Category — Vancouver

Demonstration project part of the effort to make Vancouver the greenest city in the world

By Tiffany Crawford
The Vancouver Sun
19 Mar 2010

Excerpt:

Vancouver is moving ahead with plans to make the city greener by installing beehives on the roof of city hall.

In a memo circulated to all staff this week, the city said that in an effort to make Vancouver the greenest city in the world, there will be a demonstration beehive project on the roof of the east wing. The demonstration will include the installation of two hives.

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Urban Agriculture in Vancouver

Interviews with former city councillor Peter Ladner, a fellow at the SFU Centre for Dialogue, and Janine de la Salle, the director of food systems planning at the Vancouver office of HB Lanarc.
Business in Vancouver
March 3, 2010

Excerpt:

The new City of Vancouver administration raised some eyebrows last spring when one of its first moves was to tear up a swath of lawn at city hall and replace it with a vegetable patch. For many this was easily dismissed as a symbolic gesture: farmer Robertson staking his claim.

Not so easy to dismiss are the dozens of garden plots that have sprung up all over the city or the fact that developers and urban planners now have entire departments devoted to planning patches of city farmland.

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The World in a Garden is an Urban Agriculture Project that connects youth and community to the culture, nutrition and production of growing organic food.

“Children working in our garden are getting to experience nutrition instead of just being taught it. Green foods take on a whole new meaning and the children actually enjoy eating their vegetables because they are growing and cultivating them. And, by donating food to the food bank, children are giving back to their community and making a difference in the world,” said Tricia Sedgwick, the Jewish Family Service Agency (JFSA) community garden coordinator and nutritionist. “There are many interactive opportunities for students to partake in, from growing and preparing food for harvest celebrations to fundraising and donating.”

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Bite-It

February 2010
A C.I.P. Film

A group of Katimavik youth volunteers set out into North Vancouver and Vancouver to find out some answers about environmental initiatives on the subject of food security. They interviewed Mark Bomford, UBC Farm; Emanuel Langlois, Katimivik Participant; Heather Johnstone, Edible Gardens; Michael Levenston and Sharon Slack, City Farmer; Chef Scott Rowe, Salvation Army; Nicole Robbins, Organics@Home; Melanie ter Borg and Karen Morton, ecourbia.

The City Compost process: Turning yard trimmings into high value compost. Yard and garden trimmings (grass, leaves, plant debris) are screened for metal using a magnet, ground up, and arranged in long piles called windrows. Over the next six months, the windrows are periodically turned to maintain optimum temperature, oxygen level and moisture content. The finished material is then screened for plastic and oversized pieces, before distribution as compost. Larger photo here.

Factsheet prepared by the City of Vancouver, 2010

Composting conserves landfill space, reduces greenhouse gas emissions and creates nutrient rich soil. The City of Vancouver engages residents to work toward these goals, offering educational programs, subsidized home composters, and a yard waste composting facility.

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Photo by Michael Levenston. Larger image here (4MB)

This is January!

It’s January, there’s no snow in our Vancouver garden (it’s up on the surrounding mountains). We’ve been out in the mild weather sprucing up the place for visitors from around the world who are already arriving for the Winter Games which begin February 14.

Fresh mulch is spread on the garden paths (Elm and London Plane wood-chips donated by the Park Board), our cob (clay/sand/straw) tool shed covered by a green roof is on the left next to the recycled metal entrance gate; the building in the top right corner holds our compost toilet and the new “red dragon” electric compost bin; a large Bay Laurel tree sits in the centre front of the picture; the wood-chip paths lead through the back fence into our teaching area and beyond to yet another garden, which we’ve named the “Youth Garden” where our dry-stack stone keyhole garden is located.

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Photo by John Lehmann

Vancouver farmer’s rooftop and backyard gardens are being heralded as the next generation of agriculture in the city

Frances Bula
Globe and Mail
Jan. 03, 2010

Take one Saskatchewan farm boy and move him to the big city. Add a Vancouver condo building’s unused rooftop garden and several vacant backyards.

The result is urban farmer Ward Teulon, also known as CityFarmBoy on his website, a 45-year-old former agrologist who has put his farming skills to work in the middle of some of Vancouver’s densest neighbourhoods.

He produces $30,000 worth of vegetables, herbs and fruit a year on 8,000 square feet of land in garden plots around the city.

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Spreading Seeds from Alex Burr on Vimeo.

The Three Green Citizens

Three SFU Communication students aiming for social change in Vancouver through Urban Agriculture: Alex Burr, Jeremy Addleman and Isabelle Jacques. Our interest for Urban Agriculture grew out of a desire to engage Vancouverites in a grassroots movement supportive of food security and sustainability.

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Volunteers at the Richmond Fruit Tree Sharing Project

Richmond Farm School – 2010

The Institute for Sustainable Horticulture, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, in cooperation with the Richmond Fruit Tree Sharing Project, the Richmond Food Security Society, and the City of Richmond is pleased to announce that the inaugural session of the Richmond Farm School is scheduled to commence this spring.

Objectives and Program Features:

The purpose of the Farm School is to prepare people from all walks of life to engage in human scale, urban focused agriculture enterprises including production, processing, adding value, distribution, marketing and sales and build regional agri-food systems in, around and for municipalities. The program will focus on balancing theoretical (classroom) and applied (field/ practical) skill development studies with the express objective of teaching agriculture as the applied science and art that it is.

