application of urban agriculture.

Our garden mantra has become “transforming ‘waste’ into fertile soil, clean food, and family incomes”. We are rethinking the life cycle of materials and applying the “waste equals food” parallel to regenerate soil, feed ourselves, and create sustainable markets from 12,000 tons of “waste”.

We are three young women dedicated to promoting urban agriculture in Mexico City, working under the name Sembradores Urbanos (“Urban Cultivators” in English). In August 2007, we inaugurated the first urban agriculture demonstration center in the country, believing that people need to see real examples of how to grow food in the city. The Romita Urban Garden has become our “show garden” – an office, edible garden, education center, workshop site, and a gardening supply store, all on less than 80 square meters of concrete. We have set up a variety of urban agriculture techniques which include: a container composting area, worm bins and a worm bench, a vertical garden, a sheet mulching garden bed, a wall-hugging hydroponic installation, raised and ground level gardening beds, and an organoponic garden installation.

“Organoponics” is the perfect expression of our mantra – it is an urban agriculture technique that reuses organic and inorganic materials to grow clean, healthy food in limited space. We use old tires and buckets as containers, leaf litter as bedding material, kitchen wastes in the form of compost, and urine as an organic liquid fertilizer. Instead of taking rich soil out of the few forests that surround Mexico City, we use leaf litter as the main substrate in which we transplant seedlings and rely upon liquid fertilizers to add nutrients to the plants. After a year long season of urban gardening, we are we not only harvesting vegetables, herbs, and flowers – we are also harvesting the decomposed leaf litter that has turned into nutrient rich soil. So in addition to growing healthy food, we are showing how it is possible to produce fertile soil in the city.

In a landscape where information and experiences in urban agriculture are very limited, Sembradores Urbanos is establishing itself as a local resource center. In addition to hosting workshops in urban agriculture, the Romita Urban Garden site has also hosted screenings of environmental documentaries, storytelling events for neighbors, yoga in the garden, a green architecture conference, and hosts a weekly garden club for kids in the neighborhood. We sell handbooks on gardening techniques in Spanish (compiled and designed by us), organic seeds from a seed cooperative in the state of Veracruz, and our own compost and worms, among other urban garden accessories.

We have no doubt that we are participating in a blossoming moment for urban agriculture in Mexico City. As government secretariats are finally taking initiatives to fund urban agriculture pilot projects, we celebrate our own process of teaching the urban population about the magic of transforming “waste” into soil and food.

To contact us:
Lily Foster, Carolina Lukac and Gabriela Vargas
Web Site: www.sembradoresurbanos.org
Email: sembradoresurbanos@gmail.com

Film Clip: Perhaps the original guerrilla (chimpanzee) gardener in this WW2 Victory Garden clip.

Article By Joe Robinson,
LA Times May 29, 2008

“The activists see themselves as 21st century Johnny Appleseeds, harvesting a natural bounty of daffodils or organic green beans from forgotten dirt. It’s a step into more self-reliant living in the city,” says Erik Knutzen, coauthor with his wife, Kelly Coyne, of “The Urban Homestead” to be released in June. The Echo Park couple have chronicled “pirate farming” on their blog, Homegrown Evolution. Guerrilla gardening, Knutzen says, is a reaction to the wasteful use of land, such as vacant lots and sidewalk parkways. He’s turned the parkway in front of his home into a vegetable garden.

“Guerrilla gardens can serve the same purpose as the Victory gardens,” says Taylor Arneson, editor of the Los Angeles Permaculture Guild newsletter and a proponent of sustainable food production. He and a friend raised a farmers market worth of crops — corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, lettuce, watermelon, cucumber and more — in a guerrilla dig at a large planter bed in front of an office building on Bundy Drive in West Los Angeles. Farming in broad daylight, they got support from office workers and kids excited to see real cornstalks.

Link to the LA Times Article here.

Read: Guerrilla Gardening – A Manualfesto
By Vancouver writer David Tracey

“Plants such as lettuce, peppers and tomatoes will be on the menu at Moon Base One.” Photo by CNN.

Article By Mark Tutton CNN May 22, 2008

“Wheeler sees this development of space farming as a gradual process in which space outposts become increasingly self-sufficient. “It would probably be evolutionary,” he said. “The first human missions to Mars might set out with everything stowed, but they might set up the beginnings of an in-situ production system — maybe a plant chamber — that you could use to grow perishable foods.

“So what’s on the menu at Moon Base One? Well, initial crops would need to be small in stature and grow well in controlled environments with artificial light. Plants such as peppers and tomatoes are already extensively grown hydroponically, while lettuce, with its short lifecycle, would yield fast returns for pioneering space colonists.

See complete CNN article here.

See The Controlled Environment Agriculture Center (CEAC) here.

“Grow Bag installations promote the use of vacant, neglected and undefined spaces in the inner city of London for the growing of vegetables.

“To see a working inner city allotment initiated by the What-if team in 2007, visit VACANT LOT on Chart Street N1. A formerly inaccessible and run-down plot of housing estate land has been transformed into a beautiful oasis of green. Seventy 1/2 tonne bags of soil have been arranged to form this allotment space. Within their individual plots, local residents are carefully tending a spectacular array of vegetables, salads, fruit and flowers. The VACANT LOT has become a space for growing food, socialising, picnics and BBQs.’

Link to the London Festival of Architecture event.

Link to the What If Vacant Lot site.