Category — Vancouver

Shirlene Cote, who works full time at UBC, is excited by the prospect of being able to farm land that’s closer to home.

Sanatan Dharm Cultural Society, which hopes to eventually build a Hindu temple, is offering five-year leases on its land for agricultural use

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
February 6, 2012

Excerpt:

A Burnaby-based religious group is negotiating with young urban farmers to put nearly three acres of unused agricultural land back under crops this spring.

The Sanatan Dharm Cultural Society is hoping to build a brand-new Hindu temple and seniors’ home amid the sprawling vegetable fields and industrial yards of south Burnaby, but that may not happen for years.

“I think we can start with a five-year lease [with the farmers] and then see,” said the group’s priest, Shiv Mishri. “We want to build a big temple here, but we are not ready to build.”

[Read more →]

Sustainable ideas: Above, Dave Carlson in the garden of his home. Carlson runs Common Ground Community Farm in Burnaby, a community supported agriculture project. Photograph by Jason Lang.

Sustainable model of farming brings together growers and consumers

By Christina Myers
Burnaby Now
January 25, 2012

Excerpt:

Last season, he grew dozens of different crops, from herbs to squash and everything in between, and had 17 members. He also sold produce at a number of local farm markets.

This year, he’s hoping to expand his membership to 60, particularly with residents in neighbouring communities like New Westminster, for the 20-week season.

And he may bring in some new “friends” as well.

[Read more →]

The Metro Vancouver Small Farm Resource Manual is a project of the Richmond Food Security Society. This Manual is offered as a resource to small-scale farmers to help them source supplies, services, markets, and knowledge. The manual is a dynamic manual that can expand with your feedback and can be updated easily online.

[Read more →]

Marc Schutzbank makes produce deliveries for the Orchard Garden at the University of British Columbia.

The biggest barrier to farming in the city is the cost of land, which may preclude urban farming ever becoming competitive as a career choice.

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
January 5, 2012

Excerpt:

Urban farmers in Vancouver are at that awkward in-between stage: They are gaining traction with growing public interest in fresh local food and farmers markets, but not quite making a living at it.

A report based on figures from 2010 found that eight urban farms with a total of 2.3 acres under crops earned $128,580, or $13,745 per growing season for each farmer. That’s an hourly rate of $8.64, based on a work day that varies seasonally.

[Read more →]

Ilana Labow of Fresh Roots. Fresh Roots provides produce for school cafeterias. Photo by Fresh Roots.

Urban farmers hope to grow in school district

By Naoibh O’Connor
Vancouver Courier
January 4, 2012

Exceprt:

Fresh Roots, a project co-founded by Ilana Labow and Gray Oron in a backyard garden three years ago, now develops school-based market gardens to help teachers meet curriculum goals through experiential learning, while providing produce for school cafeterias and culinary arts programs.

The group has worked with Queen Alexandra for one full growing season.

[Read more →]

Happy New Year!

And the weather report here in Vancouver is for more rain and mild temperatures. Wear your rubber boots to visit our rubber duckies at the Compost Demonstration Garden.

535 Richards Street in downtown Vancouver.

Unit to be installed on the roof levels of the EasyPark parking lot at 535 Richards Street in downtown Vancouver

By Terry Brodie
Globe and Mail
December 12, 2011

Excerpt:

Slated to be Valcent’s first ‘VertiCrop’ system in North America

Vancouver-based Valcent Products Inc. has signed a memorandum of understanding to install its first “VertiCrop” high-density vertical growing system in North America on the top level of a parkade in the city’s downtown core.

The vertical farming system allows leafy green vegetables to be grown all year round in urban environments in much smaller spaces, using much smaller amounts of energy and water while generating higher yields.

[Read more →]

Market-cargo. Urban farmers riding down Main Street to the market, carrying tent, tables, produce and flowers from south Vancouver. Photo by By Bhlubarber, David Niddrie.

While urban farmers may have gotten some of the answers they were looking for at the forum, it appears they may have actually gotten more questions!

Vancouver Urban Farmers Newsletter
Dec 2011

Excerpts:

The Urban Farming Forum took place on November 25 and 26th, 2011 at Boneta restaurant and SFU Woodwards in Vancouver. Both days were well attended by an enthusiastic crowd of urban farmers, food security advocates, NGO representatives, and consumers.

