Land ruling could be a tipping point – The decision on Richmond’s Garden City Lands will have far-reaching implications for agricultural lands

By Wendy Holm, The Vancouver Sun
23 Sept 2008
Wendy Holm is an agrologist, economist and farm columnist.

Excerpts from the article:

The use of the land for urban agriculture was dismissed out of hand (“not commercial agriculture”).

What nonsense. Enlightened communities around the world are racing to develop strong urban agriculture within their cities. Terms that five years ago were unheard of are today in common use: Food security, food democracy, food sovereignty, food miles, slow food. The community interest is clear.

Urban agriculture is the new darling of cities around the globe for good reason. Vancouver, blessed with good climate and good planning, has the land base, human capital and infrastructure capacity to quickly catch up — offering new models for Lower Mainland communities, the rest of Canada and the world.

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Hawk Visits and Eats Lunch at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden from City Farmer on Vimeo. See HD version. Click screen.
Also see alternative HD High Definition version on YouTube.

Videos shot by Maria Keating.

Maria videos a hawk dining on a chickadee in our cherry tree at City Farmer’s garden. We can’t tell if this is a Coopers Hawk or a Sharp-shinned Hawk. For 30 minutes the hawk concentrated on his meal, while some crows looked on with interest and a black squirrel travelled its highway of branches nearby.

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Photo: The RUAF partners meeting in Doorn, The Netherlands, for their annual meeting.

The RUAF (Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security) publishes this excellent magazine periodically. In their 19th issue, read stories about:

Cleaning, Greening and Feeding Cities; Local Initiatives in Recycling Waste for Urban Agriculture in Kampala, Uganda

Urban Agriculture in Msunduzi Municipality, South Africa

Solid Waste Recycling in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: Making a business of waste management

Enhancing Local Knowledge in Urban Livestock Breeding in Bukavu, D.R. Congo

Innovations in Producer-Market Linkages: Urban field schools and organic markets in Lima

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Photo by Mary Brophy

By Mary Brophy
Chitown Daily News
August 27, 2008

City Farm in Chicago’s Cabrini Green neighborhood supports 98 types of organic vegetables and herbs, and the largest crop of heirloom and hybrid tomatoes in Chicago.

“We’re going to have 25 varieties of heirloom tomatoes coming up and 30 varieties of hot peppers, and eggplant and potatoes,” says Tim Wilson, 25, City Farm’s director of urban agriculture, and a farmer himself. This year, the farmers expect to harvest between 4,000 and 8,000 pounds of tomatoes, many of them destined for sale to the café at Fox and Obel, Frontera Grill, Vie, Lula Café, North Pond and other restaurants. City Farm yielded $60,000 in produce sales last year.

Read the complete article here.

Photograph courtesy of OPP-RTI. As food prices rise in Pakistan, some are turning to home gardens to put food on the table.

by Zubeida Mustafa
August 13, 2008

Many enterprising women have risen to meet the challenge by encouraging the poor to acquire self-sufficiency in food by growing their own vegetables in their backyards. Parveen Rahman, director of Orangi Pilot Project’s Research and Training Institute, comments on her organization’s aborted attempt to launch a program encouraging a kitchen garden in every home in the low-income Orangi Township. “This was many years ago and we could not get the women to take an interest in horticulture. So we cultivated OPP’s own little plot of land and grew vegetables there which the staff would purchase.” But now Parveen is hopeful that there will be more interest when she revives the kitchen garden program.

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Photo: The Foley family, of Howe, Indiana from Mother Earth News.

Just Right for the Garden: a Mini-cow
By Chris Gourlay from The Sunday Times
August 17, 2008

For between £200 and £2,000, people can buy a cow that stands no taller than a large German shepherd dog, gives 16 pints of milk a day that can be drunk unpasteurised, keeps the grass “mown” and will be a family pet for years before ending up in the freezer.

“With high food prices, they are actually quite an attractive option if you like producing your own food,” said Sue Farrant.

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Breakfast TV Comes to the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden

Sharon talks with Tasha about how we make compost at the garden. City Farmer staff answer composting questions on the Compost Hotline six days a week all year long – that’s around 5000 calls.

Staff speak to the media every week about other subjects as well, such as green roofs, shiitake mushrooms, composting toilets, local food, natural lawn care, pest control without pesticides and so on – everything to do with being environmentally friendly at home in the city.

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Edible Flowers from the Dervaes Garden in Pasadena, California.

“At this little urban homestead in the big city, the family produces 6,000 pounds of organic produce a year. It’s amazing that their home is on a 1/5 acre and their garden is only on 1/10 acre! The front yard is 95% edible and the rest of the main planters are in the backyard. Every corner is used to grow food. Jules says he doesn’t need more space; he just needs to be a smarter gardener. He looks to the Japanese and Europeans for guidance, those who for thousands of years have had to grow food in a small space. In his garden, or “micro-farm” as he prefers, you’ll find more than 350 different vegetables, herbs, fruits, and berries.”

Watch the video showing their home garden farm here.

Maria’s ‘babies’ have finally arrived in large numbers. Carefully watched and nurtured since April, 2007, these Shiitake mushrooms are ready for harvest. They have grown on oak logs that were culled from Stanley Park after a devastating storm and delivered to us by the Vancouver Park Board. Hard to believe that anyone, that’s us, can grow such wonderful fungi in a city garden.

