Category — Vancouver

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Sustainable Simon Fraser University (SFU) Learning Garden

By Chris Reid
Shifting Growth
April 2013

Shifting Growth was awarded the Request for Proposal to undertake the community consultation, design, and garden installation of the ‘Sustainable SFU Learning Garden’ – a temporary garden on a vacant, under-utilized piece of land in the heart of SFU’s Burnaby Campus. The Sustainable SFU Learning Garden is a new garden facility near SFU Burnaby’s Convocation Mall. This new garden is a student-centered education and social space. Members will learn how to grow, eat, and share campus-grown food while making SFU Burnaby a more sustainable community.

All garden features are atop of shipping pallets, allowing the Sustainable SFU a 3-year agreement for the land to utilize as a temporary growing space. Constructed with BC cedar and black hinges, the garden beds sit at varies height.

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Consumers are encouraged to start their own juice carton herb gardens by cutting off the bottom portion of their Happy Planet 1.89 L juice carton and planting seeds.

Win a year’s worth of fresh organic produce delivery service

Press Release: Happy Planet Launches Grow For Good Campaign to inspire the urban farmers of tomorrow. On Earth Day, April 22, Happy Planet is launching the “Grow For Good” campaign and online photo contest. The contest is designed to encourage consumers to ‘grow’ a greater appreciation for fresh food and for the younger generation to develop a curiosity about where food comes from – by starting their own Happy Planet juice carton herb garden.

“We are looking to inspire younger generations to ask questions about what they eat and where it comes from,” said Happy Planet founder Randal Ius. “Creating a ‘Grow for Good’ juice carton herb garden is a fun and creative activity that will also help foster an enthusiasm for fresh food; inspiring both the urban farmers – and consumers – of tomorrow.”

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Sarah Common, left, and her mother, Julia Common, right, with the help of Jim McLeod in the middle, check on the beehive at the community garden on Vancouver’s East Hastings on March 28, 2013. Photograph by: Ward Perrin, Vancouver Sun.

This hive of activity offers beekeepers a touch of therapeutic renewal

By Jeff Lee
Vancouver Sun
March 31, 2013

Excerpt:

On a vacant lot next door to the Insite supervised drug injection facility in Vancouver’s gritty Downtown Eastside, a busy little beehive is teaching people about hope and redemption and erasing long-held misconceptions.

For Jim McLeod, at 36 still battling issues with drug addiction, caring for the hive of honey-producing bees has taught him patience and how to look beyond the day-to-day stresses of trying to survive in Canada’s poorest neighbourhood.

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Shelby and Zsuzsi have been making their way around the city visiting urban farmers on site who have been graciously hosting them for in depth interviews on the practices research project.

Understanding Our Practices from Seed to Scrap

Project Backgrounder
February 2013
Vancouver Urban Farming Society

Excerpt:

Project Overview & Team

In Fall 2012 the Vancouver Urban Farming Society (VUFS) hired a coordinator team of Shelby Tay and Zsuzsi Fodor to research what a code of best practices for urban farming in Vancouver could look like to provide a way for urban farmers to proactively and continually address the challenges and concerns around growing practices, community engagement, business practices, health and safety, among others. The research team is also working on:

1. VUFS Communication: Website, Newsletter & Social Media

2. Community Engagement & Education: 2012 Urban Farming Forum, 2013 Workshops & Tours

3. Organizational Development: VUFS Strategic Planning & Visioning

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Tina Ksor, left, Jenny Ro’mah and Susan Siu are excited to start their community garden at Moberly elementary school. Photo by Richard Lam.

Back in Vietnam, these young refugees would be living off the land like their forebears

By Darah Hansen
Vancouver Sun
March 23, 2013

Excerpt:

“Here it is school, home, sleep, eat. In Vietnam it is farming all day long, every day.”

The garden has the potential to balance both worlds.

Set to break ground April 2 at Moberly, with funding from the City of Vancouver and Vancouver Foundation, it promises to yield fruits and vegetables enough to help feed several families.

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Sharon Slack in her ‘Bulge’ garden.

Vancouver’s Green Streets’ ‘Bulge Gardens’

By Sara Orchard
The Street Gardener
Monthly News from Green Streets Vancouver
March 2013

Excerpt:

Garden: Wallace and 33rd
Gardener: Sharon Slack
Joined Green Streets: 2006

The use of primarily native plants has made the garden resilient to the Vancouver climate and allows for it to survive purely on rainwater throughout the year. Losing only a few plants over the years, Sharon has found that the coastal strawberry, evergreen huckleberry, sword ferns, dwarf Oregon grape, Kinnikinnick and the dogwood tree have thrived. The one plant that faired too well in the garden was snowberry. Sharon had to remove the plant before it consumed the rest of the garden.

