Excerpts from Table of Contents:
Integrating Agriculture and Architecture in the 21st Century
On the Roof with Urban Agriculture Rick Stars
Profitable Green Roof Vegetables
Grand Rapids Chefs Experiment With Produce From 700 Foot Edible Wall
March 19, 2015 No Comments
Is there a relationship between growing your own food on a small city lot and steampunking? Yes, she said.
Jo Ellen Meyers Sharp
February 19, 2015
Jo Ellen Meyers Sharp (hoosiergardener.com) is secretary of Garden Writers Association and co-author of “The Indiana Gardener’s Guide.”
Steampunk celebrates the individual craftsman and appreciates technology you can look at and see how it works. The farm-to-fork movement is one response to outsourcing growing food to industrial agriculture.
“With gardening, we recapture the skills we lost. There’s a streak of individualism and creativity that runs through both gardening and steampunking,” Mullen said.
February 27, 2015 Comments Off
People say we’re “rich in other ways,” but that doesn’t fix the ugly fact that most farms are unsustainable
By Jaclyn Moyer
Feb 9, 2015
(Must read. Mike)
Whenever a customer asked how things were going, I replied, Great. I thought about the sinking ship, and never said, Well, we’re making ends meet, but we work 12 hour days, 6 days a week, and pay ourselves only what we need to cover food and household expenses: $100 per week. I didn’t tell anyone how, over the course of the last three years since Ryan and I had started our farm, I’d drained most of my savings. I didn’t admit that the only thing keeping the farm afloat was income Ryan and I earned through other means — Ryan working as a carpenter and I as a baker.
February 11, 2015 Comments Off
A 100-square-meter plot in a 130-day temperate growing season “can provide most of a four-person household’s total yearly vegetable needs, including much of the household’s nutritional requirements for vitamins A, C, and B complex and iron.”
By Jeff Spross
September 18, 2014
Thirteen years ago, Marvin Gaye Park was a mess.
The park sits in Lincoln Heights, a neighborhood in Washington, D.C.’s Ward 7, just east of the Anacostia River. The community is overwhelmingly poor and non-white, and suffers some of the worst rates of crime, unemployment and social breakdown in the city. The park itself had succumbed to disuse. One of the worst PCP and heroin markets in the city had cropped up nearby.
September 22, 2014 Comments Off
Ever dream of chucking it all for the simple life? Read this first.
By Jesse Hirsch
September 15, 2014
Many small farms take in apprentices or interns (a largely semantic distinction) for a growing season. According to Thistlethwaite, this is an all but mandatory step in your farm journey. And not just for one season. She suggests apprenticing for three to four years before you even consider starting your own farm. This will not only provide a basic knowledge base, but also ensure that farming is something you enjoy. “[Apprenticing] is gut check time,” she says. “It gives you the chance to ask yourself: ‘Is this really who I am?’”
September 17, 2014 Comments Off
As of 2012, the adult obesity rate of Tennessee was up to 31.1 percent, with 11.9 percent of adults diagnosed with diabetes.
By Nora Kako
Aug 23, 2014
1. The American Heart Association Teaching Garden of Bethel Grove Elementary School is representative of the more than 40 school gardens planted in East Memphis. The teaching garden’s program “combines nutrition education with garden-based learning” to give students a hands-on experience of healthy eating. Cigna HealthCare, who sponsored the opening of the garden, hopes to sponsor at least one new school garden each year.
August 31, 2014 Comments Off
Kass takes inner-city students in Washington on tours of the White House garden
By Jennifer Steinhaueraug
New York Times
Mr. Kass is expected to stay through the end of the president’s second term as one of the last remaining original staff members of this White House, perhaps for no other reason than his love of the garden, where 1,000 pounds of food are grown each year, much of it served on the premises.
Easton’s Veggie Van distributes locally grown fruits and vegetables to residents of the West Ward. The van is operated by students from Lafayette College’s Technology Clinic in collaboration with the West Ward Neighborhood Partnership.
Last year’s Veggie Van distributed more than 1,500 pounds of produce over a seven-week period.
By Joshua Cohen
August 23, 2014
About 75 to 80 people are expected each day of operation at the Veggie Van. Malinconico says most who come to the Veggie Van are regular visitors. In fact, reusable bags have been distributed to them with the expectation they will be returned at the end of the Veggie Van’s season.
The crops distributed at the Veggie Van each week are grown all over the area. A large portion of the vegetables are from Lafayette’s LaFarm. Other donations come from Easton Urban Farm, Crayola Gardens and other community gardens throughout Easton.
