By J.E. Manning
Writer/composer
SOCAN 2009
Key of G major
Ever since I lost my job, I’m making other plans
Yes, I’m changing my direction,
Now I’m headed for the land
Time to get back to my roots; it shouldn’t be too hard
Walking out my own front door
to the farm in my front yard
Refrain: Diggy diggy don, do-si-do
Plant a little seed then watch it grow,
Eieieioh On the farm in my front yard
Ever since I got laid off, I’m coming down to earth
I’m digging up my driveway and that artificial turf
I’m making room for corn ‘n squash ‘n tender little peas
And a chicken coop for the chickens
and a beehive for the bees
Refrain: Diggy diggy don, do-si-do
Plant a little seed then watch it grow,
Eieieioh On the farm down by the bus stop
The family in the white house,
Grows their garden on the lawn
We decided WE CAN TOO, now we all get up at dawn
When the rooster crows in the old garage
We turned into the barn… at 5 am every morning
Good news is, We’ve all slimmed down
Since the markets took a fall
And MOST days we’re so busy we don’t even miss the mall
Our tomatoes are the very best, we’ve got living proof
Up there on the balcony and way up on the roof
(Break)
I confess we never dreamed we’d be farming here today
so much for that law degree and that fancy MBA
When we don’t know the answers, Grandma shows the way!
She teaches gardening workshops
(sliding scale, if you can pay)
Tonight we’re having collard greens and dandelion wine
Bring your friends ‘n your guitar,
we’ll have ourselves a time
Wherever your own garden grows, however BIG or small
As long as we can share the seeds,
The farm will feed us all
Refrain: Diggy diggy don, do-si-do
Plant a little seed ‘n watch it grow,
Eieieioh On the farm in my front yard
w/ the beets n carrots ‘n the black-eyed peas
And fish in the pond and the apple trees
The goats and the rabbits and the bumblebees
On the farm in my front yard
Diggy diggy don, do-si-do
Plant a little seed ‘n watch it grow,
Eieieioh On the farm in my front yard
eiei, eiei eieei oh!
Organising a Potluck meal
Potluck
Bring something (preferably vegetarian) to contribute to the potluck - bring enough food for yourself/family and a bit to share. The primary focus of the ‘Locavore’ potluck is to promote eating whole foods, in their nature-made state, focusing on fresh food from local sources (or as local as possible)
If not FROM BACKYARD then locally produced.
If not LOCALLY PRODUCED, then Organic.
If not ORGANIC, then Family farm.
If not FAMILY FARM, then Local business.
If not a LOCAL BUSINESS, then Fair Trade.
Bring something (preferably vegetarian) to contribute to the potluck - bring enough food for yourself/family and a bit to share. The primary focus of the ‘Locavore’ potluck is to promote eating whole foods, in their nature-made state, focusing on fresh food from local sources (or as local as possible)
If not FROM BACKYARD then locally produced.
If not LOCALLY PRODUCED, then Organic.
If not ORGANIC, then Family farm.
If not FAMILY FARM, then Local business.
If not a LOCAL BUSINESS, then Fair Trade.
Green Giants
They grow up to 80% of their own food, mill flour by pedal power, brew their own bio diesel, and would rather wather their plants than take a bath. Lucie Young meets the Dervaeses of Pasadena, poster family of a new way of living.
The full article was in the Telegraph magazine of July 2009.
They run 8 websites all very much worth a look at:
www.urbanhomestead.org
www.dervaesgardens.com
www.peddlerswagon.com
www.freedomseeds.org
www.pathtofreedom.com
Have a look at their video to see what they have managed to do on 1/10th of an acres
The full article was in the Telegraph magazine of July 2009.
They run 8 websites all very much worth a look at:
www.urbanhomestead.org
www.dervaesgardens.com
www.peddlerswagon.com
www.freedomseeds.org
www.pathtofreedom.com
Have a look at their video to see what they have managed to do on 1/10th of an acres
When we talk about Transition towns, we talk about making towns resilient. What are resilient cities?
Resilient cities are cities that can effectively operate and provide services under conditions of distress. Resilient cities can better absorb the type of shocks and stresses as identified above. Rather than focusing on vulnerability, a focus on resilience means putting emphasis on what can be done by a city or a community itself, building on existing natural, social, political, human, financial, and physical capital, while at the same time strengthening its capacities.
