Category — United States
A Stake in Your Own Salad - Victory gardens revive World War II project, with a modern twist

“Amy Franceschini is trying to nurture the victory garden concept back to prominence – this time with a 21st-century agenda. Ms. Franceschini, 37, is the architect of a San Francisco pilot project to revive victory gardens here and beyond. She recently secured $60,000 in seed money from the San Francisco government to pay for 15 backyard plots, with the hope of expanding the effort dramatically after 2008.
“In the next two years, Ms. Franceschini and Mr. Randall will hand-pick 15 people to be the initial victory gardeners. In keeping with San Francisco’s commitment to diversity, the gardeners will mirror the city’s ethnic, geographic and economic spectrum.”
March 3, 2008 No Comments
Urban Agriculture in Providence, Rhode Island

“The Providence Urban Agriculture Task Force envisions doubling the amount of food being grown in and around Providence in the next ten years. This will be achieved by increasing the number of home gardeners, community gardeners, community gardens, commercial community agriculture projects, and urban agriculture businesses.
“In Providence, 59 food gardens were counted in about 5 hours of walking in 4 neighborhoods. Fifty-nine food gardens is an undercount, and only a very small part of the City’s 25 neighborhoods was surveyed.
February 22, 2008 No Comments
Farming the Concrete Jungle

Article from In These Times, August 24, 2007
“In cities across the country urban farmers are growing communities, greening the landscape and revolutionizing food politics.”
“In Brooklyn, Added Value has turned an old asphalt baseball diamond into a full-functioning farm. And in Philadelphia, Mill Creek Farm is using storm runoff to irrigate its urban farm. Indeed, community agriculture projects are sprouting up in cities across the country—in San Francisco (Alemany Farm), Buffalo (Massachusetts Avenue Project), Birmingham, Ala. (Jones Valley Urban Farm), and Houston (Urban Harvest).”
February 22, 2008 No Comments
CBC Radio: Diet For A Hungry Planet - Urban Agriculture

Joe Nasr, one of the authors of the classic book ‘Urban Agriculture - Food Jobs and Sustainable Cities’, spoke about city farming on CBC’s ‘The Current’ today. The show can be heard as a podcast linked below. Joe Nasr, co-founder of the North American Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture Alliance, teaches urban agriculture at Ryerson University in Toronto.
February 12, 2008 No Comments
Heifer Funds Many Urban Agriculture Projects

Heifer International based in Little Rock, Arkansas, funds many urban agriculture projects. I counted 22 including: Revision House Urban Agriculture Project, Dorchester, MA; East New York Farms! Brooklyn, NY; The City Farms, New York, NY; God’s Gang Planting Dreams Fish and Worm Project Chicago, IL; Growing Home Urban Farm, Chicago, IL; Somali Bantu Refugee Food Security, Training and Community Building Project, Portland, OR; and Birmingham Urban Gardening Society Community and School Garden Project, Birmingham, AL.
“From rooftops to vacant lots, Heifer International’s Urban Agriculture program is growing goodness, changing lives and building communities in the heart of North America’s big cities. Heifer supports grassroots organizations that help communities reclaim and support local food systems.”
See Heifer’s urban agriculture projects here.
They also produced a 42-minute video documentary on urban agriculture, titled “Seeds, Hope & Concrete.”
February 9, 2008 No Comments
Garden of a ‘$20 a month home’, 1917, Fairfield, Alabama.
January 18, 2008 No Comments
