Author: UOG

HAVANA, July 5 (Xinhua) — Angel Hernandez, a resident of Havana’s central Playa district, never imagined he would be cultivating crops again after retiring, but the COVID-19 pandemic presented a good excuse.
Like many Cubans, he has been supportive of the country’s efforts to increase food production amid economic restrictions, the tightening of the six-decade U.S. trade embargo against the island and now the health emergency.
The 74-year-old spends more than three hours a day tending to his urban garden, a 150-square-meter plot of land where he grows herbs, vegetables and fruit, from beans, tomatoes and cucumbers to mangoes and spearmint, an indispensable ingredient of Cuba’s signature cocktail, the mojito.

“We did not need to go outside for vegetables and herbs during the lockdown,” Hernandez said.

“I cannot totally feed a family of seven with this small-scale production, but it helps a lot,” he said, adding “this is my passion.”His passion has also contributed to building community through a seed-sharing network that has enhanced connections among urban gardening enthusiasts, community leaders and food security activists.

Thousands of people like him across the country are part of Cuba’s urban agriculture movement, which emerged as an alternative solution to help the sanctioned country stabilize the supply of fresh produce to Cuba’s cities.
Amid the pandemic, Cuba’s government is again encouraging farmers and urban gardeners to increase output locally to substitute food imports.

READ THE FULL STORY: http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-07/06/c_139190571.htm

This sudden, shared urge to grow food in the middle of America’s cities intrigued us — enough to make an episode on urban agriculture, featured above. As the creators of a food podcast, we’re well aware of the harms caused by the intensive, industrial system of agriculture that feeds America, from the food miles racked up by the average spinach leaf to the underpaid farm workers who harvest it. Could the solution to these problems lie in diversifying where food is grown? Advocates claim that urban agriculture, which has been expanding in many ways in recent years, yields healthier diets, environmental benefits, and a host of more intangible outcomes, from beautification to food sovereignty. We couldn’t help but wonder: Might this spontaneous efflorescence of COVID Victory Gardens be part of a genuine shift, as America’s city-dwellers begin to feed themselves?

In March, as the United States began to lock down, shoppers met an unfamiliar and disturbing sight: empty shelves where bags of flour, jugs of milk, and packages of chicken breasts used to be. These shortages, combined with the “Groundhog Day”-like experience of being home day in, day out, for months on end, inspired a wave of gardening novices to try growing vegetables at home — and we at Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history, wanted to join in. To our dismay, we discovered that some of the plants we’d hoped to grow had long since sold out, like bags of flour before them, in what has been hailed as the great COVID-19 Victory Garden comeback.

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Three years ago, Christina Clum left the corporate world to become an urban flower farmer.

Her backyard in Kensington, Brooklyn, however, “is the size of a postage stamp,” she said. “And it doesn’t get good light.” So in February 2018, she put the word out to other Brooklyn residents about doing plantings in their yards. The exchange would be simple: They would get to enjoy the flowers, and then she would cut them and sell them through her company, Spry Flower Farm.

Ms. Clum, 51, settled on five yards. “I had certain criteria,” she said. “I didn’t want to have to walk through someone’s home, because it would be weird and invasive.” She needed sunlight and an outside water source. Ms. Clum also made it clear that she wasn’t a landscaper. “Some people still don’t get that,” she said.

READ THE FULL STORY: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/nyregion/urban-gardening-nyc.html

Chico, Calif. — You might have a backyard garden where you grow some fruits and veggies, but some people grow enough to live off the produce.

Orlan Luna has a very impressive backyard garden.

He and his siblings grew up on a quarter acre of land where his parents started a garden, it was then up to the kids to handle the growing and cultivating.

“When we needed snacks we didn’t run to the refrigerator or pantry, we ran outside because we had almonds, apples, grapevines and we had a huge garden that we could choose and pick our snacks from,” said Urban Gardener Orlan Luna.

He’s been handling his own garden ever since, putting in the work every day.

He grows corn, peppers, kale, tomatoes, onions, eggplants, and melons just to name a few.

“Food tastes better when you grow it yourself,” Luna said. “It’s organic and plus you don’t know what pesticides are put on the food in the stores and so it’s safer, but we have enough so that we can sustain ourselves for the summer and then after this crop is done I’m planting the fall garden as well.”

The main goal for him is to not buy food at the store.

READ THE FULL STORY: https://krcrtv.com/news/local/urban-gardening-helping-to-produce-constant-food-source

Urban farming is one way to help replenish food deserts in Milwaukee’s impoverished neighborhoods, and it’s not just about growing food.

“It’s not just about the fresh, healthy foods, but also the education behind it,” said Venice Williams, executive director of Alice’s Garden, an urban garden and farm that dates to 1972. “We do a lot of work to help people understand their relationship with food.”

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, a food desert is a low-income area where a supermarket or grocery store is at least a mile away. Based on 2015 data, the USDA estimated that nearly 9% of Milwaukee’s population lived in a food desert, including many areas of the city’s north side.

“Having access is very important from a health perspective,” said Alfonso Morales, a University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor and expert on urban agriculture. “Not only does the absence of healthy foods negatively impact health, but the presence of healthy foods positively impacts mental and physical health.”

READ THE FULL STORY: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/solutions/2020/07/13/urban-farming-one-answer-milwaukees-food-insecurity/5388888002/