planted city

From The Cheap Vegetable Gardener:

It may be impossible to put a price on the satisfaction of bringing in a basket of produce fresh from your garden.  As well as the enhanced flavors from having truly fresh produce from your garden compared to that of your local supermarket.  Though when I was harvesting my potatoes this summer with my daughter I did have the thought, Would it have been smarter for me to grow something else in this space?  I estimate out of the 4-5 square feet I used for these plants I probably got about $4-5 worth of potatoes.

I did a little research first to determine yields of various plants per square foot and secondly what the value (organic supermarket prices USD) of the yielded produce at harvest.  Given I am a city dweller with a fairly small footprint for my vegetable garden (about 30-35 square feet) making decisions on what to buy at the supermarket and what to grow in the garden may be a huge money saver with just a few dollars invested in some seeds for your vegetable garden.

Now from the results below you can see the winners for the most produce value per square foot are many of the leafy green vegetables/herbs (cilantro, lettuce, chives, dill, Swiss chard) next comes many of the larger vine plants (tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, peas) with many of the root plants taking up the rear.  Now much of this makes sense where many of the vine plants grow on trellises and are allowed to spread, which I guess is sort of cheating the square foot rule but I will let it slide.  Compared to the root plants whose production is entirely dependent on the space allowed in square footage they have to grow as well as these are normally inexpensive produce items to begin with.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: City Farmer) 

Here’s a shot of the NEU Community Garden taken from the south end of the Cambie Bridge on my walk home the other day.

The 46 plot garden gets its name from the Neighbourhood Energy Untility powering the former Olympic Village site/ Southeast False Creek mixed-use community located nearby. Vancouver now 74 community gardens with approximately 3260 garden plots citywide. Details here. 

I’ve got more photos here if you’re interested.

Three paragraphs from Thomas Homer-Dixon’s recent article in the Globe & Mail, ‘All’s not lost, Ontario. The future is green, not black’. Homer-Dixon is the director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation and the author of a number of books including, ‘Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future’, ‘The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization’, and ‘The Ingenuity Gap’. You can watch, listen and read about his work here.  

(Photo credit: Eco-News)

From The Vancouver Sun:

Companion planting has been around for centuries, a method that many organic gardeners use to try to protect certain vulnerable crops from insect predation, for instance, using marigolds to deter beetles and carrot fly.

Or — less believably — to improve the flavours of certain vegetables, such as planting basil among tomatoes.

But you can use an amped-up form of companion planting — succession interplanting — to double the output of each of your garden beds by pairing up plants that will grow together in close quarters without interfering with each other and then following with a full second crop for fall and winter. It is possible to get as many as four crops per bed in a single growing season.

You won’t end up with nice rows of identical plants like you see in magazines, those mini-mono-crops. But the esthetic loss is diversity’s gain and it’s not so hard on your soil.

If you have a lot of space, try some or all of these mixed bed plans. If space is tight, try one to start and see how it works for you.

There are no tomatoes in this plan. Grow them in a separate bed with plenty of space around them. Some plants can’t be crowded and few are more likely to disappoint when things don’t go their way than tomatoes.

Check out the rest of the article here and Wikipedia for a list of companion plants.

(Infographic credit: New Scientist via SeaCoast Eat Local)

Wendell Berry: ‘IT ALL TURNS on affection’

From The National Endowment for the Humanities:

Wendell E. Berry, noted poet, essayist, novelist, farmer, and conservationist, delivered the 2012 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on Monday, April 23, 2012 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

The annual lecture, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.

In his lecture, entitled “It All Turns on Affection,” Berry lamented the increasing divergence of modern man from the environment and local communities. Invoking the words of his mentor, the writer Wallace Stegner, Berry observed that throughout history Americans have been divided into two kinds:  the “boomers” who “pillage and run,” and the “stickers” who “settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.”

Inspired by a passage from E.M. Forster’s Howards End, Berry called for for a land use ethic that is shaped by a sense of “affection” for land and place. “And so,” he said, “I am nominating economy for an equal standing among the arts and humanities. I mean, not economics, but economy, the making of the human household upon the earth: the arts of adapting kindly the many human households to the earth’s many ecosystems and human neighborhoods.”  The full text of Wendell Berry’s lecture is available here. 

Check out the rest of the article here. Berry’s talk starts approximately 10:00 minutes into the video and you can check out media coverage of it here, here, and here.

