Category: Frontpage

The corner of Harrison and Halsted streets doesn’t feel very rural, with traffic buzzing by the busy intersection and the Willis Tower looming in the background. But that will soon change.

Students Dorrian Neeley and Lashawn Evans, both in the undergraduate Human Development and Learning program in the College of Education, have developed UIC’s first urban garden at the intersection, aiming to address issues of sustainability and food security in low-income Chicago communities.

“Growing up in Chicago, we both know what living off the corner store can do for you,” Neeley said. “We think we can influence the community starting with this garden and hopefully expanding, so people can have the ability to feed themselves.”

Their idea blossomed in the Child and Youth Policies in Urban America course (ED 135), taught by Chris Miller, assistant clinical professor of educational policy studies. Neeley and Evans sought to study sustainable food systems as an independent project, a plan embraced by Miller and Alfred Tatum, dean of the College of Education.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT: “News.uic.edu”

“Amanda Gerber never meant for this to happen. But there she was one day last week, dressed in a straw hat, jeans and fancy, dirt-caked cowboy boots, tromping out of a raised bed where she had been tearing out spent green bean plants.

“It’s a little overwhelming,” said Gerber, a mother of two and co-owner of Nottalotta Acres, a patchwork farm of 10 parcels totaling about 3 acres scattered around two neighborhoods in the Bayside section of Virginia Beach.

Not a lot of acres. Get it?”

Read the Original Article at: “PilotOnline.com“

“Each Ant Space is an ecosystem. Play with the life inside. The narrow habitat makes the game one of subtle manipulation. Sculpt the scene only from above. Drop in seeds and water, add more ants and colored sand. Intelligently design a complex balance of creatures and plants. The Ant Space will evolve over years as a co-creation between the life within and the hand that placed it there.”

Learn how you can support Ant Space on Kickstarter!

Autumn and Christian are two of the urban gardening volunteers working in northwest Spokane plots for the group Growing Neighbors.

They’ve gone to property owners and asked to borrow little bits of private land in their northwest Spokane neighborhood to grow food. The organization is run by John Edmondson, who invited us to see what Growing Neighbors is doing.

To listen to the story, visit: “SpokanePublicRadio.org“

“Shantae Johnson and Arthur Shavers both grew up in Portland and both grew up gardening.

Johnson’s great-grandmother grew berries for the J.M. Smucker company, and her family grew much of its own food. Shavers helped his grandmother in the garden when he was young. After they met they kept a garden wherever they could – in community garden plots or in the back yard of a condo – but dreamed of having their own farm.

Now they’ve launched MudBone Grown, a company focused on promoting farming, education and community outreach – and a culturally specific urban food systems project at the Oregon Food Bank’s 33rd Avenue farm.

Prior to the company’s launch, Johnson worked for Multnomah County as a community health worker and breastfeeding peer counselor. Shavers had worked as a leather smith, firefighter and emergency medical technician.”

Read the FULL ARTICLE at: “TheSkanner.com“

The all-natural, organic, non-GMO plant based diet — often the butt of a joke among Midwestern tables spread with comfort foods — has taken magazine covers and chic cafes by storm.

Chad and Nieko Summers are hoping to change that negative mentality locally and help return people’s food choices to their roots, all starting with school children.

In 2013, the father-son team started Healthy Harvest Urban Farms at 3900 Archer Drive, East Moline. They recently paired up with Our Lady of Grace Catholic Academy in East Moline to pilot “Sprouting Minds,” a food and farming educational program.

In early May, fifth- and sixth-grade students started gardens at Healthy Harvest Urban Farms. They held their first harvest July 25, with students picking and donating 130 pounds of food for St. Mary’s food pantry.

Read the FULL article at: “QCOnline.com“

“The fourth annual NoCo Urban Homestead Tour on Saturday allowed visitors to learn more about urban farming and gardening by offering an afternoon of self-guided fun through community member’s homes.

