planted city

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.

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)

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

(Source: Face Your Farmer via FarmFolkCityFolk)

From The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Climate Progress:

From CleanTechnica:

Here’s a pretty cool urban farming solution—a Plantagon greenhouse for urban farming. Construction on the first one broke ground in Sweden last week. This unique vertical-farming greenhouse will also be “[part of] an international Centre of Excellence for Urban Agriculture, a demo-plant for Swedish clean-tech and a climate-smart way to use excess heating and CO2 from industries,” a news release on the groundbreaking states. Aside from offering an innovative vertical farming solution, “Plantagon plans to develop integrated solutions for energy, excess heat, waste, CO2 and water” in cooperation with several partners.

Check out the rest of the article here. You can also check out a video about the vertical farm on YouTube.

(Image credit:  Plantagon via CleanTechnica)

From Reuters:

Global warming threatens China’s march to prosperity by cutting crops, shrinking rivers and unleashing more droughts and floods, says the government’s latest assessment of climate change, projecting big shifts in how the nation feeds itself.

The warnings are carried in the government’s “Second National Assessment Report on Climate Change,” which sums up advancing scientific knowledge about the consequences and costs of global warming for China — the world’s second biggest economy and the biggest emitter of greenhouse gas pollution.

Global warming fed by greenhouse gases from industry, transport and shifting land-use poses a long-term threat to China’s prosperity, health and food output, says the report. With China’s economy likely to rival the United States’ in size in coming decades, that will trigger wider consequences.

“China faces extremely grim ecological and environmental conditions under the impact of continued global warming and changes to China’s regional environment,” says the 710-page report, officially published late last year but released for public sale only recently.

Even so, China’s rising emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from burning fossil fuels, will begin to fall off only after about 2030, with big falls only after mid-century, says the report.

Assuming no measures to counter global warming, grain output in the world’s most populous nation could fall from 5 to 20 percent by 2050, depending on whether a “fertilization effect” from more carbon dioxide in the air offsets losses, says the report.

But that possible fall can be held in check by improved crop choice and farming practices, as well as increased irrigation and fertilizer use.

China is the world’s biggest consumer of cereals and has increasingly turned to foreign suppliers of corn and soy beans.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credits: Reuters; The Guardian)

From The Guardian:

From coal mines to rice paddies and cooking fires to diesel exhausts, 14 highly cost-effective measures could quickly curb global warming and save millions of lives, while also boosting global food production. That is the striking conclusion of a new study published in Science and the most authoritative look yet at the opportunities offered in tackling methane and black carbon - soot - pollution.

The headline findings are striking. The measures would reduce warming by 0.5C by 2050, very useful indeed with the world failing to get to grips with carbon dioxide emissions. And that’s only half the tale. They would also avert between 0.7 and 4.7 million premature deaths caused by air pollution every year and bump up crop yields by 30 to 135m tonnes a year.

Methane and black carbon have grabbed attention before, in a major UNEP report in 2011 for example, because of the speed with which measures to tackle them take effect. Black carbon floats in the atmosphere for about a week, methane for about a decade, while carbon dioxide hangs around, heating the planet, for about a century. That means cuts in methane and black carbon take effect quickly, though CO2 remains the larger problem.

Drew Shindell, at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who led the research is clear that this is not an either/or situation: “It is not at all a substitution. It would be a big mistake to focus on dealing with the near-term problems of methane and black carbon without also focusing on the problem of carbon dioxide as well.”

Nonetheless, his team’s work shows action on methane and black carbon is hugely worthwhile and, for the first time, the study shows reveals the regional benefits, from a more stable monsoon in India to better growing plants in Mexico.

Check out the rest of the article here. You may also want to check out Scientific American’s article, ‘How to Buy Time in the Fight Against Climate Change: Mobilize to Stop Soot and Methane’.

(Photo credit: AFP)

From NRDC:

In the U.S., we waste around 40 percent of all edible food. A large portion of that waste is caused by consumers. The average American throws away over $40 in the form of 33 pounds of food each month. If we wasted just 5 percent less food, it would be enough to feed 4 million Americans; 20 percent less waste would feed 25 million people.

Feeding the planet is already a struggle, and will only become more difficult with 9-10 billion people expected on the planet in 2050. This makes food conservation all the more important. The United Nations has predicted that we’ll need up to 70 percent more food to feed that projected population. Developing habits to save food now could dramatically reduce the need for increased food production in the future.

…

Follow these tips to keep your food bill and “food-print” down at the same time:

Shop Wisely—Plan meals, use shopping lists, buy from bulk bins, and avoid impulse buys. Don’t succumb to marketing tricks that lead you to buy more food than you need, particularly for perishable items. Though these may be less expensive per ounce, they can be more expensive overall if much of that food is discarded.

