A city farmer faces the challenges of urban gardening
By Susan Carpenter | 11.18.09
There are certain phrases I never expected to utter in my lifetime. Things like, “Excuse me if I don’t shake your hand. Mine’s covered in horse urine.” Or, to my son, “When you’re finished with dinner, clear your plate and feed the scraps to the worms.”
Yet those are exactly the sorts of things I’ve found myself saying in the months I’ve been an urban farmer.
A year ago, I didn’t have a vegetable garden. I had a couple of lemon trees, but I’d given up on potted plants, having killed every rooted thing I’d attempted to nurture on my back deck. I didn’t just have a black thumb. I had a black hand.
But last year I began to think that my little postage stamp of a property could do more than just look pretty. Ideally, it could be put to work. I just needed to learn how.
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Unemployed workers learn to grow their own food
By Dan Sewell | 11.16.09
Many of the new gardeners didn’t know how to grow vegetables, and weren’t sure what to do with them once they did.
They learned, though, as part of a project by a local college to help a community hard-hit by the recession grow some of its own food.
Wilmington College provided the 20 plots and the guidance in this southwestern Ohio town after DHL Express decided last year to close its operation here, putting most of 8,000 Wilmington Air Park employees out of work. Local unemployment has soared to 15 percent.
Food pantries and other charities reported unprecedented demand, so the school, besides using its agricultural program to raise and donate crops, decided it could have a lasting impact by teaching people to garden.
“It’s not about a handout, it’s a hand up,” says Chris Burns-Dibiasio, whose husband, Daniel, is president of the private college of some 1,700 students. “It’s teaching them how to supplement their groceries; it’s about building a local food system.”
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Hoop houses extend urban farmers’ growing season
By DAVID RUNK | 11.04.09
On the vacant lot in Michigan where her childhood home once stood, Carolyn Meekins grows seedlings for Asian greens, red kale, and green beans in a plastic-covered greenhouse known as a hoop house.
The structure warms and protects the tender, young plants, allowing Ms. Meekins to plant earlier in the year. She was the first in Flint to build one last year, but more urban farmers like her are using hoop houses to extend the growing season in northern US cities.
Hoop houses are relatively inexpensive to build and often are unheated — relying instead on the sun or heat thrown off by compost heaps. With frames made of metal, flexible PVC pipe, or wood, they work like greenhouses but are covered with plastic instead of glass. They can be small enough for a city backyard or 100 feet long.
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Michigan church tends a garden to feed the hungry
By Jon Gunnells | 10.30.09
The summer harvest brought in by St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in downtown Brighton went well beyond picking cucumbers from the vine. What started as an idea for a small garden in front of the church turned into an incredibly successful organic garden.
In one summer, the church garden, which sits on a 25-acre plot at the Emerich Retreat Center in Hamburg Township, harvested 1,700 pounds of produce for Gleaners Community Food Bank.
“One of the goals of the (Episcopal) Diocese of Michigan is to eradicate hunger and promote healthy eating,” says the Rev. Deon Johnson of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. “Literally, I said, ‘I want a small garden to start,’ ” he joked.
What was supposed to be a small garden is having a major impact on the community.
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Kids of all ages grow vegetables in St. Louis
By GEORGINA GUSTIN | 10.13.09
Outside the University City Children’s Center, 4- and 5-year-olds step carefully around a raised garden bed, their little hands covered in dirt. The center’s executive director, Stephen Zwolak, approaches. “What are you doing?” he asks, smiling. And one boy squeals: “Planting! Peas!”
The garden bed about 110 feet long and a few feet high has become the latest “classroom” at the center, a place where children as young as 1 and 2 spend part of their day learning how to grow their own food.
“This year it became part of the curriculum,” Mr. Zwolak explains. “They eat what they grow.”
