Category: Community Gardens

Grow Pittsburgh, which promotes regional urban agricultural initiatives, plans to expand through a $50,000 state grant that will help pay for a new greenhouse.

Jake Seltman, executive director of the Homewood-based organization, said Grow Pittsburgh would continue to partner with The Frick Pittsburgh for use of its greenhouse. He said a second greenhouse would provide more plant seedlings to urban and backyard gardeners and schools.

Grow Pittsburgh supports more than 100 community gardens and 30 school gardens.

“This is really going to help expand our operations across the region,” Seltman said. “We’re just really happy and thankful.”

READ THE FULL STORY: https://triblive.com/local/pittsburgh-allegheny/pennsylvania-provides-96000-for-urban-farming-in-allegheny-county/

When Christian Echternacht gets invited to dinner, he likes to bring tilapia and basil rather than wine or flowers. His friends have grown used to it by now. They know that the fish and the plants have something in common: Both are harvested by Echternacht himself. They make great fish burgers topped with basil mayonnaise.

The ingredients prosper in the urban farm that Echternacht has run with his partner, Nicolas Leschke, for several years. It’s located in central Berlin, on the grounds of the Malzfabrik, a startup hub in the city’s Schöneberg district.

Tilapia at various stages of growth swim around in 13 different tanks, their skin varying shades of silver and pink. The fish don’t weigh much when they arrive at Echternacht’s ECF Farmsystems, as his company is called, but after a few months in his tanks, they plump up to half a kilogram (1.1 pounds) and are ready for harvesting.

READ THE FULL STORY https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/growth-of-urban-farming-in-germany-a-1284485.html

Bob Udeck gingerly uses his hands and feet to slowly steer his four-wheeled walker carefully through the dirt- and grass-covered field, adeptly maneuvering through the ruts, divets, mounds of dirt, rocks, and plants that line the path leading to the Heroes Garden.

The 74-year-old Vietnam veteran pulls up to a section of raised garden beds filled with rows of radish and pepper plants and smiles as he admires his handy work. Many of the plants have already begun bearing fruit, some of which were ripe and ready for picking.

“I used to farm when I was younger,” Udeck said, as he wistfully looked out over the plot that houses the Veteran Farming Program. “It feels really good to get your hands dirty again — planting something, nurturing it, and watching it produce.

“Not only does this garden keep me active, it’s also therapeutic — it keeps your mind busy, gets you outside, gives you a goal, and something to focus on. That’s really helped with my post-traumatic stress disorder.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE https://www.ocj.com/2019/09/veteran-farming-program-offers-heroes-help/

Standing between two buildings on 127th Street, a group of campers on the cusp of adolescence mulled over a change in schedule. Normally, they would spend the morning planting and gardening as part of Harlem Grown, a youth development nonprofit that uses gardening and cooking to teach and empower children in Harlem.

But on this Friday, they would become amateur cartographers, mapping their local food landscape.

The 15 campers walked through their neighborhood, paper and pencils in hand. How many delis? (By some counts, 17, by others, 14.) Supermarkets? (Three.) Fast-food restaurants? (Twenty-two, they estimated, but lost count.)

READ THE FULL STORY NYTimes.com

Those and other lessons come to life in the half-acre gardens of Passage Home, an East Raleigh faith-based nonprofit that helps its clients break out of poverty. Working in the community gardens is one of several job-training opportunities the agency offers; there are others in the construction and hospitality trades.

Like other job training, gardening values reliability, coming to work on time and staying on task. It also requires a certain toughness when the weather is especially cold or, as it has been this July, sweltering hot. Groups of four to five clients work in the garden at a time on an eight-week cycle.

The Ithaca Children’s Garden (ICG) is an award-winning public children’s garden free and open to all every day of the year, from dawn to dusk. Its mission is to inspire the next generation of environmental stewards, and does so through authentic, hands-on, child-led engagement with the natural world.