[Read more →]

Vegetable Vancouver 2010: An Urban Farming Census. See the two page flyer PDF here. (1.7 MB)

An Urban Farming Census – Project Description

By Marc Schutzbank, MSc. Candidate
University of British Columbia
November, 2010
Presented at the Vancouver Urban Farming Forum

The Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Price Index is at the highest level ever recorded. Wheat crops have failed in Russia and in China due to severe heat and draught. International food access issues are stirring local public and private responses, one of which is urban farming. To ascertain the community impacts of urban farming, I propose the development of an urban farming census to measure the economic, social and environmental outcomes of urban farming.

[Read more →]

Contributing to Vancouver’s goal of being the Greenest City in the World

Collected and presented by Joanna Clark
For “Vancouver Urban Farming Forum”
Nov. 26, 2011

This past weekend The Vancouver Urban Farming Forum gave urban farmers, policy makers, and food security advocates an opportunity to gather together to discuss urban farming in the context of land use, municipal policy, and best practices.

The Farms:

Fresh Roots Urban Farm

Urban Digs

The Orchard Garden

Inner City Farms

Giddy Up & Grow

[Read more →]

EYA harvests wheat.

Environmental Youth Alliance grows wheat on 25 small patches of land in the city

By Terry Lavender
Vancouver Observer
Oct 24th, 2011

Excerpt:

Never has pizza tasted so good. But maybe I’m biased. After all, the flour that made the pizza dough came in part from wheat that my partner grew. Not only that, but I helped grind that wheat into flour by peddling away on a bicycle-powered flour mill. And I chopped the peppers that, along with cheese, tomatoes, mushrooms and pesto made up the pizza topping.

[Read more →]

Mayor Gregor Robertson debates with NPA mayoral candidate Suzanne Anton.

The urban agriculture movement is gaining strength across B.C., enthusiastically adapted by everyone from businesses to backyard growers to pot-growers. So why is it being used as a wedge issue in Vancouver’s latest election?

By Peter Ladner
Crosscut
Nov 7, 2011
Peter Ladner is the founder of “Business in Vancouver” newspaper and a former Vancouver City Councillor. He is currently a Fellow at the Simon Fraser University Centre for Dialogue. His new book is named: The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way We Feed Cities.

Excerpt:

As the Nov. 19 municipal election deadline nears, the struggling right-of-center Non-Partisan Association (NPA) has been challenging the ruling Vision Vancouver party’s misspending through its Greenest City Action Plan. The one project singled out for high profile ridicule is the “wheat fields” — a modest $5,000 grant to the Environmental Youth Alliance dedicated to planting enough wheat in numerous front yards to harvest 100 pounds, redefine the notion of the “city farm,” and teach young people how bread is made. It’s definitely a stretch of taxpayer dollars, but hardly significant for a city with a $1 billion budget.

[Read more →]

‘Vision Vancouver’ – Community gardens and food security

By VoteVision, Press Release
Vision is a Vancouver, BC, political party
Oct 25, 2011

Take a walk through the expanded Cottonwood Community Gardens on Raymur Avenue or the newly formed Mount Pleasant Gardens on Ontario and West 16th and you’ll see the potential for growing food in an urban setting. Tomatoes, bok choi and apple trees abound! Vision Vancouver sees the potential too – we even built a community garden at City Hall.

In 2010, Vision Vancouver established 450 new community garden plots in the city. It’s just one of the ways Vision Vancouver is support urban agriculture and food security. Vancouver now has approximately 3260 community garden plots.

[Read more →]

Mespilus germanica features an unusual apple-like fruit that requires bletting to eat; although not widely eaten today, consumption of these fruits was much more common in the past.

Mike: I am able to remember the tree’s name by calling it ‘Blet Medlar’ after the comic actress Bette Midler.

Today we met two people, born in Northern Iran, who were picking the fruit of a Medlar tree planted along a residential street in Vancouver. They loved this fruit, but hadn’t tasted it since leaving Iran 26 years ago.

The couple said that after taking the fruit home, they would let them ripen (blet) under a cloth on a tray in a warm place for a couple of weeks before eating. Finding these fruit brought memories back and tears to their eyes.

[Read more →]

Title: Cliffside Arbutus Tree. “He painted for over 50 years, totally unrecognized, every week, every month, every year.” See more of Donald Flather’s work here.

