The Next Small Thing

August 14th 2011

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 49^th 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/

Posted at 11:42pm and tagged with: garden, gardening, urban agriculture, community garden, community gardens, permaculture, sustainability, local, locally grown, food, vegetable gardens, canada, canadien, communal gardens, garden shares, sharing backyards, city farmer,.

August 3rd 2011

“Not Your Grandma’s Strawberries,” or, Where the Nutrients Are (Not)

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SERENDIPITY!

Two things happened:

I read this article:

http://www.grist.org/food/2011-08-02-not-your-grandmas-strawberries

by Natalie Jones at grist.org about the dwindling nutritional value of our selectively bred and cultivated (for quantity) produce,

AND,

I went foraging with Russ Cohen again and learned that the “weed” versions of our cultivated plants — wild beets (aka wild amaranth and sometimes callaloo in the farmer’s market) and wild spinach (also goose foot or lamb’s quarters) are delicious and have a ton more nutritional value than the garden varieties, AND the fruit of the autumn olive (an invasive species) has 18 times the lycopene of a tomato. And, as I’ve mentioned in the previous foraging post, you can make CANDY from the fruit of the autumn olive.

So heirloom vegetable varieties are best for growing, but mix some local weeds into your salad for healthy eating!

This foraging trip was at the lovely Allandale Farm, a very old, thriving, and wonderful farm in Brookline:

http://www.allandalefarm.com/

And Russ leads several more trips in the late summer and fall in New England, New York and Canada — check out his schedule:

http://users.rcn.com/eatwild/sched.htm

Oh, and those are elderberries up top…no autumn olives until September…

Posted at 6:15pm and tagged with: autumn olive, candy, food, foraging, garden, gardening, goose foot, grist, lamb's quarters, local, local food, locally grown, nutrients, nutritional value, russ cohen, sustainability, weeds, wild amaranth, wild beet, urban agriculture, urban farm,.

July 26th 2011

Another Reason to Love Garden Writers (if you needed one!)

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I didn’t know this.

Did you know this?

The Garden Writer’s Association started Plant a Row for the Hungry in 1995 and since then, American gardeners have donated over 14 million pounds of herbs and vegetables to feed the hungry (about a million pounds a year), just by planting one extra row in their gardens.

PAR is a way for garden writers to use their position in the local media to rally communities to help fight hunger by sharing locally grown produce.

You can find more information on the Garden Writers Association below, and you probably have a local PAR program in your area!

http://www.gardenwriters.org/gwa.php?p=par/index.html

Posted at 11:30am and tagged with: garden, gardeners, garden writers, garden writing, urban agriculture, food, community, hunger, local, locally grown, food share, sustainability, garden writers association, plant a row for the hungry,.

July 14th 2011

Locally grown and almost forgotten - Boston Harbor Clamming

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As it turns out, quite a few people in the Boston area didn’t know that a lot of those famously delicious steamers and chowder clams are dug out of the Boston Harbor by third-generation clammers…while clamming hasn’t made much noise in the local food movement, it’s actually a pretty big deal and in a pretty perilous situation thanks to a noncommittal response to fuel spills by Massport and Swissport. This is a great exposé by Phoenix writer Chris Faraone “Are Logan Airport polution and Massport indifference killing Boston’s proud clam-digging tradition? (Shucking Fits).”

Posted at 9:42am and tagged with: farm, urban farm, urban agriculture, aquaculture, urban aquaculture, local, locally grown, food, community, clams, clamming, pollution, politics, boston,.

July 13th 2011

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FIELD TRIP – UMASS AMHERST PERMACULTURE GARDEN!

“The Chancellor said the word “permaculture” at commencement this year, to a crowd of 30,000 people…the Chancellor talked about permaculture.”

(Nathan Aldrich, Sustainability Specialist, UMass Amherst Franklin Permaculture Garden)

It’s a bright-and-shiny scorcher of a day and I’m strolling the Franklin Permaculture Garden with Nathan Aldrich, the garden’s sustainability specialist and one of the original members of the student team who proposed the garden as a class project back in 2009.

Driven by concern about the troubled U.S. food system and a desire to build something that would benefit their local community, a group of students, including Aldrich, who were taking a sustainable agriculture course, designed a plan for establishing a permaculture garden on ¼ acre of lawn outside one of the dining halls. The plan reached an impasse when it was discovered that the requested location was slated to become a parking lot. But when the parking lot plan fell through, the garden project became a reality. With the students and the university administration unified behind the plan, the garden broke ground and had its first planting this spring.

The garden is a great template for thoughtful planning and design, and community inclusiveness. Aldrich notes that some very large meetings were organized to allow all stakeholders to weigh in on the planning process. And with the help of many eager volunteers, they set about turning the lawn into nutritious garden soil – check out the video documenting the process here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWHSzGDItBA

And while the spring planting was delayed a bit by the late arrival of all-important water tanks, UMass is well on its way to establishing a low-maintenance permaculture garden.

The food that’s grown (including tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, squash, basil, culinary herbs, and a great fruit selection featuring pears, peaches, quince, blueberries, and beach plums) will be served in the dining halls, but as Aldrich notes, the garden can’t feed the entire campus, and that’s not its purpose. The primary purpose of the garden is to educate the vast number of people who come in contact with it, as active volunteers or as members of the community at large. In addition to college students, volunteers and guests come from neighboring schools, community groups, and even administrative offices, and everyone who visits learns a little about permaculture and food sources as well as gaining some skills for growing their own food.

I offer the story of the Amherst permaculture garden as an antidote to the absurd shenanigans in Oak Park, Michigan: here’s a great example of what happens when an institution gets behind a community initiative instead of trying to squelch it!

