Category — United States

“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.”

Link to article by Scott Lindlaw of The Associated Press in the Dallas Morning News February 29, 2008.

Link to “Victory Gardens 2007+ ” a concept currently being developed by Garden for the Environment and the City of San Francisco’s Department for the Environment.

“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.

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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).”

Read the whole article here.

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.

Hear the CBC show here (the second story).

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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.”

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Food gardening in the front yard during World War 1.

See larger image here.