Closing the Food Gap / Panel discussion in Edmonton tonight

I have been asked to participate in a City of Edmonton The Way We Green Speakers Series called Closing the Food Gap. I will be one speaker on a panel of four. The other speakers are:

• Mark Winne, food policy expert and atuhor of Closing the Food Gap (Beacon Press 2008) and Food Rebels, Guerilla Gardeners, and Smart Cookin’ Mamas (Beacon Press, 2010)
• Kevin Kossowan, local food expert and urban homesteader, videographer and award-winning blogger at www.kevinkossowan.com
• Kathryn Lennon - Volunteer Organizer, Multicultural Health Brokers Co-op

The panel will be moderated by Mack Male, social media expert and community action organizer

You can still register, it's free.

In preparation for the panel discussion, I am going to pop up some photos and some talking points. I won't have a slideshow presentation tonight, but many people in the audience will be holding their smartphones at the ready. I will likely touch on a few of these photos / points, but it's a free-flowing discussion. In other words, I'll post something more coherent here in the next day or so.

Photo B9021 appears courtesy of the Provincial Archives of Alberta "Vegetables from Donald Ross's Vegetable Garden Edmonton (1902)"

The point of the above photo is that Edmonton has a long and successful history of urban gardening, both on a homescale and a commercial scale. Donald Ross sold his Edmonton-grown veg at the city market (he was an urban farmer, though he would have called himself a market gardener in 1902).

Photo B9028 appears courtesy of the Provincial Archives of Alberta "W. Reeve's Tomatoes Edmonton"

And Edmonton has a century-long history of urban food production on a homescale and on vacant lots. During WWI and WWII, home food production and preservation peaked. And it remained "normal" to have a kitchen garden through the 1970s and 1980s. It's only in the 1990s that food gardening really dipped. It is now swinging back. The Edmonton Horticultural Society acted as the city of Edmonton's agent administering the vacant lots for food gardening from 1916 to the early 1990s. Here's a touch of the history and the staggering numbers of food gardens in Edmonton in those early years before the 50s. (Keep in mind the population of Edmonton was considerably lower than now, so the person-to-garden ratio was quite high.)

Until well into the 1950s the renting of vacant lots was one of the EHS's major programs. By 1924 the EHS had hired a full-time secretary to administer the program and, by 1930, the number of lots rented each year had increased from 200 (in 1916) to 2200. During the Great Depression hundreds of lots each year were allocated rent-free to citizens on relief. The EHS, in conjunction with the City's Special Relief Department, set up competitions for relief gardens which ran during the worst years of the depression. In the 1940s it was not unusual for the EHS to administer the rental of over 4000 lots per year but, over the next few decades, the numbers of lots available dwindled; in 1978 120 lots were rented.

                   --Kathryn Chase Merrett, http://www.edmontonhort.com/about/historyexpanded.php

And finally here's the cover of my maternal grandmother's copy of Victory Backyard Gardens (1942). It was a US government (Department of Agriculture) manual that was a standard reference even here in Canada for the Victory Gardens movement. In the 1940s, 40 percent of domestic fresh vegetables and fruit were produced in household victory gardens in the United States.

Meet Your Urban Farmer: Curtis Stone, Green City Acres, Kelowna

Curtis Stone, owner / urban farmer at his Green City Acres, is a very successful urban farmer in Kelowna, British Columbia. He's defied the critics ("you can't farm in cities and make money!) and is now in his third year of urban farming on borrowed residential front and back yards in downtown Kelowna.

I met him in his very first year of SPIN farming in downtown Kelowna (the interview is in the "Vancouver" chapter of the book). Since then, he's become an in-demand speaker with his SPIN farming seminars, and even as a TED talk speaker.

Here's a brand new video featuring Curtis. It's part of the excellent "Meet Your Urban Farmer" -- a short film series that introduces us to 18 urban farmers in and around the metro Vancouver area by Fire and Light Media Group.

Meet your Urban Farmer - Green City Acres (extended version) from Fire and Light Media Group on Vimeo.

East London's Pothole Gardener

Image via http://media.photobucket.com/image/pothole/THEJJ76/fishing_in_pothole.jpg?o=16

Potholes!

