Category: Frontpage

Bean Head Farm takes underutilized land & grows fresh produce for food banks & shelters.

Learn more about Bean Head Farm, here: “BeanHeadFarm“

In Detroit, a three-story vacant building will now be a home to a community resource center adjacent to an urban garden which provides fresh, locally grown produce to about 2,000 homes in the area.

“The Michigan Urban Farming Initiative bought the building several years ago at auction. The restored building and cafe are expected to be unveiled in May.

The two-acre urban garden features a 200-tree fruit orchard and provides free produce to about 2,000 homes in the area. The Michigan Urban Farming Initiative says Wednesday that the project is an alternative neighborhood growth model.”

Learn more about the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative.

Read the original article, at :”DetroitCBSLocal.com“

In Tokyo you can find a 9 story office building which boasts an urban farm built into it, right in the middle of the city’s modern and crowded streets.

“The headquarters of the Pasona Group, one of the country’s largest staffing and talent agencies, literally blooms, a garden in the sky that provides Tokyo with a striking display of foliage. More than 100 types of roses grow on the building’s “green curtain” exterior during the late springtime, and in autumn months, vines growing on the trellised facade display fall colors. And that’s just the outside. The ground floor entrance, lined by citrus plants such as limes and kumquats, leads to a lobby with a functioning rice paddy and urban farm.”

“We’re trying to broadcast what you can do in a metropolitan environment,” says Yukie Yoneyama, who works for the company’s urban farm division, which began seeding and planting the midcentury office building in 2010.

Read the entire article at, “Curbed.com“

In 2003, Rosa found an 1,800-meter dumpsite that was inhabited by homeless beggars…she “decided to look for the owner of this site, who gave it to her under a commodatum (gratuitous loan). Then, she moved into the dumpsite, setting up a provisional camp, and started working with her two sons on cleaning the waste that had been piling up during the past 40 years.”

To read more about this story, visit: “LinkTV.org“

 

There’s a lovely garden being operated in DC where neighbors are coming together to learn how to cook with fresh produce, grown right in their own neighborhood.  This particular urban garden, which was started just three years ago, began with a dream of providing low-cost produce to people living in area’s without access to a grocery store.

“They studied successful urban gardens in other states and learned about grant writing to fund theirs. They utilized neighborhood ambassadors like Parker and added two more sites. Now, they have three mini-farms in parts of southeastern D.C. labeled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as food deserts — places usually in low-income areas that lack fresh fruits and vegetables.”

Read the entire article at, “PBS.org“

Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne have been farming their yard in Los Angeles for over a decade. In addition to a mini orchard and extensive veggie garden, they have all the instruments of an urban homestead: chickens, bees, rainwater capture, DIY greywater, solar fruit preserver, humanure toilet, rocket stove, adobe oven. But they don’t like to talk about sustainability of self-sufficiency, instead they prefer the term self-reliance.

“I don’t like the goal of self-sufficiency, I think it’s a fool’s errand to chase that goal,” explains Knutzen. “I think we live in communities, human beings are meant to live, and trade and work together. I think self-reliance is okay, in other words, knowing how to do things.”

Knutzen and Coyne share their tinkering, DIY and small scale urban agriculture experiments on their blog Root Simple and in their books “The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City” and “Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post Consumer World”. They believe in the value of shop classes and old-school home economics (back when you learned how to make things, not shop for things).

For the couple, their true goal with all of this self-reliance is freedom to live as they please. By growing their own and canning, pickling, preserving, freezing and baking their own breads and beans, they live frugally. They also only own one car (plus a cargo bike), one cellphone and no tv. “I think a lot of it has to do with our overdriving ambition to be free,” explains Coyne, “makes being cheap fun, because it means you can be free”.

Original story: http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/…

“This community garden offers a shared plot for farming as well as a space for family and freinds – but only recently was it an overgrown empyt garbage lot. “

“We are running out of space for farmland and a third of all food that is produced is wasted. Ken Dunn has been called the greenest man in Chicago and he’s on a crusade to turn our food waste into productive farmland–right in the middle of the city!”

Permaculture is a system of agricultural and social design principles centered on simulating or directly utilizing the patterns and features observed in natural ecosystems. Permaculture was developed, and the term coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in 1978.

It has many branches that include but are not limited to ecological design, ecological engineering, environmental design, construction and integrated water resources management that develops sustainable architecture, and regenerative and self-maintained habitat and agricultural systems modeled from natural ecosystems. -source Wikipedia