While accompanying my fiancé to Asheville, N.C. for one of her residency interviews, I found myself bouncing around from coffee shop to coffee shop in downtown Asheville, scooping up free internet, downing coffee, handling bits of work, bits of personal business and trying to think about whether I could live here for the next 4+ years. Then I remembered an article we had read in the New York Times about an “Edible” park in Asheville. I quickly looked it up, and found out that Asheville indeed had embarked on an edible park based on the foundations of permaculture and “edible forest gardens”
Canopy of Fruit Trees
I drove five minutes out of downtown and found a small park with a recreation center, looking out onto city hall. As you walk down a path through the park, what you see are grapes lining the fence of a basketball court with fig trees, elderberry trees, and kiwis both growing and vining through fence-like structures. Further down the path are apple trees, peach trees, berry bushes and other edible plants that I couldn’t recognize due to the coming winter season. Everything in this area of the park is both edible and representing of mini-ecosystems called “edible-forest gardens.” Planted next to the fruit trees are plants that work in symbiosis with the fruit tree, much like the different species in a forest. I saw herbs that attract pollinators, ground cover like lemon balm and strawberries that keep the ground moist, avoid evaporation and block out weeds. Other perennials like borage, comfrey and purple tree collards act as dynamic accumulators, which bring important minerals from the soil and make them available to the surrounding plants, while plants like artichoke act as natural “mulchers” that continually feed the soil. I did not see all of these plants present, but I can understand that is their vision. Read More >
as seen from Whitelock St.
On a recent crisp October weekend, Reservoir Hill community members, friends, farmers, and two bus loads of Johns Hopkins undergraduate students gathered at the Whitelock Community Farm for a modern barn raising. The various volunteer groups, totaling close to 50 people, built an inexpensive but practical hoop house using a clear plastic roof and a PVC-pipe spine to extend the newly established farm’s growing season. Construction of the 20 foot by 30 foot hoop house was managed by Thor Nelson, an architect/planner who lives a block from the farm site, and paid for by a grant from Parks and People. The Reservoir Hill Improvement Council (RHIC) chipped in Federal Stimulus money to fund materials for a shed and farm stand on the property, and coordinated the volunteer support from Johns Hopkins. Read More >
Last Tuesday I spent the evening at the Clifton Mansion, home of Civic Works, the umbrella organization of Real Food Farm (RFF), a new urban agriculture project. The occasion was Digging for Data, an event held jointly by the Center for a Livable Future and Civic Works.
Located on six acres of Clifton Park in northeast Baltimore, Real Food Farm utilizes high-tunnel hoop houses (low-cost, low-input greenhouses) to produce pesticide-free fruits, vegetables, and herbs for Baltimore residents. In October 2009, Real Food Farm collaborated with the Safe Healing Foundation to erect the first three. In the future, there will be 20 hoop houses in Clifton Park-18 for production, one for processing and packaging, and one for education and training.
The farm aims to improve community access to organic, wholesome and real food, addressing the problem of food deserts and promoting healthy living. Read More >
I wanted to post an impact study that I performed this year of the Urban Agriculture Institutes that I used to run in Richmond, Calif. This paper represents the first step in a program evaluation of Urban Tilth’s Urban Agriculture Institutes. While this study had an intervention/control cross sectional design, with no baseline data it cannot make any causal claims. The data for the full program evaluation does have a pre/post element and is being currently analyzed.
The program that Urban Tilth is now running is a mature, well conceived model that I believe has replicable qualities for schools throughout the country. The idea is fairly simple. An urban agriculture program at the high school level, that gives high school graduation credit, provides food system education, cooking and tasting demonstrations, community and service learning all under the larger focus of intensive urban food production. Students manage their own school garden or farm, and create a working Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) business model to provide produce to the community. During the summer when school is out (and school gardens become abandoned) Urban Tilth hires the trained Urban Aggers to continue their training, and manage many school and urban gardens throughout the summer. Students return next year as leaders in the continuing work of producing food for the community.
