Cure for a cold, gloomy, and wet fall day: Gotham Greens! Check out their high-tech rooftop hydroponic farm located above a Brooklyn bowling alley. Locally grown, pesticide free herbs and vegetables produced using clean energy sources, and I can’t believe how much I want some of that lettuce right now!
(all photos: Gotham Greens)
This blog is mostly about community gardens and sometimes about bicycles, but I, the blogger, am primarily an artist, and only a gardener with effort and a cyclist with great effort. It is hard, figuring out how to apply my artistic strengths (theater, film, writing) in support of what I care about (community gardening and urban agrictulture). This entry is a reminder and an indulgence. Please: Indulge along with me.
I don’t usually post food photos, but these are delicious!
I can’t believe it took a hurricane threat to get me to try them!
I went to the garden to say a pre-Irene goodbye to the tomatoes (and to pick any that might be willing to ripen on a windowsill).
I’d planned to leave the full-on green ones to weather the storm, but some of them had already gotten wind of Irene and had chosen the “opt-out” feature. Who wants to hurtle through 80-110 mile wind gusts? I get it. Why not just drop gently to the earth and avoid the drama?
So there they were, a bunch of tubby and rebellious green and green-white-pink tomatoes scattered along the garden path. What to do?
Cook them, of course!
These are non-traditional fried green(ish) tomatoes: sliced, dipped in egg, and dredged through a mix of cornmeal, smoked Spanish paprika, sea salt & pepper, and then pan fried in olive oil. The Spanish paprika is fantastic & the cornmeal makes them gluten-free…
Happy Hurricane and be safe!
When Marjolein Noyce posted this on Ikea Hackers, I sprinted (figuratively) to the Conceptual Devices website to check out their “Malthus: A Meal a Day or How I Learned To Stop Worrying about the Food and Love the (Population) Bomb”
Yep, it’s a smarty-pants in-home aquaponics unit based on an Ikea Broder hack.
Fantastic!
Although, if I kept fish in my apartment, I’d get way too attached to cook them…
SHARING BACKYARDS (Oh, Canada! Part III)
This is so, so interesting to me. And not just because it’s Canadian.
I confess; my current city does not have its urban agriculture act together.
It has one (1) community garden, inconveniently located on the outskirts of the city. It took a fair amount of research for me to discover its whereabouts. And while you might think it’d be easy to get a plot in a secret garden once you discovered its magic location, it turns out I’m number 29 on the waiting list and will continue to be so for years.
Clearly, the city could use more than one secret community garden. For perspective, the two adjacent cities have 12 and 15 community gardens each.
My city (my city!) has absorbed “community gardens “ into its “urban space plan,” a project so steeped in bureaucracy that it pits playgrounds for children and community gardens against one another in terms of priority of funding.
But then.
Enter “Sharing Backyards,” a project created by Vancouver-based City Farmer.
Sharing Backyards is a program that connects private land-owners (homeowners with yard space) to people who are looking for garden plots.
Abracadabra.
Bureaucracy-free community gardens.
I’m meeting with some garden-activists tomorrow, and we’ll take a look at the Sharing Backyards model. Truth be told, what works above the 49th parallel does not always (does not usually) work in the States, but it’s worth a try. Community gardens don’t need to be a “city” project, and frankly, many of the most successful, longstanding community gardens in NYC, Boston, and other U.S. cities are the products of grassroots, community, and guerrilla efforts; the official city stamp came much, much later.
If you’re curious, here’s the link to the sharing backyards website:
http://www.sharingbackyards.com/welcome
And if you haven’t checked out City Farmer: http://www.cityfarmer.info/about/
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