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Sharon, Head Garden at Vancouver’s Compost Garden, stands in front of the Silver Dragon electric composter. Photo by Michael Levenston.

10-20 neighbours in apartments bring their food scraps to us

By Michael Levenston
City Farmer
March 6, 2013

Our newest electric composter, nicknamed the ‘Silver Dragon’, is midway in size between the home-sized ‘Red Dragon’(now white) and the ‘White Dragon’ (a larger size) in which we composted Bishops’ restaurant food waste for a year.

Over the winter, we signed up between 10-20 neighbours from multi-family apartments and they brought their food scraps to the Compost Garden on Wednesday or Saturday afternoons. (No meat/fish/dairy waste accepted.) They met our gardener who inspected the waste and then unlocked the shed and placed the scraps in the Dragon.

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Photographic art pieces and arrangements of locally-grown vegetables and herbs provided an extra sensory experience.

‘All & Sundry’ collaborated with the Vancouver Urban Farming Society for their latest urban farmers gathering.

Excerpt from their site:

The 2012 Vancouver Urban Farming Forum, held at the sustainability and creativity co-working space the HiVE, was centred around local urban farmers who wished to share data about their work and discuss subjects relevant to the farmers themselves.

All & Sundry created the large black-and-white photographic art pieces, signage, activity booklet cover pages, and table centrepieces for the 2012 Forum. With the theme of local food and sustainability at the forefront of such an event, the art pieces and accompanying signage were made-to-assemble so that they could be easily stored and reused for future events. An assortment of locally-grown herbs (rosemary, lavender, sage, Italian parsley) and two types of kale and chard were used for the table centrepieces to provide that extra sensory experience—the visual piece of seeing what can be grown most anywhere in the city as well as the lovely scent of fresh herbs—and as gifts for the event volunteers.

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Photo by Hella Delicious.

Condos vs Cottonwood Community Garden – Vancouver’s City hall’s viaduct removal plan could accelerate gentrification and hit Downtown Eastside’s green space and food system

By Peter Driftmier
Megaphone
Feb 26, 2013

Excerpt:

While many community gardens have a visibly white and middle-class dominated constituency, multiracial working-class and low-income gardeners are among the community gardening movement’s active long-term membership, especially in the greater Downtown Eastside. Indeed, community gardening can be a vital survival strategy for low-income people.

With the $610 per month for an ‘expected-to-work’ adult’s social assistance payment, that leaves little for food after shelter, transit, clothes and a phone for finding work. This leaves a maximum $26 per week that the government says should be left for food after these minimum expenses. That is less than half the conservative amount deemed necessary by the Dietitians of Canada in order for an adult to sustain a basic healthful diet.

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Nick Hermes is the founder of green-tech startup Urban Stream Innovation that has created a way to eliminate organic waste. Photograph by: Mark Van Manen.

Self-contained system is small enough to fit in a single parking space

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
February 22, 2013

Excerpt:

Urban Stream Innovation, a Vancouver-based sustainable tech firm, has installed its first self-contained prototype composter and vertical growing system designed to eliminate kitchen waste and produce restaurant-quality herbs and greens.

The staff at Luke’s Corner Bar & Kitchen will donate about 45 kilograms of vegetable waste, old coffee grounds and used tea bags each day to the micro-farm’s two-stage composter housed in a shipping container, parked behind the Granville Street eatery.

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Covered Roots: The History of Vancouver’s Chinese Farms

Video visits Chinese Canadian farmers

Produced by: Chinese Canadian Stories (www.chinesecanadian.ubc.ca).
Created by: Alejandro Yoshizawa and Wendy Phung.
2012

Less that 100 years ago, ‘eating local’ was not a luxury but a reality. So who fed Vancouver? Discover the little-know history of Chinese farms in the Vancouver area, as told by the farming families themselves. Includes rare photos and old family videos.

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Meet Seann Dory from Sole Food Farms in this 10th short film in the ‘Meet your Urban Farmer’ series.

By Vita Mavronicolas, Digital Storyteller
Shaun Mavronicolas
Fire and Light Media Group
2013

From Fire And Light’s description:

Seann J Dory is the Co-Director of Sole Food Farms. Before starting Sole Food, Seann was a project manager at United We Can a social enterprise creating employment opportunity for inner city residents through environmental enterprises. Seann is a founding member of the Young Agrarians, an initiative to recruit, promote and support young farmers in Canada.

Seann speaks regularly about food, sustainability and inner city development and has presented at the EAT Vancouver Festival and the Projecting Change Film Festival. Seann is a graduate of the Sustainable Community Development program at Simon Fraser University and a member of the National Farmers Union.