I hope you enjoy reading it and I’m getting excited about putting together the final program evaluation to show a national audience what Urban Tilth is doing…
Students Growing Food: A Study of a Food-Production Focused Intervention in a California High School
On Saturday, June 5th, DC Prep Academy Charter School and Rails to Trails Conservancy teamed up to add another urban/school garden into the growing rolls of urban agriculture taking place around the country. The 1000 square foot garden set in Northeast D.C.’s Edgewood community will combine an edible forest of fruit trees, perennial vegetables, herbs, insectary plants and dynamic accumulators with a large space for growing annual crops like collards, corn, squash, tomatoes and more.
Garden Site before Transformation
The advantage of this garden site is that it is located along the brand new Metropolitan Branch Trail coming out of Union Station which provides previously cut-off communities accessibility to the metro and to Union Station and the Capital. The garden will not only beautify the new bike trail it will hopefully connect the charter school to the community in a new way. DC Prep is housed in the old industrialized buildings that would use the nearby railroad industry and even now their middle school campus has no playground to speak of. A true “urban” campus, DC Prep students are absolutely the students that most need to be reconnected to the growing of food and how it affects our lives
New Garden Site
Plans are being made for how the garden will be used, but classes and teachers are already lining up to use the garden in their curriculum. Hopefully, the site will be used not only to educate students in genuine food production, but bring a small and steady stream of locally grown produce into the homes of the students and teachers at the school. DC Prep already is at the forefront of school food, using Revolution Foods as their sourcing agent and we hope next year to collaborate with Revolution Foods in cooking demonstrations using food from the garden.
Sheet Mulching!
Three 60 ft rows will keep the kids busy
On Friday, April 12th, Food Access Solutions: Urban Agriculture, Local Food, & Community Development, a panel discussion between leaders in the food movement on a regional level and leaders on the local level took place in southeast Washington D.C. in Anacostia. My interest in Urban Agriculture comes from my desire to integrate schools and students with the urban ag movement, but within the specific process comes issues of food access, food security, job promotion, economic and community development. These were all issues that the panels addressed with exciting stories from the trenches of urban agriculture programs and new ideas. In the end, what I took away was a sense that the food movement is maturing with the scope of ideas that are now being talked about consistently and without hesitation. Ideas like partnering with local chefs and restaurants, expanding the number of concentration of farm stands and markets and focusing on community empowerment from the inside and putting the power, leadership and responsibility for urban food production into the hands of those that are affected.
Food access was the topic of discussion and organizers decided to have the event in what is considered a current “food desert” in Washington D.C. to illustrate the need for discussion about food access. Alexandra Ashbrook of DC Hunger Solutions stated that in the richest part of DC there is a full service supermarket for every 7,000 residents, while in Ward 8 where the discussion was held, there was one full service “Giant” supermarket that serves all 70,000 residents of Ward 8. Last month at the DC Healthy Schools Act hearing, I listened to Marion Barry, the city councilman from Ward 8 discuss the closing down of the Ward 8 Farmer’s Market limiting access to healthy foods even further.
The first panel consisted of the following speakers:
• Robert Egger (DC Central Kitchen)
• Michael Heller (Clagett Farm)
• Carolina Valencia (Social Compact)
• Malik Yakini (Detroit Black Community Food Security Network)
• Maurice Smalls (City Fresh, Cleveland, OH)
Much of the discussion focused on issues of race and power, not only within the communities that the panelists served, but within the food movement itself. Malik Yakini, currently working in Detroit for the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network posed some challenging questions to the audience. He is operating within the context of Detroit, what he claims is the most segregated city in the nation. He said, white supremacy exists within our food system, but it also exists in the food justice and food security movement. He talked about looking at the organizations associated with the food movement and seeing most of the leadership being well-intentioned young, white individuals, mostly women. His organization is attempting to place blacks in those leadership roles. He posed an honest question to the audience, “How can we shift the power from those that currently have it, to those that should have it?” Read More >
