urban agriculture

After watching the video, if you would like to sign the Petition to ask Mayor Bloomberg for a vegetable garden in front of City Hall, please see: http://www.PeoplesGardenNYC.org

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After watching the video, if you would like to sign the Petition to ask Mayor Bloomberg for a vegetable garden in front of City Hall, you can visit this site: http://www.PeoplesGardenNYC.org

by Lynn Fredericks, FamilyCook Productions 

Watching a swarm of inner city teens crunch golden delicious apples like they were candy and crowd in front of trays of quesadillas loaded with Swiss chard and apples was, well – pretty darn amazing! 

While others ask how to build a more inclusive good food movement, Henry Harris has an answer: beets.

As a primary organizer of the Food Security Roundtable, Henry has recently worked with Mothers on the Move of the South Bronx to bring a ton of fresh organic vegetables, including over three hundred pounds of beets, straight from farmers in Vermont to communities where such quality produce can be difficult to find.

And now he is turning his energy to another innovative collaboration, working with staff and volunteers from Just Food and other organizations to build a diverse delegation from New York to attend the Growing Food and Justice Initiative (GFJI) conference in Milwaukee at the end of October.

The Growing Food and Justice Initiative came about through the work of Growing Power, Will Allen’s national non-profit. As the successes of Allen and his organization are being lauded by everyone from Bill Clinton to the Macarthur Foundation, this year’s conference will focus on building cross-cultural understanding for systems change.

by Kerry Truman, Eating Liberally 

A bountiful, beautiful food garden in every school? Yes, it's a dream, but so was the White House kitchen garden, and Alice Water's Edible Schoolyard before it. Thanks to a terrific new guide to starting school gardens, Growing School and Youth Gardens in New York City, the vision of edible schoolyards in every community is that much closer to a reality.

The excellent edible endeavors of Michelle Obama and Alice Waters have inspired school gardens to spring up all over the country. But there are hundreds of unsung horticultural heroes who've been working for years, even decades, to get kids excited about learning how to sow, harvest, and cook fresh, homegrown fruits and veggies.

One such hero is FSNYC's own Leslie Boden, who labored long and hard in collaboration with GreenThumb to compile this fantastic, comprehensive resource for anyone who's interested in starting a school garden. Growing School and Youth Gardens in New York City is a thoughtfully written guide with clear, helpful tips on everything you need to know and extensive listings that instruct you on where to find all the tools--both literally and figuratively--that you need to get your school growing.

And though the guide was compiled with our own region in mind, it's a goldmine of useful links to resources that would be helpful to schools nationwide. The guide provides extensive descriptions of each resource that's listed, making it easy to pinpoint the sites that will be most relevant for your particular space and project. Cheers to Boden and the many folks who did all the digging to produce this invaluable resource.

Posted by Kerry Trueman, Eating Liberally

Cars and fast food are partners in crime when it comes to undermining America's health. Our favorite mode of transportation deprives us of exercise, while our dependence on quick, cheap convenience foods cheats us of nutrients. We reportedly eat nearly a quarter of our meals in our cars, a practice that baffles folks in countries where taking time out to share a real meal with friends and family is still the norm.

But our landscape is changing, literally, and I found evidence of a nascent rebellion against our car-centric cuisine in a rather ironic place: the grounds that surround Automotive High School in Brooklyn. I first noticed squash vines growing outside the auditorium at this vocational high school in Williamsburg back in June when I attended a screening there of No Impact Man hosted by Rooftop Films.

I was intrigued, but had no idea that Automotive High School's edible landscaping was inspired by the school's participation in Slow Food NYC's Harvest Time program, whose mission is to create "a meaningful relationship between young people and their food and the environment by providing hands-on experiences, community engagement, and the enjoyment of good, healthful food."

Keeping in close step with this month's seasonal feature on urban gardening, we've selected a well done news broadcast by New Tang Dynasty Television covering Rooftop Farms in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. You can read about Paula Crossfield's experience volunteering at Rooftop Farms here.

Last Sunday, I had the pleasure of lending a hand as a volunteer at Rooftop Farms in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The name says it all: it is a 6000 square foot urban vegetable farm on the roof of an industrial building, growing rows inter-cropped with lettuces, tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers, kale and much more, which they sell directly to restaurants and at a farm stand inside the building every Sunday from 9am – 4pm.