Ithaca Bakery is a local destination that has stood the test of time and remains today one of the busiest eateries in town. And so it made perfect sense for these two Ithaca favorites to work together in the best interests of our community. Ithaca Bakery donates cold brew coffee to be sold at the garden’s Teen Urban Farmers (TUF) Farm Stand Café all summer long. Emmy’s Organics macaroons, other drinks, healthy snacks and new ICG merchandise will also be available for purchase. Pete’s Dandy Mart supplies daily ice needs. Feel free to enjoy your refreshments on the new Farm Stand patio area, which was made possible by support from the Haslinger Foundation out of Akron, Ohio. All proceeds from sales at the stand will go toward providing critical support for the TUF program.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE Ithaca.com

BEREA, Ky. — A pilot program in Berea where women in recovery learn job skills through farming saw its first batch of graduates this month.

Harvesting Hope is a partnership between Sustainable Berea and Liberty Place, a recovery center for women in Richmond, along with several local businesses. Program director Cheyenne Olson said many people might be surprised by how much planting and harvesting translates to other types of work.

Kentucky has one of the lowest workforce participation rates in the country, according to a 2017 report by the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce. Olson pointed out while the opioid epidemic has made it difficult for many employers to fill available jobs, communities haven’t put effort into helping people transition from sobriety into employment.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE Public News Service

In Chelsea, Massachusetts — a 2-square-mile chunk of mostly industrial land across the river from Boston — a tiny urban farm sits in a gravel parking lot, sandwiched between towering, tarp-covered salt piles and a tightly packed residential neighborhood.

The farm was created to provide food for the Waterfront District’s high concentration of undocumented people, who don’t qualify for federal assistance and struggle to make ends meet in the gentrifying city. And that it does: 10 undocumented families visit the farm regularly to harvest from beds containing an abundance of peppers, holy basil, and fist-sized tomatoes.

But in the middle of its first growing season, the farm has also become a community hub. It’s a place for field trips, sharing knowledge, and people who just want to say hey. Excess food gets cooked into a weekly community meal held by a nearby young mothers’ program.

“We want to connect people back to growing, so they feel like they’re taking care of this piece of land together,” says Leilani Mroczkowski, food justice organizer and farmer extraordinaire for GreenRoots, the nonprofit behind the farm. “We also want to connect people to Chelsea.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE Grist.org

“Community Roots uses the entire city as a classroom. It sees place-based learning as essential to teaching and learning. Urban gardening serves as a departure point for learning about land and relationships, as well as food, consumer culture, and social activism.”

“Raven, a student who grew up in Coney Island, recalls a reading in Community Roots class from Brazilian educator and theorist Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire introduced an approach called problem-posing: teachers and students teach and learn together. Their major subjects of inquiry include themselves, each other and the ideas and issues that shape their realities and relationships.”

“Community Roots attracts many students like Iris and Raven: immigrants, children of immigrants and first-generation college students. Each student brings to the class deep, rich experiences of food, of places that are important to them, and their own relationships to these things. Learning starts in the garden and branches out into related themes and different parts of the city. When students make connections through critical thinking and relationships, their capacities to lead in their families and communities is strengthened.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE Civil Eats

Milwaukee’s past is often seen through the lens of industry and big factories, but “Growing Place: A Visual Study of Urban Farming,” now at MSOE’s Grohmann Museum, shows there were more ways to grow a city. Milwaukee was a frontrunner in gardening dating back to the late 1800s, laying the groundwork for the urban farm visionaries of today.

Guest curators Michael Carriere, assistant professor at MSOE’s Humanities, Social Science and Communications Department, and David Schalliol, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at St. Olaf College, gathered a collection of photographs, documents, signs, posters and farm tools to tell Milwaukee’s agricultural story. Items were acquired from UW-Milwaukee, Milwaukee Public Library, the Milwaukee County Historical Society and individuals.

“Growing Place” was born out of a broader project Carriere had been involved with, which studied placemaking (a multi-faceted approach to the planning, design, and management of public spaces) following the Great Recession, and how cities try to bounce back from severe financial crisis.

READ THE FULL STORY: https://shepherdexpress.com/food/eat-drink/growing-place-sheds-light-on-history-of-growing-food-in-milw/