“Urban agriculture can play a role in building more resilient cities. Growing food in cities reduces the dependency on (rural) food supplies, which can easily be affected by disrupted transport, armed conflicts, droughts or flooding and increasing food prices.
Apart from enhancing food security and reducing the ecological footprint, urban agriculture can also play a role in city greening and water management. Green spaces contribute to economic (energy) savings, or controlling storm water flows.
“Urban agriculture can play a role in building more resilient cities. Growing food in cities reduces the dependency on (rural) food supplies, which can easily be affected by disrupted transport, armed conflicts, droughts or flooding and increasing food prices.
Apart from enhancing food security and reducing the ecological footprint, urban agriculture can also play a role in city greening and water management. Green spaces contribute to economic (energy) savings, or controlling storm water flows.
Build a solar hot water panel
V3 Power are running a course on the 18th and 19th of July
at Ecoworks (Hungerhill Allotments, St.Anns, Nottingham).
Learn to build and install a panel to
harness solar energy to heat up your
water. Lunch and refreshments
provided, £40 per day course fees.
Email info@v3power.co.uk or phone
07985727925 to book.
See for more details
at Ecoworks (Hungerhill Allotments, St.Anns, Nottingham).
Learn to build and install a panel to
harness solar energy to heat up your
water. Lunch and refreshments
provided, £40 per day course fees.
Email info@v3power.co.uk or phone
07985727925 to book.
See for more details
Abundance project - Sheffield
Abundance harvests trees across the city on industrial waste sites, roadsides, the grounds of mansions and back yards. We harvest a range of soft fruit, top fruit and nuts. Over fifty volunteers of all ages and from many different backgrounds harvest and process the fruit. Fruit is distributed to Surestarts, community groups, community cafes and individuals across Sheffield.
We receive tip-offs by word of mouth, text and email as to where to find ripe fruit trees. The greatest journey any fruit travels from tree to mouth is five miles often by bike and trailer. We have found at least fifty varieties of apples and more than twenty varieties of pears. We give away hundreds of fruits and lots of freshly pressed juice. Tree owners are offered the first share of fresh fruit.
We make juice, cider, jams, preserves and pickles from the damaged and bruised fruit. We leave plenty for the birds and the soil. We carry Abundance through the winter by teaching people how to prune their trees. Abundance taps into a huge public enthusiasm for and appreciation of local produce. We are rediscovering Sheffield as one big orchard.
Abundance was set up by Stephen Watts and Anne-Marie Culhane in 2007. Stephen is a food grower, artist and wild food forager and Anne-Marie is a community and environmental artist working in rural and urban areas. Stephen had been spotting fruit trees across the city over a number of years and harvesting them for his own needs, and together they decided to find a way to share the bounty with others.
The Handbook of their experiences can be downloaded here on line:
City of London plans guerrilla allotments for vacant building sites
The Square Mile, capital of commerce and the site of Britain's most expensive real estate, could soon host some of its first temporary allotments with giant "grow bags" set up on building sites.
The City of London, one of the few authorities not to have formal allotments, wants some of its 9,000 residents to use the spaces to grow fruit and vegetables. The authority has only 22 acres of open space, mostly in old burial grounds and small squares, but the recession has left many building sites vacant.
for the full story click here
Free Distance Learning Courses on Urban Agriculture available online
This free version is self-paced. These courses are offered to you by the Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security (RUAF) and Ryerson University. Simply sign in as a guest and start reading.
Distance Learning on Urban Agriculture (UA)
Course 1 - Understanding UA
Module 1 - The Concept of Urban Agriculture
Module 2 - Building Blocks of Urban Agriculture
Module 3 - Types of urban agriculture
Module 4 - Direct and indirect stakeholders in UA
Module 5 - Dimensions of UA: Benefits and functions
Module 6 - Dimensions of UA: Problems and risks
Module 7 - Constraints and opportunities facing UA
Street Farmer
By ELIZABETH ROYTE
Published: July 1, 2009
Will Allen, a farmer of Bunyonesque proportions, ascended a berm of wood chips and brewer’s mash and gently probed it with a pitchfork. “Look at this,” he said, pleased with the treasure he unearthed. A writhing mass of red worms dangled from his tines. He bent over, raked another section with his fingers and palmed a few beauties.
