Backyard farming seems a bit counter-intuitive. Why take time out of our daily routine to grow food at home when we can just buy it at the grocery store? Isn’t saving our time and effort part of the reason we work long hours and strive to make money? These questions seem to be ingrained in our culture’s DNA. Convenience is important, but so is preserving the environment, teaching children how to grow food, and building community resiliency. Yet there is an easy way to balance these values: practical and enjoyable design.
This year, the nonprofit Denver Urban Gardens (DUG) will support the construction of its 100th community garden. We only had time to visit four of them in the two days we were in town, but we got a kaleidoscope of ages, ethnicities, socio-economic strata, and motivations: the suburbanites in formerly rural Aurora, African and Asian refugees in East Colfax, school students all over the place, and upper-middle-class professionals in Rosedale.
Committing to buying locally used to mean eating at restaurants was a no-go. However, an increasing number of Boulder-area establishments are seeing the benefit in offering food grown within the county’s limits. Some restaurants, such as the famous breakfast spot, Lucile’s, has taken it even one step further by planting their own extensive garden in Niwot. While this home-grown produce is only available seasonally, long-time Chef Mickey Samuels says customers really notice the difference. “What better local stuff can you get than growing it yourself?” he says. Read More »
On March 19, Polyface Farm’s Joel Salatin spoke before a crowd of more than 700 people in Ft. Collins, CO, a seminal regional event put together by the newly-formed Front Range Permaculture Institute. The impressive turnout and very enthusiastic audience response is a signal that a true revolution in local food and farming is underway—and that people in the Ft. Collins area are right at its forefront. Below is a video of Salatin’s rousing presentation.
…This is the eighth year that Sommers has had a plot in Second Start Community Garden where 11th Avenue dead-ends just past Baker Street. “I have to plant something every year, just because. Every year, it gets bigger and bigger.” Every year, “it” does get bigger and bigger: community gardening, that is. The trend is growing. A lot. And fast. So much so, that’s it almost impossible to keep up with all the new vegetable gardens sprouting up around the city.
Members of Transition Louisville hope their one vegetable garden grows into many, part of their goal of promoting sustainable living and local food production. The group has about 150 members, and about 15 members spend their Sunday afternoons planting and tending their crop of arugula, tomatoes, hard squash, peppers and potatoes.
“Dandelions are not a problem for the environment,” said herbalist, author and event co-director Brigitte Mars. “Herbicides are.” Mikl Brawner, co-owner of Harlequin’s Garden, will be teaching a class on the basics of how to garden without chemicals. Brawner has spent 35 years researching and testing alternatives to toxic chemicals, and has managed the nursery and his display gardens organically for 19 years.
For a group of University of Colorado students, the “freshman 15″ says less about the sedentary lifestyle, underage drinking and stressful schedules of students and more about CU’s food system and the lack of understanding about food waste and food production by their peers. CU Going Local is a group of students working to get locally grown food into dining halls, educate fellow students on how to grow and produce their own food and work with the Boulder community to build urban gardens in elementary schools and low-income housing developments.
The Grow Local Colorado Campaign is partnering with Denver Parks and Recreation and the Parks Stewardship Program in 2010 to grow Edible Public Demonstration Gardens in four Denver parks: Civic Center, Berkeley, Highlands and Highlands Gateway. The produce will be planted, maintained and harvested by local volunteers. The food will go to Denver’s residents in need, delivered to such organizations as The Gathering Place, EarthLinks, and Food Bank of the Rockies.
More than 40 farmers and Boulder County Farmers’ Market local businesses gathered at the Boulder Outlook Hotel on Nov. 21 to have one big celebration of local! This event was originally designed to support local agriculture and provide a way for local food growers and producers to find their way to the Thanksgiving tables of local families past the ending of the outdoor Boulder Farmers’ Market season. But like all things in Boulder, the event took on a life of its own…
The Boulder County EAT LOCAL! Campaign presents positive pathways of engaging citizens, communities, businesses, and local governments to take the far-reaching actions that are required to strengthen the local food system. This ten-year Campaign is working to expand the capacity of our local food system and to promote closer connections between community members and those who grow our food.