“This isn’t your grandma’s garden tour,” said volunteer, Connie Myers. “We are going beyond just perennials and flowers; we are showing people bees, chickens, goats, fruits and vegetables in an urban setting.”

Myer has served on the tour’s committee since it began and also runs a blog called Urban Overalls that focuses on self-sustainability and gardening in an urban setting. Each home was selected through nominations and approached by the committee.”

Follow the REST OF THIS STORY, here: “ReporterHerald.com“

“After years of working with adolescents who had to be coaxed and cajoled into learning, in this new setting I was surrounded by little children who got excited if you offered them a smile and a handshake. They practically ran into class to find out what Mr. Farmer Steve was up to each day. They expected excitement. Equally exciting for me, I got to be the oldest sixth grader in the Bronx in a school that only went up to the fifth grade. I may have acted like a big kid, but I could do long division in my head. I had a driver’s license. And now I had my own master key to the building.

Our first task: Build our classroom farm. “This is a big project,” I explained to the wide-eyed students. “I’m going to need everyone’s help to put all these pieces together.” Just as I had seen with older students at JVL, these little guys quickly found ways to contribute. Some sorted pieces, some assembled, and together we managed to get six Tower Gardens ready to plant.”

Read the REST of the ARTICLE at: “GreenBiz.com“

Drew Demler is digging in a box of dirt in the middle of Fair Park. He is harvesting potatoes — big, small, misshapen, one that even looks like a snowman — in a hotter-than-deep-fried parking lot just outside the Cotton Bowl.

“I think potatoes and onions are two of the most important crops that we grow,” Demler, farm manager at Big Tex Urban Farms, says as he uses his bare hands to search for the tubers. “They’re hearty and prolific, and their storage life is long.”

Demler and landscape supervisor Barron Horton take about an hour to harvest potatoes from four raised wooden containers on one side of the farm. There are more than 500 other planting beds around them, full of vegetables in various stages of promise — peppers, black-eyed peas, okra, squash, zucchini.

Read more over at “DallasNews.com“

GREEN BAY – To Kim Fruin, it was the heavy-handed city trying to shut down her garden.

To the city of Green Bay, it was a mostly a miscommunication between Fruin and its inspectors, maybe fueled by overzealousness on the part of some of Fruin’s friends.

In any case, what Fruin sowed this planting season, the city hopes to harvest as a whole new set of guidelines for urban gardeners.

It started in late June, when someone in Fruin’s east-side neighborhood — she thinks she knows who it was — complained about her yard. Fruin rents on Berwyn Street, and she’s at the end of a cul-de-sac, where traffic can’t pass.

See the FULL Article at: “GreenBayPressGazette.com“

An innovative inter-departmental collaboration, Urban AgricultureStat, launched in June with a motion passed by Cincinnati City Council. The goal is to expand Cincinnati’s urban agriculture footprint and invest in ways to develop blighted properties for the purpose of urban farming.

“Many cities, including Cincinnati, have highly successful urban agriculture programs, and many of those programs are expanding,” says Larry Falkin, director of the Office of Environment and Sustainability. “Currently, gardening is occurring on approximately 40 city-owned parcels.”

OES, working with other City departments including law, health, economic development, planning and water, is developing a pilot project to convert publicly owned vacant land or buildings into urban farms.

“Next step will be presenting a report to the City Council,” says Falkin. “OES always tries to learn from both the successes and failures in our own programs and those in peer cities.”

Read the full article at: “SoapBoxMedia.com“

“These large-scale greenhouses are advanced and expensive, but more and more consumers and businesses are supporting them,” said Nicole Baum, spokeswoman for Gotham Greens, a rooftop farm operator in Brooklyn.

The city changed its zoning laws in 2012 to allow rooftop greenhouses certain exemptions from limits on height and floor size on commercial and industrial properties. As a consequence, landlords have come to view them as a potential amenity and opportunity for profit.

“The landlords now see a way to use their space wisely,” said Annie Novak, a farmer who helped create the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Greenpoint in 2009. “Now there is a positive shift from the community who want to see these spaces.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT: “AMNY.com“