It was one of those April days in Wisconsin when the weather shifts abruptly from hot to cold, and Allen, dressed in a sleeveless hoodie — his daily uniform down to 20 degrees, below which he adds another sweatshirt — was exactly where he wanted to be. Show Allen a pile of soil, fully composted or still slimy with banana peels, and he’s compelled to scoop some into his melon-size hands. “Creating soil from waste is what I enjoy most,” he said. “Anyone can grow food.”
Like others in the so-called good-food movement, Allen, who is 60, asserts that our industrial food system is depleting soil, poisoning water, gobbling fossil fuels and stuffing us with bad calories. Like others, he advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local doesn’t mean a rolling pasture or even a suburban garden: it means 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, less than half a mile from the city’s largest public-housing project.
And this is why Allen is so fond of his worms. When you’re producing a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of food in such a small space, soil fertility is everything. Without microbe- and nutrient-rich worm castings (poop, that is), Allen’s Growing Power farm couldn’t provide healthful food to 10,000 urbanites — through his on-farm retail store, in schools and restaurants, at farmers’ markets and in low-cost market baskets delivered to neighborhood pickup points. He couldn’t employ scores of people, some from the nearby housing project; continually train farmers in intensive polyculture; or convert millions of pounds of food waste into a version of black gold.
With seeds planted at quadruple density and nearly every inch of space maximized to generate exceptional bounty, Growing Power is an agricultural Mumbai, a supercity of upward-thrusting tendrils and duct-taped infrastructure. Allen pointed to five tiers of planters brimming with salad greens. “We’re growing in 25,000 pots,” he said. Ducking his 6-foot-7 frame under one of them, he pussyfooted down a leaf-crammed aisle. “We grow a thousand trays of sprouts a week; every square foot brings in $30.” He headed toward the in-ground fish tanks stocked with tens of thousands of tilapia and perch. Pumps send the dirty fish water up into beds of watercress, which filter pollutants and trickle the cleaner water back down to the fish — a symbiotic system called aquaponics. The watercress sells for $16 a pound; the fish fetch $6 apiece.
Onward through the hoop houses: rows of beets and chard. Out back: chickens, ducks, heritage turkeys, goats, beehives. While Allen narrated, I nibbled the scenery — spinach, arugula, cilantro.
If inside the greenhouse was Eden, outdoors was, as Allen explained on a drive through the neighborhood, “a food desert.” Scanning the liquor stores in the strip malls, he noted: “From the housing project, it’s more than three miles to the Pick’n Save. That’s a long way to go for groceries if you don’t have a car or can’t carry stuff. And the quality of the produce can be poor.” Fast-food joints and convenience stores selling highly processed, high-calorie foods, on the other hand, were locally abundant. “It’s a form of redlining,” Allen said. “We’ve got to change the system so everyone has safe, equitable access to healthy food.”
Propelled by alarming rates of diabetes, heart disease and obesity, by food-safety scares and rising awareness of industrial agriculture’s environmental footprint, the food movement seems finally to have met its moment. First Lady Michelle Obama and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack have planted organic vegetable gardens. Roof gardens are sprouting nationwide. Community gardens have waiting lists. Seed houses and canning suppliers are oversold.
Allen, too, has achieved a certain momentum for his efforts to bring the good-food movement to the inner city. In the last several years, he has become a darling of the foundation world. In 2005, he received a $100,000 Ford Foundation leadership grant. In 2008, the MacArthur Foundation honored Allen with a $500,000 “genius” award. And in May, the Kellogg Foundation gave Allen $400,000 to create jobs in urban agriculture.
Today Allen is the go-to expert on urban farming, and there is a hunger for his knowledge. When I visited Growing Power, Allen was conducting a two-day workshop for 40 people: each paid $325 to learn worm composting, aquaponics construction and other farm skills. “We need 50 million more people growing food,” Allen told them, “on porches, in pots, in side yards.” The reasons are simple: as oil prices rise, cities expand and housing developments replace farmland, the ability to grow more food in less space becomes ever more important. As Allen can’t help reminding us, with a mischievous smile, “Chicago has 77,000 vacant lots.”