And I highly recommend the UMass Permaculture Garden blog and website:

http://umasspermaculture.wordpress.com/

http://www.umasspermaculture.com/

Posted at 10:44pm and tagged with: garden, gardening, permaculture, urban farm, urban agriculture, local, locally grown, sustainability, farm, food, community, community garden,.

July 7th 2011

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HUNGER FREE COMMUNITIES NETWORK!

This is Exciting! The Hunger Free Communities Network is up and running! It’s “a nation-wide platform for coalitions, campaigns and collaborations committed to ending hunger in their localities to learn from each other and share their knowledge and experience with other hunger free organizers.”

A vision for a centralized resource where information can be easily shared and accessed! I can’t wait to see where this goes! Take a look!

http://www.hungerfreecommunities.org

Posted at 7:11pm and tagged with: garden, gardening, locally grown, food, community, urban farm, urban farming, urban agriculture, sustainability, hunger,.

HUNGER FREE COMMUNITIES NETWORK!
This is Exciting! The Hunger Free Communities Network is up and running! It’s “a nation-wide platform for coalitions, campaigns and collaborations committed to ending hunger in their localities to learn from each other and share their knowledge and experience with other hunger free organizers.”
A vision for a centralized resource where information can be easily shared and accessed! I can’t wait to see where this goes! Take a look!
http://www.hungerfreecommunities.org

July 6th 2011

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Hunger Free North Dakota Garden Project!

I tend to focus on local-to-me garden projects, but with both TreeHugger and the BBC writing about North Dakota, I had to take a look.

Sami Grover at Treehugger notes, “the most powerful sustainability efforts are those that reach beyond individual lifestyles, and into the realm of community identity and cultural change.”

The Hunger Free North Dakota Garden Project concurs, and with a partnership that includes community gardeners, the Department of Agriculture, the Farmers Market and Grower’s Association, and others, it starts with the simple request for gardeners to grow an extra row of vegetables for those in need. Last year, the project provided over 350,000 pounds of food to agencies that feed the hungry.

Seems like they are well on their way to changing their food culture!

You can check out Paul Adam’s BBC article and Grover’s Treehugger follow-up below.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-14022795

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/07/community-gardening-fight-hunger.php

Posted at 3:36pm and tagged with: garden, gardening, urban garden, community garden, sustainability, urban agriculture, urban farm, locally grown, food,.

July 5th 2011

The Next Small Thing — Emily's Story

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LIKE RADIO, WITH PICTURES!

So, my research for this documentary involves visiting and sometimes volunteering at community gardens and urban agriculture projects and talking to people who grow things — Lucky Me! And because it’s fun and interesting, and because I like the sound of people’s voices, I’m recording some of these interviews and posting them here — Radio Free Gardens!

Please check out this segment of Emily’s story and let me know if you like it!

Posted at 10:16pm and tagged with: garden, gardening, community, community garden, urban agriculture, urban farming, permaculture, sustainability, locally grown, documentary,.

June 29th 2011

Delicious Fire Escapes

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I trotted down to Union Square this morning to visit Andrea’s gloriously tiny, fire-escape garden. On the small (8’x4’ maybe) iron platform, she’s found space for basil, foxglove, thai chilis, rosemary, a blueberry bush, avocado and orange trees, strawberries, tomatoes…and even two small kitchen stools for sitting and chatting!

And yes, it’s still a fully accessible, functioning fire escape :)

Andrea has sharpened her small-space, urban-gardening skills as the manager of the ingenious indoor garden of a local (and committed to locally-grown food) restaurant, but more about that later!

We’ll be following Andrea’s story of a garden-demolished-and-rebuilt throughout the summer, but her fire escape made me so happy, I needed to post a photo or two for continued inspiration!

Posted at 1:55pm and tagged with: garden, gardening, urban garden, urban farm, urban, urban agriculture, urban farming, locally grown, sustainability, container garden, restaurant garden,.

June 21st 2011

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FORAGING!

This is a bit of a deviation from the urban gardening posts, but I went foraging last evening and when you forage, trust me, you want to talk about it.

Foraging is the poor-but-super-smart second cousin of gardening; instead of exerting pressure on the earth to produce in an orderly and predictable manner (like gardening), Foraging says, “I’m hungry, Earth. Whatcha got for me?” and then takes the offering with resourcefulness and gratitude.

I went on a mini foraging trek with Russ Cohen, the guy who literally wrote the book on foraging in Massachusetts, Wild Plants I Have Known…and Eaten. So on the cusp of the solstice, I found myself standing in a field by White Barn Farm with 15 other people, munching on wood sorrel, lamb’s quarters, and purslane, which we’ve just pulled out of the ground at Cohen’s urging.

Cohen has been leading foraging trips and serving up delicious meals from foraged bounty for over 30 years, and as we wander through the twilight, he not only points out the many edible plant species, but gives us cooking tips and recipes as well. We sampled the sweet-tart fruit leather he makes from the berries of the autumn olive – foraged candy! And since the autumn olive is an invasive species, the more candy you eat, the more virtuous you feel!

If you’re curious, Wild Plants I Have Known…and Eaten is published by Essex County Greenbelt Association and all proceeds benefit Greenbelt. http://www.ecga.org/products_online.html.

Cohen leads foraging trips throughout Massachusetts through the fall – some are free and some have a small fee to support the sponsoring organization. If you steer clear of mushrooms and trust your taste buds, foraging is pretty safe, but it’s a good idea to go out there with a specialist — you can check out Cohen’s foraging schedule here: http://users.rcn.com/eatwild/sched.htm

Posted at 8:05am and tagged with: urban agriculture, gardening, garden, foraging, sustainability, community, local, locally grown, green, farm, wildlife,.