Video: Lina speaks about her school’s food garden. She’s in Grade 5.

What a great thrill to revisit the school garden we (City Farmer) helped create back in 1986 in the West End of Vancouver. Twenty-two years later and the excitement is still present. Young children pick and wash lettuce, radishes and onions, cut them up carefully into small pieces before placing the vegetables in a large salad bowl. Their teacher mixes the spring harvest with dressing and serves the enthusiastic children who come back for seconds. When does that happen at home?

For a city farmer like me, this is “headline” news – kids growing and eating their food amongst the high-rises of inner city Vancouver where they live – parents watching, sometimes taking a nibble themselves, happy to see their children so focused.

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Book by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen
April 2008

“The Urban Homestead is the essential handbook for a fast-growing new movement: urbanites are becoming gardeners and farmers. Rejecting both end-times hand wringing and dewy-eyed faith that technology will save us from ourselves, urban homesteaders choose instead to act. By growing their own food and harnessing natural energy, they are planting seeds for the future of our cities.

“If you would like to harvest your own vegetables, raise city chickens, or convert to solar energy, this practical, hands-on book is full of step-by-step projects that will get you started homesteading immediately, whether you live in an apartment or a house. It is also a guidebook to the larger movement and will point you to the best books and Internet resources on self-sufficiency topics.”

Link to book on Amazon here.

Link to the authors’ web site: Homegrown Evolution.

Photo: Jac Smit standing in blue shirt on far left. (photo taken in New York, 2001, at a meeting of the Support Group For Urban Agriculture. Beside Jac standing, Luc Mougeot IDRC, Yves Cabanne UNCHS/UNDP, Gordon Prain CGIAR, sitting l to r, Michael Levenston City Farmer, Olivia Argenti FAO.

Jac Smit is one of the world’s leading thinkers on the subject of urban agriculture. His seminal book “Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities” is a classic.

The Climate-Neutral Post-Carbon City
May 30 2008

A decade ago, late 1990s, we engaged in the establishment of the urban agriculture industry. A visit to Google tomorrow will find 1,740,000 entries. It was then targeted at food security and building community. Since then we have added farming the city as an economic generator and as an element of Urban Greening.

The next step is to add carbon farming as a core or foundational element of this industry. Another turn of phrase, we are adding a core commodity to those we are familiar with such as vegetables, poultry, herbs, fruit and flowers.

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Photo from “A Prisoner in the Garden”.

Excerpt from his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom”.

“The Bible tells us that gardens preceded gardeners, but that was not the case at Pollsmoor, where I cultivated a garden that became one of my happiest diversions. It was my way of escaping from the monolithic concrete world that surrounded us. Within a few weeks of surveying all the empty space we had on the building’s roof and how it was bathed the whole day, I decided to start a garden and received permission to do so from the commanding officer.

“Each morning, I put on a straw hat and rough gloves and worked in the garden for two hours. Every Sunday, I would supply vegetables to the kitchen so that they could cook a special meal for the common-law prisoners. I also gave quite a lot of my harvest to the warders, who used to bring satchels to take away their fresh vegetables.”

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“Plants such as lettuce, peppers and tomatoes will be on the menu at Moon Base One.” Photo by CNN.

Article By Mark Tutton CNN May 22, 2008

“Wheeler sees this development of space farming as a gradual process in which space outposts become increasingly self-sufficient. “It would probably be evolutionary,” he said. “The first human missions to Mars might set out with everything stowed, but they might set up the beginnings of an in-situ production system — maybe a plant chamber — that you could use to grow perishable foods.

“So what’s on the menu at Moon Base One? Well, initial crops would need to be small in stature and grow well in controlled environments with artificial light. Plants such as peppers and tomatoes are already extensively grown hydroponically, while lettuce, with its short lifecycle, would yield fast returns for pioneering space colonists.

See complete CNN article here.

See The Controlled Environment Agriculture Center (CEAC) here.

“Grow Bag installations promote the use of vacant, neglected and undefined spaces in the inner city of London for the growing of vegetables.

“To see a working inner city allotment initiated by the What-if team in 2007, visit VACANT LOT on Chart Street N1. A formerly inaccessible and run-down plot of housing estate land has been transformed into a beautiful oasis of green. Seventy 1/2 tonne bags of soil have been arranged to form this allotment space. Within their individual plots, local residents are carefully tending a spectacular array of vegetables, salads, fruit and flowers. The VACANT LOT has become a space for growing food, socialising, picnics and BBQs.’