Published: July 1, 2009
Will Allen, a farmer of Bunyonesque proportions, ascended a berm of wood chips and brewer’s mash and gently probed it with a pitchfork. “Look at this,” he said, pleased with the treasure he unearthed. A writhing mass of red worms dangled from his tines. He bent over, raked another section with his fingers and palmed a few beauties.
It was one of those April days in Wisconsin when the weather shifts abruptly from hot to cold, and Allen, dressed in a sleeveless hoodie — his daily uniform down to 20 degrees, below which he adds another sweatshirt — was exactly where he wanted to be. Show Allen a pile of soil, fully composted or still slimy with banana peels, and he’s compelled to scoop some into his melon-size hands. “Creating soil from waste is what I enjoy most,” he said. “Anyone can grow food.”
Like others in the so-called good-food movement, Allen, who is 60, asserts that our industrial food system is depleting soil, poisoning water, gobbling fossil fuels and stuffing us with bad calories. Like others, he advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local doesn’t mean a rolling pasture or even a suburban garden: it means 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, less than half a mile from the city’s largest public-housing project.
And this is why Allen is so fond of his worms. When you’re producing a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of food in such a small space, soil fertility is everything. Without microbe- and nutrient-rich worm castings (poop, that is), Allen’s Growing Power farm couldn’t provide healthful food to 10,000 urbanites — through his on-farm retail store, in schools and restaurants, at farmers’ markets and in low-cost market baskets delivered to neighborhood pickup points. He couldn’t employ scores of people, some from the nearby housing project; continually train farmers in intensive polyculture; or convert millions of pounds of food waste into a version of black gold.
With seeds planted at quadruple density and nearly every inch of space maximized to generate exceptional bounty, Growing Power is an agricultural Mumbai, a supercity of upward-thrusting tendrils and duct-taped infrastructure. Allen pointed to five tiers of planters brimming with salad greens. “We’re growing in 25,000 pots,” he said. Ducking his 6-foot-7 frame under one of them, he pussyfooted down a leaf-crammed aisle. “We grow a thousand trays of sprouts a week; every square foot brings in $30.” He headed toward the in-ground fish tanks stocked with tens of thousands of tilapia and perch. Pumps send the dirty fish water up into beds of watercress, which filter pollutants and trickle the cleaner water back down to the fish — a symbiotic system called aquaponics. The watercress sells for $16 a pound; the fish fetch $6 apiece.
Onward through the hoop houses: rows of beets and chard. Out back: chickens, ducks, heritage turkeys, goats, beehives. While Allen narrated, I nibbled the scenery — spinach, arugula, cilantro.
If inside the greenhouse was Eden, outdoors was, as Allen explained on a drive through the neighborhood, “a food desert.” Scanning the liquor stores in the strip malls, he noted: “From the housing project, it’s more than three miles to the Pick’n Save. That’s a long way to go for groceries if you don’t have a car or can’t carry stuff. And the quality of the produce can be poor.” Fast-food joints and convenience stores selling highly processed, high-calorie foods, on the other hand, were locally abundant. “It’s a form of redlining,” Allen said. “We’ve got to change the system so everyone has safe, equitable access to healthy food.”
Propelled by alarming rates of diabetes, heart disease and obesity, by food-safety scares and rising awareness of industrial agriculture’s environmental footprint, the food movement seems finally to have met its moment. First Lady Michelle Obama and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack have planted organic vegetable gardens. Roof gardens are sprouting nationwide. Community gardens have waiting lists. Seed houses and canning suppliers are oversold.
Allen, too, has achieved a certain momentum for his efforts to bring the good-food movement to the inner city. In the last several years, he has become a darling of the foundation world. In 2005, he received a $100,000 Ford Foundation leadership grant. In 2008, the MacArthur Foundation honored Allen with a $500,000 “genius” award. And in May, the Kellogg Foundation gave Allen $400,000 to create jobs in urban agriculture.
Today Allen is the go-to expert on urban farming, and there is a hunger for his knowledge. When I visited Growing Power, Allen was conducting a two-day workshop for 40 people: each paid $325 to learn worm composting, aquaponics construction and other farm skills. “We need 50 million more people growing food,” Allen told them, “on porches, in pots, in side yards.” The reasons are simple: as oil prices rise, cities expand and housing developments replace farmland, the ability to grow more food in less space becomes ever more important. As Allen can’t help reminding us, with a mischievous smile, “Chicago has 77,000 vacant lots.”
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