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By Anand Pendharkar
August 14, 2008
Visits a 3000 sq ft terrace kitchen garden in Ghadiyal Godi (Victoria Dock) of the Mumbai Port Trust, India

I walked out on the terrace of the catering department and entered through a canopy of climbers into a heaven of chikoos, guavas, bananas, coconuts, lemons, mint, bhindis and a 120 other varieties of trees, shrubs, herbs, climbers standing in drums and plastic baskets right on the roof of the building. I saw that the plants had not only food value but also immense medicinal and ornamental values.

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Sharon Slack, City Farmer’s head gardener, picks fresh vegetables at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden. It’s summer and this is food grown in the city just feet from our back door. That’s what urban agriculture is all about.

Link to larger photo of Skippy’s Garden.

“This is a photo journal of my small home vegetable garden. Skippy thinks it’s his garden, but I’ve been gardening here for 20 years. We’re located near Boston, in Eastern Massachusetts, USA (USDA zone 6a). My home garden space is quite small (250 sq ft) and very shady. My challenge is to squeeze in and extend the season as much as I can. This spring, I got a sunny community garden plot assignment! An extra 350 sq ft! I wonder what great veggies I can grow this year?”

Link to Skippy’s Vegetable Garden here.

Photo from ‘Cowfiles African Gardens’.

From: ‘Ideas that will catch on here.’
July 12, 2008, BBC

“Another fantastic idea I picked up – which could make its way onto my allotment before long – is the keyhole veg bed. This is a raised bed with bells on: it’s about 1m (3’6″) high, and the outer bed, where the vegetables are growing, slopes down from a central hollow column. There’s an access path to the column (giving the bed a “keyhole” shape viewed from above) and inside it is what amounts to a compost bin, held in with hessian: you fill it with kitchen waste, stable manure, grass clippings – whatever you’d put on your compost heap.

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Photo Credit: Len Spoden

Pedaling the Local Food Movement
Three D.C. Women Take a Three-Month Bike Trip to Montreal to Document Community Agriculture Efforts

By Adrian Higgins
Washington Post July 24, 2008;

The result is a low-budget documentary, “Garden Cycles Bike Tour,” which captures the spirit of their unusual 2,000-mile sojourn and the much larger movement that inspired it.

In the course of their three-month odyssey, the women found a community garden in the gutted ghettos of Baltimore, were run off the road by a truck in New Jersey, abandoned efforts to cycle across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York and got hopelessly lost in New England towns. They slept in the gardens of strangers, discovered new ethnic food and recipes and cemented their desire to change the world by growing vegetables.

Link to the article and video interview with the women filmmakers.

The National is CBC TV’s premier news show, which is watched across the country. This clip, from July 25, 2008, produced by Margo McDiarmid, shows a growing awareness and interest in urban farming by both the media and the public.

City Farmer was interviewed for the show but due to time constraints was not included in the final edit. The producer had “too many different people in the story and not enough time to tell it”. She is interested in looking more deeply into urban agriculture … “I do hope to do some longer stories on food security and urban agriculture … you were very helpful and your website is a font of information.”

Sheryl shows us how we can put all that mint growing in our Demonstration Garden to good use. This traditional Cuban highball should probably be made after work, not at ten in the morning when we put it together.

Article by Tara Duggan, Chronicle Staff Writer
June 23, 2008

“Last month, Vollen, 44, and her husband, Gary Vollen, 45, turned to MyFarm, a new San Francisco business that took the family’s local and organic diet to a new level: by designing and planting an organic vegetable garden in their Marina district backyard. The Vollens pay MyFarm a weekly fee to maintain and harvest the vegetables that have just started to mature. They can gaze at their garden and dig into just-picked lettuce without so much as touching dirt.

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Seven years ago Sharon, Head Gardener, brought a small Wasabi plant at a local nursery and tucked it away in a back corner of our City Farmer Demonstration Garden. This spring I noticed how beautiful its leaves looked and thought – wouldn’t it be great if this was more than just a decorative plant. But is it anything like the Wasabi we eat with our sushi at Japanese restaurants?

Maria takes the taste test. Watch the video above.

Learn more about Wasabi here.

Photo by Ian Lindsay. City Farmer’s instructor Lauren Welch in centre. Alexander Dallin and Maren Gilbert Stewart are the students.

[Since 1990, City Farmer and the City of Vancouver have held worm composting workshops for City of Vancouver residents who live in apartments. For $25 participants get a worm bin, 500 worms, Mary Appelhof's book "Worms Eat My Garbage", a trowel, bedding and a one-hour class. City Farmer also holds classes for school kids who come with their class.]

“Decay: It’s bad enough you need to compost organic waste; now you need to have worms eat it for you.”

Article by Denise Ryan
Vancouver Sun June 14, 2008

Since our cat, Gordito, died last year, and hard on the heels of the end of our morbidly bloated gerbil population, my son has been lobbying hard for a pet. Preferably a dog. It doesn’t need to be a big dog, Alexander says. A terrier, a wiener dog, even a chihuahua would do.

When I announce that as part of greening our home we are going to get some pets — 500 of them — he is pretty excited.

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With Food Prices Soaring, Cuba’s Urban Farms Could be a Model for the World

Niko Price, Associated Press
June 9, 2008
Photo by Javier Galeano/

“Ms. Bouza was a research biologist, living a solidly middle-class existence, when the collapse of the Soviet Union — and the halt of its subsidized food shipments to Cuba — effectively cut her government salary to $3 a month. Suddenly, a trip to the grocery store was out of reach.

“So she quit her job, and under a program championed by then-Defence Minister Raul Castro, asked the government for the right to farm an overgrown, half-acre lot near her Havana home. Now, her husband tends rows of tomatoes, sweet potatoes and spinach, while Ms. Bouza, 48, sells the produce at a stall on a busy street.

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