Link to the London Festival of Architecture event.

Link to the What If Vacant Lot site.

Photo by Kym Pokorny from her blog “Dig in with Kym”.

Article by Kym Pokorny
The Oregonian October 2007

From atop the Rocket building, there’s no doubt you’re smack in the middle of a city. Swing around in a circle and you’ll see the sun going down on Big Pink, the arching Fremont Bridge thronged with traffic, the new aerial tram creeping up the hill to OHSU and the green-and-white 7-UP building plunked down squarely to the east.

When you scrape your eyes off Portland’s skyline and focus on what’s going on just below eye level, you may begin to doubt your urban sureness. The usual flat-topped, tar-papered city rooftop has been overtaken by edible productiveness, food that ends up in front of customers at the new Rocket restaurant.

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New report shows edible cities are the future – Edible Cities, looks at examples of urban agriculture projects in cities and identifies a series of opportunities that other cities could be adopting.

The British group visited an inspiring range of projects in Milwaukee, Chicago and New York and noted a number of similarities to and differences from urban agriculture initiatives in London, including:

• A commercial element to many of the US projects, which is much less common in the UK;

• A more liberal situation in the US than in the UK to encourage composting, but less willingness than in the UK to include animals in some urban agriculture projects;

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Photo by Ismael Hautecoeur.

The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, Canadian Institute of Planners, and Canadian Society of Landscape Architects are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2008 National Urban Design Awards. Making the Edible Campus.

“With simple, direct layouts it aims to employ underused corners and spaces within the public realm to grow produce linked to a food collection and meal delivery system, creating a sustainable prototype that could potentially be expanded to other university campuses and across the city.

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Paper produced for the Department of Geography, Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria (4731 words)
Email: mansurdawaki@hotmail.com

“— a system of land use that is being practiced in metropolitan Kano will be considered. This system of land use that has been going on for centuries involves the use of stream water to irrigate land at the banks. Principal of these streams are Challawa, Getsi, Jakara and Salanta. The main objective is to produce fruits and vegetables for the consumption of the city dwellers. This system of land use has been called by Binns et al (2003), by the name urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA).”

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“City Harvest is a business which uses urban space in Victoria, BC — yards or vacant land — to produce hand-tended, sustainably produced vegetables to market.”

“City Harvest is also responsible for a pending bylaw amendment in its home municipality of Oak Bay where agriculture – defined as the production and subsequent sale of produce – has been illegal. The municipality’s council has ratified the amendment which now welcomes urban agriculture, and the bylaw will be changed upon a public hearing on the issue in the near future.”

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By Antoinette M.G.A. WinklerPrins (Assistant Professor)
In Urban Ecosystems Volume 6, Numbers 1-2 / March, 2002

Abstract: “The division between rural and urban sectors of the landscape in many parts of the world is increasingly blurred. House-lot or homegardens offer a perspective on understanding rural-urban linkages since they are frequently a landscape feature in both settings and the exchanges of their products link the two. House-lot gardens are an under-researched component of the agricultural repertoires of smallholders in many parts of the world. Urban house-lot gardens in particular, have until recently not received much attention despite their critical importance to urban livelihoods.

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Photo by Hannah_Y_Juan
Plantings by displaced people in Bogotá’s main plaza.

Article from Latin American Press, April 10, 2008

“Usually when you think of agriculture, you think of a farm, of production per hectare and of profitability. But not in this case,” says Claudia Marcela Sánchez, the coordinator of Bogota mayoralty program that has trained over 40,000 of city’s residents in urban agriculture.

“You can’t compare it with traditional agriculture, which has the aim of generating income,” she says. “This program has goals of building social fabric, and of appreciating agricultural practices.”

“I don’t spend money on lettuce and other vegetables now, because I cultivate them on my terrace,” says Ariznalda Camallo, a resident of Mochuelo, on the southern fringes of Bogota, “Food is so expensive at the moment, so it saves me 80,000 Colombian pesos [US$40] a month.” The Urban Agriculture program estimates average monthly wage in Ciudad Bolivar, the largest and poorest district in the capital, at 200,000 Colombian pesos, or $110, less than half the minimum monthly wage of about $250.