August 29, 2014 Comments Off
Kimbra said in an interview on Consequence of Sound that after the 2013 Grammy Awards, she needed a place without “too much stimulus” to write her new album.
By Jared Sichel
Aug 21, 2014
Kimbra said in an interview on Consequence of Sound that after the 2013 Grammy Awards, she needed a place without “too much stimulus” to write her new album. In Goudsmit’s words, Kimbra needed the laid back environment to “stomach the idea of living in L.A.”
Next thing, Goudsmit had a rising pop star in her house, writing and recording songs for her newest album, feeding her chickens, meditating and doing yoga in the backyard, and occasionally getting locked out of the house at night when Goudsmit forgot that her young housemate, unlike her, stayed awake past nightfall.
August 28, 2014 Comments Off
From left, Marissa Jacobsen, Brenna Leyden, Ryland Aksamit, and Hailey Brundage repair a drip hose before planting tomatoes in a raised bed at the Mickle Middle School community garden in Lincoln, Neb. Photo by Kristin Streff.
Foodscaping, CSA, Co-op, Farmer’s Market, Soil Contamination, Food Desert
By Ellen Meyers
Christian Science Monitor
July 6, 2014
Foodscaping is a gardening practice that makes people’s home landscapes edible. For example, homeowners may incorporate more edible plants into their entire yards instead of relegating them to small garden plots. Many businesses are also taking up foodscaping, making fruits, vegetables, and herbs as part of their curb appeal.
The practice itself has turned into a business. One company, Nashville Foodscapes, designs, implements, and maintains foodscapes for its customers, according to the business’s website. For one customer’s yard, Nashville Foodscapes put in a fruit tree, a herb spiral, edible dogwood, and other edible plants.
July 16, 2014 Comments Off
A model where agriculture is reintegrated into urban and suburban areas — and locally produced food is sold and consumed locally.
By Jason Reed and Robert Puro
July 7, 2014
Jason Reed, a movie producer formerly with Disney, and Robert Puro are co-founders of Seedstock.com, a Los Angeles-based social venture dedicated to promoting innovation and investment in sustainable and urban agriculture.
One key to improving the urban farm system is aggregation. It’s easier, and certainly more cost-effective because of its scale, to collect on a daily basis hundreds of boxes of lettuce, truckloads of tomatoes, etc., sort them and then designate their ultimate destination — which is usually another, smaller sorting operation within a city. In the large-scale commercial farming operation, it’s one crop with one fleet of semi trucks from one aggregated source. The aggregation system for urban farming is obviously different — which means it’s riskier for the entrepreneur who wants to create that network.
July 15, 2014 Comments Off
If young home buyers like chickens and goats and kale, real-estate agents like them even more.
By Lauren Markham
The New Yorker
May 21, 2014
(Must read. Mike)
The “blighted” lots suitable for urban agriculture are often found in lower-income neighborhoods like NOBE, as well as in post-industrial neighborhoods like West Oakland and West Berkeley. These also happen to be neighborhoods that developers see as ripe for construction. For decades, the overgrown grass across the street from Jeff DeMartini’s commercial property in West Berkeley (formerly his grandfather’s cabinet factory) had been giving him trouble: weeds encroaching on the sidewalk, phallic graffiti, dead trees that occasionally came crashing down. Last year, a community-agriculture organization called Urban Adamah acquired the space, and announced plans to install a small farm—chickens, goats, and all. At first, DeMartini worried that the animals might degrade the site even further. “I thought, Will it smell?” But, within a matter of weeks, interest in his property spiked, and prospective renters came calling.
“I don’t think there is anything easy about finding the right urban agro-ecology, but I do know it needs to happen.”
May 2nd, 2014
Urban agriculture, whether grown in community gardens or in large commercial warehouses, is here to stay – and increasing. And along with it, new accommodations need to take place between neighbours.
May 22, 2014 Comments Off
In backyards and on once-barren city lots, local growers produce crops and livestock.
By Martha M. Hamilton
for National Geographic
May 18, 2014
A new wave of urban agriculture is flourishing because it benefits consumers concerned about sustainably grown food as well as cities with land to spare. It started in 2008, fueled both by economic stress and concerns about nutrition, childhood obesity, and diabetes highlighted by First Lady Michelle Obama.
May 2 at the White House
Photo by Guido Bergmann
May 2, 2014
A German government handout shows a White House staff member (C) explaining the herbs and vegetable garden to US President Barack Obama (R) and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (L) at the White House in Washington D.C., USA, 02 May 2014.
German Chancellor Merkel arrived in Washington for a much-anticipated visit with Obama during which they discussed the current crisis in the Ukraine and the spy affair that rankled German-US relations.
May 15, 2014 Comments Off