Category — Vancouver

Article in The Tyee by James Glave
Published: May 5, 2008

“There is definitely a buzz and an interest,” observes City Farmer’s Michael Levenston. “We are busy seven days a week; our classes are full, our phone is ringing. There is certainly a great interest generated in city farming and urban agriculture.”

“Someone here said, ‘This is trendy,’ and trendy can be a good thing,” adds Levenston. “There may be a new generation of food gardeners, and I think that’s very exciting.”

Salt Spring Seeds owner Dan Jason is equally stoked to be riding the home-grown wave. Jason has completely sold out his stock of “Zero Mile Diet” seed kits — a collection of bean, grain, and other seeds tailored to help this region’s people grow most of their own food. “Enormous changes are afoot,” he says.

Read the article in The Tyee here.

Preet is our Punjabi host.

Hong speaks Mandarin

And Patrick, Cantonese, in these scripted videos.

Many Vancouver residents want to compost but cannot speak English, so we’ve made three instructional videos, which are available on the Web.

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DESIGN BRIEF
Presented by: Southlands Community Planning Team
Delta BC, Canada. April 2008. 40 pages
A charrette will be led by Andrés Duany, a founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism and one of the premiere planners worldwide.

Agricultural Urbanism (AU) is an approach to integrating growth and development with preserving agricultural resources and enhancing elements of the food system. The cornerstone of AU is creating an urban environment that activates and sustains urban agriculture with important elements such as educational programs, small-scale processing opportunities and a farmers’ market or other local sales conduits. AU offers an alternative to the practice of separating places where people live and where agricultural activities occur. Central to the concept of AU is the idea of integration not separation, transitions not buffers.

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By Paris Marshall Smith and Arzeena Hamir
Richmond Fruit Tree Project, BC, Canada, 2007

“Imagine growing greens in the dead of winter and sharing the bounty with a group of eager students. Once harvested, the food from the garden becomes a resource for the kitchen, the next stop in the seed to table cycle. Students have the opportunity to further their garden experience by learning about their taste palates, culturally diverse food preparation techniques, historical methods of food processing (fermentation, canning, pickling), nutrition and food combining and, of course, the pleasure of eating and working together.”

Toolkit is available on-line. Be aware it is a large download (30MB PDF).

City Farmer head gardener, Sharon Slack, in British Columbia Magazine, “The Good Earth”, 2008 (spring issue)

” … Sharon Slack maintains an incredible garden in her Dunbar district backyard. The earth, she says, is in her bones. Around her on this warm June day – squeezed onto her residential lot – are at least 100 species of flowers, five dwarf apple trees, a pond and bog garden, a patch of half-metre-high garlic plants, rows of salad greens and beans, potted herbs, two dozen blueberry bushes, a greenhouse full of tomatoes, more than two dozen bee boxes, and two well-tended composters. There are basketball-sized cabbages growing on her carport roof.

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Massive urban development features “urban agriculture” on signage.

Presently in development in downtown Vancouver, the SEFC site comprises 32 hectares (80 acres). It will eventually be the home to 12,000 to 16,000 people. When fully developed, SEFC will have 6 million square feet of development. This will include: more than 5000 residential units; a full-size community centre and non-motorized boating facility; three to five licensed childcare facilities; two out-of-school care facilities; an elementary school; restoration of five heritage buildings; interfaith spiritual centre and 10 hectares of park.

SEFC will be a model of sustainable development. Unique features include: urban agriculture; a rainwater management system; green roofs; and a neighbourhood energy system.

The first phase of SEFC will be temporarily transformed into Vancouver’s Olympic Village during the Winter Games in February 2010.

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I visited with Shandelle and Peter in an empty lot in the heart of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where they plan to start a garden for the neighbourhood. Peter, who works at the Portland Hotel, part of the PHS Community Services Society, describes who lives in the buildings surrounding the garden. Shandelle is excited by the food growing potential of the lot and how it can help the people she works with.

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A Vancouver Urban Designer, Planner and Landscape Architect recounts her experience with gardens during her recovery from cancer.

“Having had cancer has allowed me certain freedoms I never had prior to my illness. One of those freedoms is the ability to talk openly and candidly about my experience. This piece entitled ‘The Spirit of Healing’ comes from a place deep inside. A place from which we all have the ability to seize and harness energy, but a place few of us tap into until we are confronted with a crisis in our lives. How each person harnesses his or her ability to heal is as different as each person is different.”

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Online Videos by Veoh.com

Mike Clark of Onni called me a couple of weeks ago looking for a group to manage a new community garden his company had built on their property in downtown Vancouver. Now, this is a one of a kind story — a developer makes available gardens on vacant land until such time as that land is ready for building construction to begin. How often have we seen empty lots sit vacant for years while nothing happens. A City Farmer video.

Link to City Farmer TV.