(Photo credit: NEH)

From Climate Central:

Dramatically reducing emissions of one of the key contributors to global warming – nitrous oxide – will require farmers to change their ways of growing food, and citizens in the developed world to slash their yearly meat consumption, according to a new study published Friday.

The study by Eric Davidson, the director of the Woods Hole Research Center on Cape Cod, Mass., lays out actions that would be required in order to adhere to emissions scenarios developed by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Specifically, meeting the strictest emissions reduction scenario would mean that, in the developed world, the average person would need to cut their meat consumption in half by the year 2050. This would help ensure there would be enough food to feed the planet’s rising population, with nearly 9 billion people expected to call Earth home by 2050, up from about 7 billion today. Red meat consumption is growing in the developing world and is still on the increase in developed countries, trends that pose formidable obstacles to those seeking to reign in nitrous oxide emissions.

…

A decline in meat consumption would have two main benefits, Davidson said. It would reduce the demand for nitrogen-based fertilizers, and cut down on manure production and use.

As for whether a 50 percent reduction in average per capita meat consumption is at all feasible by 2050, Davidson pointed to the relatively rapid changes in cigarette smoking habits seen during the past 50 years.

“If you had asked me 30 years ago if smoking would be banned in bars I would have laughed and said that would be impossible in my lifetime, and yet it has come true,” Davidson said in a press release.

“I don’t have an expertise to say how likely it is that people will change habits,” he said in a phone interview, emphasizing that he is not advocating vegetarianism, but rather is pointing out that in order to reach certain emissions reduction goals, cutting meat consumption in the developed world has to be considered as a sensible option.

The study notes that if people were to take an intermediate step and switch some meat consumption from red meat to pork, poultry or shellfish, they would help reduce nitrous oxide emissions. 

Check out the rest of the article here. For some low carbon food ideas check out Anna Lappe’s article, ‘Seven Principles of a Climate-Friendly Diet’ and the Center for Food Safety’s ‘Cool Foods Campaign’.

(Photo credit: Climate Central)

From The Globe & Mail:

Broccoli, beets, carrots and peppers, spinach, romaine and buttercrisp lettuces. Since 2009, employees of the Vancouver Island community of Ladysmith have been turning the flower beds around the town hall into vegetable gardens, donating all their crops to the Ladysmith Food Bank. The produce display is beautiful – and bountiful.

“We sow a few hundred plants and get a good amount of vegetables,” says Glen Britton, an original member of the town’s employee-based Green Team and parks supervisor who oversees the planting and harvesting with six employees.

…

In-house employee Green Teams who come up with and manage environmental initiatives have become integral to most of Canada’s Greenest Employers for 2012. All Green Team members are volunteers, both off and on the company clock, for projects such as paper conservation, energy reduction, tree-planting and recycling electronics, often working in partnership with community organizations.

The Ladysmith garden project grew out of a combination of community, employee and city council support. One key needed for success is having support from the top down.

“When we established a Green Team in 2008, we left it open to all our employees so anyone who had an interest could be part of it,” says Ruth Malli, Ladysmith’s city manager and a member of their Green Team. “Meetings are held during working hours. We chose to do it on the employer’s time because we wanted to show employees it was important enough to dedicate some of their work time to it. A lot of work is done on their own time as well.”

Check out the rest of the article here. Also worth checking out, ‘These employers back Green Team initiatives’.

(Photo credit: Globe & Mail)

‘Fossils from the Anthropocene’

(Source: Planet Under Pressure 2012)

Food with a Smile: ‘1 in 5 Teenagers Will Experiment With Farming’

(Source: Face Your Farmer via FarmFolkCityFolk)

From CSR Wire:

Ethical Markets Media, LLC (USA and Brazil), released their 2012 Green Transition Scoreboard® tracking private sector investments since 2007 in green companies and technologies globally, now totaling more than $3.3 trillion.

The 2012 Green Transition Scoreboard® (GTS) report finds Asia, Europe and Latin America catching up with the USA in total non-government investments and commitments for all facets of green markets.  2011 ended with a GTS total of $3,306,051,439,680, starting from 2007.  Given the many studies indicating that investing $1 trillion annually until 2020 will accelerate the Green Transition worldwide and the over 100 research reports and articles referenced in this years’ update, the”Green Transition Scoreboard® 2012: From Expanding Cleantech Sectors to Emerging Trends in Biomimicry” definitively shows green investments are becoming the norm.

More here.

(Graphic credit: Green Transition Scoreboard)