Category: Frontpage

“What do you do once you’ve built a 450-square-metre underground park? If you’re Daniel Barasch and James Ramsey, you make it 100 times bigger. In October 2015, ex-Googler Barasch and former Nasa satellite engineer Ramsey, both 39, raised $223,506 (£170,000) on Kickstarter and took over a downtown warehouse in New York City to create the indoor Lowline Lab.”

So far there’s been over 75,000 visitors and have plans to upgrade, moving across the street taking up an additional 4,000 square meters of subterranean space.

“The Lowline’s skylight system uses external Sun-tracking parabolic dishes to gather and concentrate sunlight to 30 times its regular intensity. Internal optics filter out the hot rays, and the incoming sunlight is then distributed in a modulated way, to suit the vegetation – including exotic plants, mosses and hops. “Tropical species do best, but flowering varieties have also done very well,” says Barasch.”

Read the entire article at: “Wired.Co.Uk“

“Jesse DuBois is an urban agriculturalist. He moved to Los Angeles to become a screenwriter, but instead got caught up in reshaping the food system. He is the CoFounder and currently serves as the Chief Eclectic Officer for two start-ups: Farmscape, an urban farming maintenance company, and Agrisaurus, a web-based polyculture gardening assistant. Horticulturally, he is a big fan of the nightshade family.” –TEDx

In East Harlem, a new Urban Garden Cafe will soon be opening right in the middle of a neighborhood covered in graffiti, organic food, vintage parking meters and more.

“It’s a bizarre combination, but these items — among many others — are the central pieces of an East Harlem cafe being opened as a spin-off of the Urban Garden Center.” The new eatery “is designed to make the future more settled and ‘co-mingle the brands.’ He said he wants to look ahead as spaces for urban farming and gardening in the city become scarce.”

Read more at “DNAInfo.com“

Ben Greene’s farmery turns industrialized produce on its head by allowing food to be grown and sold in the same space – A film by Gary Breece and Russell Hawkins. (5:13)

Read more: http://www.SmithsonianMag.com

Appetite For Change, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit dedicated to using food as a means for economic and social growth, recently released a new video with a slightly different message—but some familiar faces.”

Read the original article at: “ModernFarmer.com“

“If you haven’t already seen this inspirational and entertaining Ted Talk by Ron Finley, then do yourself a favour and watch it — truly an inspiring talk and man.”

“With the help of a dedicated team and executive producer John Legend, Finley has put together a documentary that helps to spread the word of Gangsta Gardening. Can You Dig This explores the urban gardening movement that is sprouting up through the concrete and colouring the urban landscape. As part of an urban gardening movement taking root in South LA, people are planting to transform their neighbourhoods, changing their own lives in the process. Calling for people to put down their guns and pick up their shovels, these “gangster gardeners” are creating an oasis in the middle of one of the most notoriously dangerous places in America.”

Read the original article at: “Collective-Evolution.com“

Due to a concoction of irresponsible, shortsighted and cheap practices, conventional agriculture is extremely environmentally damaging and unsustainable. These practices are numerous and all contribute to agricultures unsustainability in different ways. They will be explored in the following paragraphs. The first practice that will be discussed is monoculture. Monoculture is growing a single crop on large plots of land. This is done because it is cheaper than growing a variety of crops, although at the cost of biodiversity. It is also the perfect environment for pests and diseases that could easily infect and ruin the entire crop.

Please read the entire article, at “LittleByLittle“

“Irrespective of whether you are gardening in patio containers or have backyard hydroponics, UOG’s seed packs are the way to go, because the UOG team creates your tailor-made parcel each month, taking into consideration your geographical location, prevailing weather, growing season and your growing preferences.  How do they know what’s best?  Well, I think there is some magic involved (and I suspect you will too when your first seeds germinate), but just to keep it conventional, they ask you to complete a small questionnaire about your garden.”

Their seeds are:

·        Superior raw quality,

·        Untreated, non- Genetically Modified (GMO) Heirloom garden seeds,

·        Most natural seeds available, and (drumroll please…)

·        Guaranteed to grow! Yes, it no longer has anything to do with the color of your thumbs.

Read the FULL review at: “Desima.co”

“Through the construction of urban gardens on abandoned city lots, Buckets of Rain diminishes urban blight, rekindles hope in struggling neighborhoods, brings fresh vegetables into the neighborhoods, and feeds the homeless through partners like the Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries and others.   We have re-purposed 30 blighted lots into food production since 2013, and grown or provided hundreds of thousands of servings of vegetables, free of charge, to our partners and neighbors.”

This rapidly expanding effort of urban gardening yielding over 50,000 servings of locally grown food. A new parking lot garden now has over 220 raised beds and a half a mile of drip irrigation installed. Most of the raised beds are constructed from reclaimed materials. As of late Nov. 2014, they had converted 23 abandoned city lots into food producing urban farms.

“Harvesting occurs daily during the growing months and food is transported to soup kitchens and homeless shelters of the Detroit Rescue Mission. One day a week, at least, we make bags of fresh veggies available for direct pickup by neighborhood residents.  By 2020, we aim to produce a million servings of fresh vegetables per season. This will require about 10 acres in continuous production and ten full time seasonal employees.”

Read more about “Buckets of Rain”, here.