Annie Novak and Ben Flanner are the farming minds behind the project. Both are passionate about how food gets to our table (Novak works with farmer Kira Kenney of Evolutionary Organics at the Greenmarket, and works as the Children’s Gardening Program Coordinator at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. Flanner is new to farming but seems to get a kick out of hawking produce). Chris and Lisa Goode of Goode Green, a green roofing company, found the roof and funded Rooftop Farms as a test. With this project, the team hopes to determine what is possible in terms of scale for growing on rooftops in the city.

Posted by Lynn Fredericks, FamilyCook Productions Food gardening is not only becoming popular and practical again-- it's  become at once patriotic, a la our First Lady's White House Garden, and something that separates the real gardeners from the virtual ones who sigh at the photos in gardening magazines.  But for even the most enthusiastic and resourceful first-time urban growers, there can be any number of hurdles and it can be difficult to know where to start. Cerise Mayo, formerly of Slow Food and now Project Director for the New Amsterdam Market, launched her project, Urban Kitchen Garden, to share her knowledge and expertise with NYC dwellers who want to grow even a little of their own food.

After taking a peek at her new site, nyckitchengarden.com, we decided to find out a bit more and share it with our FSNYC readers here.
                 
Lynn Fredericks: How would you summarize the goals of the Urban Kitchen Garden project?

Cerise Mayo: The goal of Urban Kitchen Garden is to teach urban dwellers the fundamental tools to get them growing edible gardens successfully year after year. I often meet people who have tried to garden unsuccessfully and are dubious about trying again. But by learning a few key skills, they can make a lasting impact even in the smallest spaces. Whether it is to save a little on weekly food bills, for a creative outlet, or just to have a new perspective on the urban landscape, we educate our clients on how to create kitchen gardens of any size for themselves, and provide them with all the resources they need to find quality materials (compost, manure, lumber, etc.).

LF: How has the project intersected with education? I understand you are involved with a school garden in Harlem.

Posted by Kerry Trueman, Eating Liberally                                        

Posted by Mark Foggin

A few weeks ago, on a bike tour of community gardens that are also raising chickens,  the tour guide was asked where the gardeners managed to get chicken feed for their fowl, and riders heard this tantalizing scrap: that many of them get it from New York City’s only animal feed store—in the Bronx.

The Bronx? Surely he was joking.

Nope. Owen Taylor, coordinator of Just Food’s City Chicken project, was referring to Bronx Animal Feeds on Park Avenue and East 162nd Street in the Melrose neighborhood. And, yes, it appears to be one of only two bulk feed stores in New York City (CG Country Seed in Staten Island is the other). Of late, Bronx Animal Feeds has become much more of a place for pet owners to provision dogs and cats than for coop owners (nota bene, all you city-slickers, that’s coop owners and not co-op owners) to buy cracked corn for their Rhode Island Reds.

Business is just fine, says owner Jack Horowitz. His grandfather started the shop about 75 years ago to supply live poultry markets in a time before refrigeration and pre-butchered meats. But in the post-war era, live poultry markets became the exception instead of the rule in New York City.  And those that remained, Horowitz said, got their feed from the farms that supplied their livestock.

“We kept carrying chicken feed because it was in our blood, but we were down to very little. A couple of poultry markets would come by just to fill in.”

But recently, Horowitz says, he’s seen a significant change. “Three years ago, we did about a thousand pounds a month,” he told me one recent Saturday afternoon while walking among shelves piled with 50-pound bags of feed. “Now we’re up to two or three tons a month.” What accounts for the change? City chickens, he says. “It’s all from the laying hen movement.”

Thank you to Helen Ho, Greenthumb, for sharing her photo out takes from Just Food's City Chicken Tour! To learn more about the City Chicken Project, visit www.justfood.org

Posted by Kerry Trueman, eatingliberally.orgFifth Avenue’s about the last place you’d expect to see cabbages and kale flourishing, but a mini farm has sprouted up like some agrarian apparition inside the gallery at Parsons The New School for Design at Fifth Avenue and 13th Street. Installed by the Yale Sustainable Food Project, it’s just the latest tasty testament to the fervor for food gardening that’s sweeping schools across the country.The exhibit features three 15 foot-long planters filled with Red Russian kale, Osaka Purple mustard greens, Bright Lights swiss chard, Ruby Moon hyacinth beans, and other highly ornamental edibles. The mini farm, on display till May, is being lovingly tended by Parsons and New School students.Just a few blocks south, New York University has its own urban farmer faction--the NYU Community Agriculture Club.