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Figure 7: Modeling the Initiation of Urban Agriculture based on Vancouver and Montréal Case Studies

The Urban Agricultural Movement in Canada: A Comparative Analysis of Montréal and Vancouver

By Chandal Nolasco da Silva
Email: chandal.nds@gmail.com
A research essay submitted to the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, 16,000 words
Carleton University 2009

1. Introduction

Urban agriculture is a term used to describe both private and public agricultural activities that take place in urban and peri-urban areas. While regional examples practice urban agriculture differently, each will help to increase food security. Urban agriculture has the potential to increase a region’s food security by providing a local food supply system and successful examples of this situation have been documented in the Canadian cities of Montréal and Vancouver.

By documenting the birth of the urban agricultural movements in Montréal and Vancouver, this research has sought to understand how modern Canadian cities can adopt local food systems.

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Photo by ARLEN REDEKOP — The Province. James Oickle was attracted to the Hastings Folk Garden near Columbia Street. “I didn’t think I had a healing process I needed, but it did become that,’ he says.

Garden gets green thumbs up – Passers-by call out, ‘Good job!’ says its creator

BY ELAINE O’CONNOR
The Province
3 Nov 2009

It’s not hard to turn urban wasteland into urban farmland. You just have to plant the seed. PHS Community Services Society’s Peter LaGrand planted that seed in late 2007 when he had the idea of turning an abandoned lot owned by Concord Pacific into a vegetable garden for the residents of the Downtown Eastside.

Since then, the Hastings Folk Garden on Hastings Street near Columbia has grown into a gathering space for green thumbs.

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Photo by Michael Levenston

Farm brings dirt without hurt to gritty Eastside

By CTV British Columbia’s Peter Grainger
Sat Oct. 31 2009

A pilot farming project in Canada’s poorest area code is bringing dirt – without the hurt – to Vancouver’s gritty Downtown Eastside.

Volunteers worked tirelessly Saturday to build a community garden. Although urban community gardens are becoming common sights across Metro Vancouver, the East Hastings Street location is quite different because it will be a fully functional farm once completed.

“They’ll be growing vegetables that will be sold to restaurants and the like in the Downtown Eastside,” Projects in Place Society’s Bryce Gauthier told CTV News.

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Deborah Henderson, director of the Institute for Sustainable Horticulture at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Langley. Photo By Bill Keay. Vancouver Sun

Food Production: Kwantlen lab on cutting edge of pest control. Langley university to work on process that uses predators, parasites and microbes to fight destructive insects

By Randy Shore
16 Oct 2009
The Vancouver Sun

A new biological pest control laboratory opening today at Kwantlen Polytechnic University will place B.C. at the forefront of a global revolution in urban food production.

The lab — the first of its kind in North America — will develop insect-and microbe-based pest control systems for use on small-scale farms and in areas where farming and housing share space.

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By David Tracey

This six-part series explains why the time is ripe for an urban farming revolution in B.C., and who’s showing how to bring it about. Supported by a Tyee reader-funded Fellowship for Solutions-oriented Reporting, David Tracey surveys the urban farming landscape of B.C., visits Cuba to learn from that nation’s city gardening success story, and explains the utility and benefits of bringing agriculture within our urban boundaries.

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Home Grow-in Grocer Ltd.

Home Grow-in Grocer sells food products from around British Columbia, but what makes it unique is the store sells veggies and fruit grown in the gardens of residents only blocks from City Hall. This is recognition of the value of home grown urban food.

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See larger photo here. Photo by Michael Levenston

Our garden veggies and fruit go to West Side Family Place

Head gardener Sharon Slack drives five minutes from the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden to donate freshly harvested organic food to Family Place.

West Side Family Place in Kitsilano is a resource centre dedicated to supporting families with young children. It is a place to meet new friends, gain a sense of community, and to receive ongoing assistance that helps families to raise healthy, happy children.

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This year, Maria experimented to see if she could grow wheat, flax and quinoa at our Vancouver Compost Garden, and she succeeded. The wheat and flax were purchased from a local seed company, Salt Spring Seeds. The wheat varieties are named Red Fife, Marquis, Kamut and Blue Tinge Ethiopian. The flax is named Golden Flax. The quinoa was purchased from a local organic bulk food store.

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Graeme Evans, director of housekeeping at Vancouver’s Fairmont Waterfront hotel, opens a hive last week to show off the bees and their honey to guests. A beekeeper, Evans keeps beehives on a deck at the hotel. And no, he doesn’t wear protective gear. Photograph by Gerry Kahrmann, The Province

Bees cause buzz at Fairmont hotel

Three hives on third-floor deck provide kitchen with honey, guests with stories

By Christina Montgomery,
The Province Newspaper
June 7, 2009

Graeme Evans is undoubtedly Vancouver’s nattiest – and most hospitable – beekeeper.

You won’t catch Evans in one of those bulky, netted helmets and spacesuits that most of his colleagues don when tending their hives. He looks after his trio of nests while wearing a dapper, crisply pressed suit. And tie.

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by Patricia Tribolet

A wild notion I had to convert the existing flower/dead bush beds on the rooftop of the Sophos Vancouver building into a Vegetable Community Garden shared by anyone at Sophos willing to keep it.

We have aproximately 300 people working in this building as a part of Sophos.

The reason why I started this was because I wanted to grow veggies… I started with small pots on the windows next to my desk on the 5th floor with herbs, tomatoes and peppers.

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Minister of State, Trevor Sargent (centre) visits Vancouver’s Compost Garden. City Farmer’s Lauren Welch and Michael Levenston welcome him.

Why I grow my own food

by Trevor Sargent
From his blog, February 1, 2009

I’m lucky to have a front and back garden that’s big enough to grow some food but not too big to manage. Before I cook a meal I always see what I can add to the meal fresh from the garden. Growing food to me is richly satisfying – a healthful pursuit for mind, body and spirit.

George Bernard Swaw, even though he earned his money writing plays, stated “gardening is the only unquestionably useful job”. The same can be said for farming. Indeed, food production is not just useful, it is essential.

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