They're hazards for cyclists, they shake your molars loose in the car, and generally are just something to complain about. Until now, I've never considered the up-side to these roadway menaces. Check out this website, from East London, the Pothole Gardener.

And here's his video, Holes of Happiness: 

Urban Ag Dispatch from London: Farming a Building in Hackney

(My friend Craille lives in Hackney, a neighbourhood in London. She's an accomplished and smart writer working on a big, cool writing project on geographic promiscuity and the pathological need to travel, The Modern Nomad. On her way to her office, she passes by an urban farm/ing shop and has sent me photos from time to time. This past weekend, she attended a workshop on urban agriculture this past weekend and is guest blogging for me about it. I LOVE having foreign correspondents on foodgirl.ca!)

By Craille Maguire Gillies

photo: Craille Maguire Gillies

On a recent sweltering Sunday in London, one of few in the UK this year, I visited KXFS, or King’s Cross Filling Station, on the edge of Regent’s Canal. KXFS is a one-time petrol station that has been converted to a restaurant (Shrimpy’s) and a pizza bar.

The weekend I visited, a stage, seating and a large screen had been set up to host a small festival devoted to all things science. I was there to hear a talk about urban agriculture by artist Andrew Merritt, one third of the London’s creative studio Something & Son. They’ve worked with the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Council, and the London Architecture Festival. They’re also the folks behind FARM:shop, a retail store and urban farm housing in a former women’s refuge in East London. Through the windows you can see hydroponic greens and basil and when I’ve wandered by I’ve always been curious about what goes on inside. A bearded, T-shirt-clad Merritt came to super/collider’s festival at KXFS to fill us in.

Image from http://farmlondon.weebly.com/farmshop.htmlThe tagline adopted by FARM:shop, which opened in 2011, is “growing as much as we can in a shop in Hackney, London.” Specifically, they renovated a four-storey building, including the basement. “We wanted to farm the whole building,” Merritt told us. That means chickens on the roof where London’s foxes can’t catch them, a wall of hydroponic basil, tanks with 40 tilapia, a freshwater fish (great because they reproduce in tight spaces and are highly immune to disease), and mushrooms. A ground-floor café and co-working desk space bring in extra cash.

The goal has been to not only experiment with how much space you need to create a sustainable urban farm (Merritt estimates 2,000-square-metre), but also to involve the community in the venture and raise consciousness around food in the city. Though they try to be as efficient as possible, the true goal, says Merritt, is “to show the realities of where your food is coming from.” Something & Son describes itself as an eco-social design studio, and many of its projects, such as a new affordable bathouse/spa in the suburb of Barking, are as much social projects as art projects.

There’s another goal at FARM:shop. It opened thanks to an arts grant (which can be a great way to fund social and eco projects, says Merritt); now it employs two people. That means that Something & Son is thinking not only about the best way to, say, kill aphids (parasitic wasps seem to do the trick), but also to make community projects like FARM:shop or the Barking Bathhouse sustainable businesses. “We need to balance the commercial side [of urban agriculture], which New York City does really well with the local growing side, which London does really well,” Merritt said as smoke from the pizza oven curled upward.

The roof over the former filling station protected us from a brief bout of thunder and lighting. A barge floated down Regent’s Canal as Merritt spoke, and we were surrounded by concrete and cranes and buildings. Slowly, as funding comes along, Something & Son is rolling out satellite projects around the city and it plans to bring FARM:shops to in-between spaces throughout the UK. Looking up at the brick buildings on the other side of the canal, just sitting empty, it was easy to imagine how, when it comes to urban ag in London, the sky’s the limit.

Andrew Merritt talks urban ag at the Super/Collider festival Aug 17-19, 2012Photo: Craille Maguire Gillies Andrew Merritt, FARM:shop talks urban farming at the Super/Collider festival London, Aug 17-19, 2012. Photo: Craille Maguire Gillies

The Importance of Urban Agriculture on Global News Toronto this morning

Here I am talking about the global movement of urban agriculture and why growing food in cities matters on this morning's news in Toronto. (Watch directly on the Global Toronto site, or in the little screen below. The direct link to the site has a clearer picture.)