Food
Planting with egg shell pots is a simple, smart and economical idea to help you start growing your own food. Larger eggs are a bit easier to work with, and also provide more space for your seedlings, though any chicken or duck eggs should work fine. A half dozen egg shells sprouting with beautiful young plants can also be an ideal and creative Easter gift.
Artichokes are a hardy perennial plant that can be simple to grow, as well as being a stunningly beautiful addition to your edible landscape. There are many varieties available to cultivate in your own backyard garden; though the Green Globe is by far the most popular in the United States. You might even say we have a monoculture of them.
There are several different varieties of the Green Globe on the market, but there are also many types of purple and violet artichokes that you can grow. Many Italian families have historically raised an incredible diversity of heirloom artichokes, from Violetta di Chioggia and Purple of Romagna, to Romanesco Italian Purple. But if you want to eat some of these more unusual cultivars, you may just have to grow them yourself.
Being a serious coffee lover can sometimes be really intimidating. You want to support local indie coffee shops; you also need to figure out the balance between certified Fair Trade and small farm co-ops. There are countless kinds of beans and countless roasts, and just trying to figure out the best way to make a single cup of coffee can bring up intense debate among friends and strangers. The deeper you go, the less you seem to know, and in the end a real coffee lover will fall into saying: “it’s what I like best, but it’s not for everyone”.
Urban farmer extraordinaire, Novella Carpenter, has recently hit a wall of bureaucracy with the city of Oakland that threatens the very existence of her small farm.
Carpenter is the author of the popular and engaging book “Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer”, and has been raising food on an open parcel of land that she owns in Oakland. She was informed by local officials that growing vegetables on an empty city lot is illegal, and furthermore, raising livestock without a $2500 Conditional Use Permit, (she has chickens, goats, rabbits, and at one time had two pigs) is also illegal. I would argue that a lot with a farm on it is not empty, but that’s just my own twisted logic.
Beware, growing your own vegetables is the “gateway drug” to a more sustainable lifestyle. Households that grow food usually do so organically, to better protect the health of their families and the environment. They begin composting in order to feed their gardening habit, then go on to add efficient watering systems, (recycling gray water, drip irrigation, collecting rainwater). Next come worm bins, chickens and perhaps a backyard beehive. Soon a suburban micro farm is thriving where you would not have expected it, as rows of leafy lettuce and succulent fava beans replace what was formerly a perfectly manicured front lawn.
The changing aesthetic in designs for suburban gardens was clearly reflected in the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show this past weekend. Now in its 26th year, the show emphasized green lifestyles as expressed through gardening with edible and native plants. Besides featuring edibles in many of the twenty design display gardens, the show included a separate 6000 square-foot edible garden designed by Oakland-based Star Apple Edible Gardens.
It’s a challenge creating access to healthy, affordable food in many urban neighborhoods. The following inspiring story was published on Eco Etsy last week, and it features the efforts of Juanita Rivas-Raymer, who has been able to do just that. She has succeeded in combining the concept of a community garden with a food-swapping co-operative.
There is a growing grassroots movement in suburban and urban areas where the local action of growing food is beginning to profoundly transform our neighborhoods and our world. It begins first with a simple attitude shift, when we start thinking of our lawns and backyard gardens as opportunities for sustainably growing food. As we each start to plant a seed, we are healing not only ourselves, but the planet as well.
Can you think of a more useful plant for your edible garden that is easier to grow than the bean? It can be eaten as a tender green pod, or as a freshly-shelled bean, then stored dry for hearty eating later in the year, it can also be used as seed stock for replanting in the next season. And if that wasn’t enough, beans are also an excellent source of protein and many other nutrients. I find it empowering that…
Creating the first comprehensive urban agriculture plan for New York City, that is a new project by Design Trust for Public Space and Added Value, the Five Borough Farm project. Here’s more from UrbanOmnibus, part of the intro to an extremely in-depth piece on the project. Over the course of this year, the Five Borough Farm team will be evaluating the city’s existing urban agriculture activity, establishing a set of metrics by which to quantify the benefits of urban agriculture and creating…
As part of the EcoFarm Conference last week, I had the opportunity to see several local organic farms. The tour was led by Amigo Cantisano, and it included visits to four nearby farms. Cantisano grew up in the region, and as our bus was driving to our various farm destinations, he regaled us with the secret history of the pioneering nurseryman Felix Gillet, and also shared his insights about the land we passed, especially noting the rapid disappearance of orchards…
I’m involved with a local food justice organization called Planting Justice and have had the privilege of serving on the board of directors since its inception last year. I have seen it grow from a seed idea to a full-fledged force for food justice and urban agriculture over the past year and half. While my role has often been along the lines of communications, board decisions, and supporting in whatever ways I can, I have often been involved with the…
Cargo Bikes + Food for the Hungry + Portland = B-Shares. I met the guy in this video and we had a long chat about all things bikes when I was in Portland this summer. Looks like his company, B-line, is expanding its services to the hungry now. “The ‘B-shares’ program uses 600-pound capacity(!), electric-assisted cargo trikes to collects food from retailers and farmers’ markets and fills in the ‘last mile’ of tricky urban logistics,” Rory Woods of sustainablog writes. Here’s…
A leading urban-farming and food-justice organization in Oakland, City Slicker Farms, recently got awarded $4 million from the State of California to buy land for urban farming and a new park. With this money, City Slicker is going to purchase a 1.4-acre parcel of land (a brownfield site) in West Oakland and create the “West Oakland Urban Farm and Park” on it. This farm and park will include “lawn space (for kids to run, play, and exercise), a vegetable-growing area,…