…If we could double, triple, or quadruple the organic carbon content of soils in the decades ahead, the benefits would be incredible. The productivity of the land would climb and soils’ ability to hold and attract moisture would increase dramatically. The ability of the land to support economic activities would diversify and expand. If the scale of the soil-creation project was large enough, then soil building, as much as any other program currently being considered, could help lower atmospheric carbon dioxide and create a more stable climate.
…How ready are we for this scenario? Short answer: we’re not ready now, but the transition could be accomplished, especially if we start preparing. The percentage of food produced locally would have to rise from 1 to closer to 100. This can be done not only by an expansion of local farming, but also by a rapid growth in urban horticulture. During both world wars, government in the U.S. sponsored a social invention called “victory gardens.” 20 million Americans responded to the call from the Department of Agriculture which made pleas to Americans to grow their own food. Gardens in yards, vacant lots, and parks supplied up to 40% of the produce eaten in the U.S.
…Several times a year, I get a ‘fresh batch’ of kids in my high-school chemistry classroom. Most of them come from an upper-middle class background and are thoroughly indoctrinated into the basic tenets of industrial civilization — material growth, technological progress, nature as merely a source of raw materials, novelty as virtue, etc. And in addition to imparting the general chemistry curriculum, I feel it is my obligation to both (1) tell them the hard truths about our civilization and its future prospects, and (2) outline a philosophy and practical steps that may improve our chances for a livable future. But both of these “extra” tasks are not without their challenges.
…This new way of procuring food, by direct connection with a local farmer, is called “Community Supported Agriculture,” CSA for short, a movement which sprouted in Europe and Japan in the 1960s, and took root in the U.S. in the early 90s. It’s also an old way of procuring food, that is, from neighbors who you know and trust. It works like this: Pay your farmer a set price at the beginning of the season (usually between $300 and $600) and for the next 20 weeks you will be provided with a variety of fresh vegetables, either right at your doorstep or for you to pick up at the farm.
West of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, coastal California is a hotbed of alternative agriculture. Eating locally is easy enough where the balmy climate affords a year-round growing season. Ironically, the same farms featured as local growers in a San Francisco market are featured in my mother’s New Jersey grocery store as “California Fresh.” “That’s because it snows in New Jersey,” explained my ever-patient mother. This I already knew, having grown up on the East Coast.
A newly produced UN Report rightly points out, among other things, that the western model of meat and dairy production simply won’t work on a planet of 9 billion people. The report, which quantifies the basic unsustainability of affluent societies and the challenges facing us in satisfying needs we’ve spent a century creating and can’t possibly actually fulfill, is generally a good one. But I do want to take issue with the underlying assumptions in the report, including the ones that lead the UN to the most controversial and media-attention gathering claim – that we need to move towards a universal vegan diet.
Roundup Ready corn, soy, and cotton have been the norm in America during this past decade. The seeds are used for 90% of soy and 80% of corn plantings. Roundup is used four times that of any other herbicide. But, nine weeds, including pigweed, horseweed and Johnsongrass, on millions of acres in more than 20 states in the Midwest and south have now developed immunity to Roundup. It was fun and easy while it lasted, but it didn’t last long, did it?
…How does the way we eat have such a big effect on the amount of energy we use? According to this report, about half of the change is due to increased use of labor saving devices, with the remainder being split between population growth and changing food choices. Fewer people are farming, processing, cooking, and cleaning. Machines do the work for us, and consume more energy to do it.
…If food is cheaper it’s more affordable and more people should be able to get an adequate diet. That is true for people who buy food, such as those living in cities. But it is quite obviously not true if you’re the one growing the food. You’re getting less for your crops, less for your work, less for your family to live on. That is as true for Vermont dairy farmers as it is for rice farmers in the Philippines. Dairy farmers today are getting prices for their milk that are well below their costs of production. They are putting less food on their own tables. And they are going out of business at an alarming rate. When the economic dust settles, this will leave us with fewer family farmers producing the dairy products most of us depend on.
Most vegetarians I know are not primarily motivated by nutrition. Although they argue strenuously for the health benefits of a vegetarian diet, many see good health as a reward for the purity and virtue of a vegetarian diet, or as an added bonus. In my experience, a far more potent motivator among vegetarians–ranging from idealistic college students, to social and environmental activists, to adherents of Eastern spiritual traditions like Buddhism and Yoga–is the moral or ethical case for not eating meat.