Buy Funny Fruit—Many fruits and vegetables are thrown out because their size, shape, or color are not “right”. Buying these perfectly good funny fruit, at the farmer’s market or elsewhere, utilizes food that might otherwise go to waste.

Learn When Food Goes Bad—“Sell-by” and “use-by” dates are not federally regulated and do not indicate safety, except on certain baby foods. Rather, they are manufacturer suggestions for peak quality. Most foods can be safely consumed well after their use-by dates.

Mine Your Fridge—Websites such as www.lovefoodhatewaste.com can help you get creative with recipes to use up anything that might go bad soon.

Use Your Freezer—Frozen foods remain safe indefinitely. Freeze fresh produce and leftovers if you won’t have the chance to eat them before they go bad.

Request Smaller Portions—Restaurants will often provide half-portions upon request at reduced prices.

Eat Leftovers—Ask your restaurant to pack up your extras so you can eat them later. Freeze them if you don’t want to eat immediately. Only about half of Americans take leftovers home from restaurants.

Compost—Composting food scraps can reduce their climate impact while also recycling their nutrients. Food makes up almost 13 percent of the U.S. waste stream, but a much higher percent of landfill-caused methane.

Donate—Non-perishable and unspoiled perishable food can be donated to local food banks, soup kitchens, pantries, and shelters. Local and national programs frequently offer free pick-up and provide reusable containers to donors.

More here.

* As a Canadian reading about food waste in the USA I was curious about the level in my country. Turns out we have similarly wasteful habits. According to Statistics Canada, “in 2007, an estimated 38% of solid food available for retail sale was wasted, the equivalent of 183 kilograms per person.“ 

From The Epoch Times:

Vancouver is about to get North America’s first VertiCrop rooftop veggie garden as part of the city’s goal to become the world’s greenest city by 2020.

Developed by Vancouver-based Valcent Products Inc., VertiCrop is a high-tech vertical farming system that enables leafy green vegetables to be grown using a fraction of the land, energy, and water conventionally required to grow produce.

Valcent has entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with EasyPark, a corporation that manages parkades and properties owned by the City of Vancouver, to install a VertiCrop system on the top level of a parkade on Richards Street in the heart of the city’s downtown.

Named in 2009 as one of TIME Magazine’s 50 Best Inventions, VertiCrop enables leafy greens and flowers to be grown year round in a controlled environment without the use of herbicides or pesticides.

“We’re very excited about the possibility of having North America’s first VertiCrop operation installed in the progressive city of Vancouver,” said Stephen Fane, CEO of Valcent.

“Urban farming systems like VertiCrop provide a secure and profitable growing solution by offering more efficient crop production, reduced food miles, and lower distribution costs than traditional field farming.”

Utilizing a series of suspended trays that rotate on motorized conveyors, the hydroponic system provides optimal exposure to either natural or artificial light with each plant receiving precisely measured nutrients.

The system produces around 20 times the yield of normal field crops while using only 8 percent of the water typically required for field agriculture, according to the company.

…

Construction of the project is scheduled to begin in January, with the first crops expected as soon as April. Local food supplier PSWJ Holdings Ltd., which entered into the MOU with Valcent and EasyPark, will market and distribute the produce.

“The ability to grow high-volume produce in local environments where weather and natural disasters aren’t a threat has never been more attractive,” said Fane.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: Vancouver Sun)

From PhysOrg:

When a plant encounters drought, it does its best to cope with this stress by activating a set of protein molecules called receptors. These receptors, once activated, turn on processes that help the plant survive the stress.

A team of plant cell biologists has discovered how to rewire this cellular machinery to heighten the plants’ stress response – a finding that can be used to engineer crops to give them a better shot at surviving and displaying increased yield under drought conditions.

The discovery, made in the laboratory of Sean Cutler, an associate professor of plant cell biology at the University of California, Riverside, brings drought-tolerant crops a step closer to becoming a reality.

When plants encounter drought, they naturally produce abscisic acid, a stress hormone that helps them cope with the drought conditions. Specifically, the hormone turns on receptors in the plants, resulting in a suite of beneficial changes that help the plants survive. These changes typically include guard cells closing on leaves to reduce water loss, cessation of plant growth to reduce water consumption and myriad other stress-relieving responses.

Check out the rest of the article here. Also, if you’re interested in this story you may want to check out Fred Pearce’s latest for Yale e360, ‘Can ‘Climate-Smart’ Agriculture Help Both Africa and the Planet?’

(Photo credit: Treehugger)