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“The Edible Estates project proposes the replacement of the domestic front lawn with a highly productive edible landscape. It was initiated by architect and artist Fritz Haeg on Independence Day, 2005, with the planting of the first regional prototype garden in the geographic center of the United States, Salina, Kansas. Since then three more prototype gardens have been created.

“Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn documents the first four gardens with first-hand accounts written by the owners, garden plans, and photographs illustrating the creation of the gardens, from ripping up the grass to harvesting a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, and herbs.”

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New British magazine.

“Well Clayton in Manchester was just about the most inner city district in the country and we lived the ‘Good Life’ there. Only we didn’t really know it was the good life – it was just life. In amongst the back streets, where everything was purple from the dye works or noisy and full of smoke from the wireworks, we had hens and their eggs, pigs for their meat, and by the river there was an old man who kept sheep with whom we’d do a swap – a clutch of plucked hens for half a lamb.

“Within sight of my bedroom you could see the remains of Manchester United’s first stadium, the power station, a dozen factories, including the one that the Germans bombed, my school, rows of back to back houses and a few dozen little farms, because we all did our own. Own food, own furniture, own everything really.”

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Canadians Wally Satzewich and wife Gail Vandersteen teach city farmers how to earn money from gardening small lots.

For aspiring and practicing urban, home-based, backyard and front lawn farmers.

“Had I known about the feasibility of sub-acre farming when I started my farming career 20 years ago, I would never have bought large acreage in the country, and would have instead fulfilled my farming aspirations more easily and with less expense in the city.” – Wally Satzewich

“SPIN is the first commercial organic-based farming system for land bases under an acre in size, and it takes the challenges posed by urbanization and turns them to a farmer’s advantage by capitalizing on limited space and resources.”

Workshop Program, May 19, 20, 2008 Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

SPIN Farming web site.

May 10th, 2008 “SPIN-Gardening” Workshop in Portland, Oregon information here.

Article about City Farmer by Leslie Gillett.

Vancouver’s City Farmer has been dishing up dirt for 30 years now, first through a newsletter and workshops, now through classes and its extensive website.

The dirt – as befits a society formed to encourage urban agriculture – is often about just that, things of the earth and compost and worms.

In fact some of long-time environmentalist and City Farmer executive director Michael Levenston’s favourite repeat questions are about composting with worms. “What do I do? I think my worms are escaping from my bin?” was a recent query – setting up wonderful mental images of dozens of red wigglers making a run for it with little flashlights and very small backpacks.

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Rooftop Garden Project, Montreal, Canada

“After five seasons of gardening and experimenting, the Rooftop Garden project team is happy to share the fruits of its labor with you. The Guide to Setting up Your Own Edible Rooftop Garden comes from our wish to see new gardens and partners take root in the fertile soil of Montreal but also in other parts of the world.

“The guide is divided into six chapters that cover the main factors to consider when developing a rooftop garden project: project definition, choice of site, setting up the garden, coordination of gardening activity, health choices and a detailed technical guide on rooftop container gardening.

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A Symposium that will be held at Ryerson
University, Toronto, Canada. May 2-4, 2008

Some of the presentations:

• Planning the Edible Landscape: Challenges & Opportunities in Toronto
• On zoning and building regulations and urban agriculture – lessons from East Africa
• Ravine City / Farm City: gardening and density in Toronto
• Urban agriculture in the community design studio: The Detroit Studio example
• From international development to a more edible Montréal – urban agriculture and urban design at McGill
• From community garden to community food security: Grupo Motivos and Penn Planning
• Linking urban agriculture and built form to carbon cycles, energy use and nutrient flows
• Urban agriculture in the design charrette: The Black Creek Urban Farm example

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This has to be the year of the chicken in the city. Move over dogs and cats. You are about to be outshone.

From the filmmakers’ blog:
“In the spring of 2004, Madison, Wisconsin passed a law reflecting a growing trend in municipalities across the country. Single-family homes within the city limits were now able to raise chickens in their backyards. A year later, we started filming.

“From the underground to about town, chickens take the city by storm. Backyard poultry owners came out of hiding, and with them the chicken supporters came out of the woodwork. These beautiful birds are celebrated in art, music, and an ever-expanding community.

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