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Jamie Latimer, Kathleen Olds, Ilana Labow of Fresh Roots, Sam Kaser and Jane Buckshon will transform muddy school fields into a market garden. Photo by Kevin Griffin.

School project will also be commercial operation

By Kevin Griffin
Vancouver Sun
February 8, 2013

Excerpt:

Students at Vancouver Technical secondary school will be digging in the dirt this spring when they begin transforming several muddy areas into a market garden.

The school’s organic garden, along with a similar one at David Thompson Secondary, will be funded through a $35,000 grant to Fresh Roots Schoolyard Market Gardens from the Greenest City Fund.

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Kent Mullinix, Director Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security at the Institute for Sustainable Horticulture of Kwantlen Polytechnic University, looks over some under used land in Richmond on Wednesday. Photo by Ian Lindsay.

More crops, better processing would keep billions of food dollars in the Vancouver Lower Mainland says researcher

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
Jan 31, 2013

Excerpt:

“If the available underutilized ALR (Agricultural Land Reserve) land was put to use in these small-scale, human-intensive farm operations, they could satisfy Surrey’s demand for 24 commonly consumed crops and animal products, create almost 2,500 jobs, and contribute over $173 million in gross receipts to Surrey’s agriculture sector, more than doubling the current size of the industry in Surrey,” the Kwantlen report states.

It was commissioned by Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts to estimate the economic potential of fallow land. City staff have been creating a strategy based on that document. It will come to council in the next few weeks, she said.

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From 2 page project poster. See complete poster here.

This study examines the business models and economics of Metro Vancouver’s urban farms

By Marc Howard Schutzbank
E-mail: marc.schutzbank@gmail.com
Master of Science – MSc
UBC’s Integrated Studies in Land and Food Systems
2012

Abstract:

Increasing food insecurity, lack of sustainable food systems, and a desire to participate in the food system are prompting the growth of various forms of urban agriculture: community gardens, urban homesteads, and urban farms. Urban farms, as distinct from other urban agriculture projects, are defined by the sale of their product. They raise produce and grow ornamentals to sell in neighbourhoods, all while building urban food networks that connect communities to their food.

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Vancouver’s Draft Food Strategy: Blueprint for an edible city – 71 recommended actions

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
Jan. 26, 2013

Excerpt:

VANCOUVER — The city’s new food strategy depicts a high-density urban environment lush with edible landscaping, community vegetable gardens, green walls, rooftop greenhouses, farmers markets and thousands of green jobs based in a burgeoning local food economy.

City council intends the Vancouver of the near future to be a model system of just and sustainable locally-grown food, a city as pretty as it is delicious.

“People will be able to see the fruit of this plan everywhere, when they walk down the street, in schoolyards and community centres, you’ll see it on empty lots and on vertical walls, farms that pick up and move from location to location,” said Coun. Heather Deal. “Food will be grown everywhere.”

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‘The World In A Garden’ is a multicultural urban farm project

By Vita Mavronicolas, Digital Storyteller
Shaun Mavronicolas
Fire and Light Media Group
2013

Meet Trisha Sedgwick and Alicia Baddorf from ‘The World In A Garden’. ‘The World In A Garden’ is a multicultural urban farm project that educates community and youth on the nutritional, cultural, environmental and social benefits of a just and local food system.

Their programming includes youth leadership, kids summer camps, school programs and gardens and farm to table workshops. Their social enterprise includes market sales, honey from our bees, educational workshops and programs, community events, fundraisers, garden wares and more.

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Photo by Stefan Lozinsky. See larger image here.

Seasons Greetings from City Farmers’ Directors, Staff and their Families.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! 2013 marks City Farmer’s 35th year of service promoting urban agriculture. City Farmer is a Non-Profit Society and Registered Charity conceived in 1978. We operate Vancouver’s Compost Demonstration Garden.

See some of our work here.

Meet Will and Camil from Inner City Farms in this 8th short film from the Meet your Urban Farmer series

By Vita Mavronicolas, Digital Storyteller
Shaun Mavronicolas
Fire and Light Media Group
Dec 21, 2012

Inner City Farms is a small business that uses organic practices to grow vegetables in residential spaces in Vancouver. They revive neglected garden space and convert lawns into beautiful and productive urban farms, all within the limits of the city.

Land is provided by Vancouverites who support their efforts and commitment to social, ecological and financial sustainability. In return they offer what they can: a share of the harvest bounty.

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EYA is offering a 5-month, high quality Organic Orchard Management Training course

2 Saturdays per month, from February to June, 2013
$100 ($75 for youth under 25)

A 5-month program designed for urban agriculture enthusiast looking to add organic perennial food production to their skill set. In-class, theoretical workshops will be complimented by hand-on skill building at Copely Community Orchard.

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