Flash from the past – 1979 article in City Farmer Newspaper

By Kerry Banks
City Farmer Newspaper
Vol 2 No. 1, October, 1979
(City Farmer began in 1978 by publishing a newspaper. Kerry is a founding member of City Farmer. He is an award-winning freelance writer and journalist. See bio further on.)

(1979) – Dr. Donald Flather and his wife Grace have one of the more unique vegetable gardens in Vancouver. It’s the last remaining ‘victory garden’ from the city’s World War Two home food production effort.

Beginning back in the early forties, the Government of Canada made a concentrated effort to get city and town folk involved in growing their own food. Large advertisements were placed in the daily newspapers.

“Plant a wartime garden,” they urged. “Home production of vegetables is needed now more than any time during the war. Help by growing the vegetables your family needs.”

[Read more →]

Randy Shore is the Vancouver Sun newspaper’s ‘Green Man’. One year ago Shore took on the challenge to eat something that he grew each and every day for one year.

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
September 30, 2011

Excerpt:

For every hard-to-manage bit of ground in your yard, there is a protected corner, sunny spot or shady microclimate waiting to be exploited with a pot of soil and a few seeds. If you can find those secret spots, you can use them, usually year round.

Growing food has been delicious, rewarding, discouraging, heartbreaking and the best thing I do all day. Preserving, processing, picking, cooking and eating what we grow, my wife and I do together every day.

[Read more →]

A gathering of Vancouver’s urban farmers

Friday, November 25, 2011 (evening);
Saturday, November 26, 2011 (all day)

Introduction from the website:

Vancouver has the goal of being the Greenest City in the World by 2020. Local food and green economy are two of ten areas of focus for achieving the greenest city goals. Urban farming is in a unique position to contribute to both of these goals. The number of urban farms in Vancouver is increasing and these green businesses are leading the way in developing economically viable food production models for the urban environment.

With urban commercial food production being a relatively new occurrence in Vancouver, it is not accounted for in current city policy. There are a number of factors affecting urban farms’ ability to operate as legitimate businesses in Vancouver including land zoning and business licensing. This forum comes out of an interest from both the City and Urban Farmers to work together toward policies, best practices, and land-use decisions that can support urban farming practices now and into the future.

[Read more →]

Jodi Peters and Jeffery Radke are fighting back against orders to tear down their garden. Photo by Matthew Burrows.

Tenants challenge explicit orders to remove their veggie patch.

By Matthew Burrows
Georgia Straight
September 14, 2011

Excerpt:

Two gardening renters in East Vancouver are headed to provincial arbitration on September 30. This will come after their landlords demanded they dig up their extensive vegetable garden, and remove a greenhouse and rain barrel, along with other instructions sent in writing on August 5 and 14.

“It was like an absolute slap in the face,” Jodi Peters, project coordinator with the Environmental Youth Alliance and an avid gardener, told the Georgia Straight while sitting in the back yard of their multi-unit dwelling at 1922 Adanac Street.

[Read more →]

Peter Ladner.

Successful politicians will be out in front of this parade, not jeering from the sidelines.

By Peter Ladner
This column originally appeared in the Sept. 20, 2011 issue of Business in Vancouver.
Peter Ladner’s book, The Urban Food Revolution, Changing the Way We Feed Cities, will be published by New Society in October, 2011.

Politicians and candidates be warned: ridiculing urban farming is a no-win strategy. Food security is marching up the priority list in cities around the world, and Vancouver should be leading, not resisting, this movement.

Growing more food in our cities harms no one, and spins off myriad benefits: better diet, lower health care costs, beautification, safer neighbourhoods, safer food, inter-cultural and inter-generational integration, increased food security, exercise, increased property values near community gardens, less hunger, and, yes, commercial enterprises.

[Read more →]

Family Guy chicken fight.

Urban farming’s growing political power

Listen to anti urban farming political ad here:

NPA Ad by Sunciviclee

By Doug Ward
Vancouver Sun
September 15, 2011

Excerpt:

Peter Ladner, the previous mayoral candidate for the Non-Partisan Association, isn’t happy with his party’s campaign decision to mock Mayor Gregor Robertson’s promotion of urban agriculture.

“Politicians and candidates be warned: Ridiculing urban farming is a no-win strategy,” wrote Ladner in a column this week in Business In Vancouver.

[Read more →]