City Farm (Chicago, IL)

Check out this totally amazing urban farm in the heart of Chicago. City Farm is actually part of a recycling resource center (offsite). They run at least two farms in the city, selling produce locally and collecting compost materials (plant scraps) from all over the city.

Here are two of the staffers putting up the last letter of their very cool street sign. This site in Cabrini-Green sits on the edge of a historically poverty-stricken part of the city undergoing gentrification. The farm runs a youth training program and serves as a demonstration site.

One of the unbelievable things about City Farm is that they have actually moved this farm –soil and all—at least twice. They just scoop up the soil in dump trucks and haul it to their new site.

Soil is a major issue in Chicago, since most of the land in the city has been contaminated by one thing or another. Rather than building grow boxes to combat the problem, City Farm lays down a layer of clay soil (to adsorb contaminants and keep them from moving upward) then layers their good garden soil on top of that.

I love City Farm, but not in a weird way.

City Farm

Garden for the Environment (San Francisco, CA)

I’ve been a fan of the work these people do for some time.  Even though I haven’t been personally involved (or even living in the same city!) since I found out about them, I got on their email list a few years ago. I actually read their e-newsletters and look at photos from their workshops sometimes. Does that make me an internet garden stalker? Oh well.

 

So, here are some photos from the time I actually visited in person with a bunch of cool kids from Davis. Garden for the Environment has all these demonstration features, like the raised beds above. (Note how each one is made from different materials!)

Plus this extra tall one that is extra accessible. The bed is pretty shallow, but you could grow some small things in here, like baby salad greens.

I also love recycled objects in community gardens. Here we have a mosaic wall. There are also a few other recycled features that caught my attention. Love the red sink and the leftover tiles used as mulch:

The garden serves as a classroom, demonstration site and general public garden that’s open dawn-to-dusk. As far as I know, they don’t run any plots for rent, but a lot of the work is done by volunteers and interns.

Overall, the place feels like a hybrid between a grassroots project and a botanical garden, just my cup of tea! I would pretty much love to work here some day.

Garden for the Environment

Mill Creek Farm (Philadelphia, PA)

Like many good things, this urban farm was started by a couple of badass women. Just a few years ago they got permission from the city to build a mini-farm on this vacant lot in West Philadelphia, next to an existing community garden (which is pretty cool).

When I visited in July, they were harvesting like crazy and selling through a farm stand in front of the lot. They were also taking on high school interns and doing all kinds of cool  building/art projects on site.

The last photo above is their newly planted green roof. (That’s sedum, the ever-so-popular plant of choice for green roofs, precisely because it needs almost no water and the thinnest of soil to survive.) Pretty soon, if all goes well, the whole roof will be a carpet of green.

Mill Creek Farm

Alice Fong Yu School Garden (San Francisco, CA)

What a fabulous little school garden in San Francisco this is. I visited in September, when the apples (for the teachers?) were getting ready for school.

It’s just a little garden on a very steep hillside. The garden designers did some excellent work building terraced raised beds into the hill. I think those poles holding up the sides of the beds might even be the same materials used for playground equipment?

We also got a presentation from the local school garden coordinator. Can you believe that’s really her job? This woman gets paid to go around schools, growing gardens with kids. Talk about a dream job.

Gotta love the little details.

Johnson Community Garden (Sacramento, CA)

The Johnson Community Garden is the smallest garden run by the City of Sacramento, and also one of the first built by the department of Parks and Recreation.

Smallness has its challenges: few plots, an enormous waiting list, little room for perennial flowers (with their bees and butterflies!), and a higher cost-per-gardener. Still, a small garden is better than no garden, right?

This is also the burliest raised bed I have ever seen!

Urban Farming (Detroit, MI)

It’s hard to describe Urban Farming in a brief post. The founder, Taja Sevelle, explains it this way:

“We want people to see food growing all over the place, in yards, on rooftops, on walls, anywhere there is space,” she said. The one common denominator with all of the gardens is that they are open to the public. “There are no fences,” she said. “Anyone can take food from the garden.” (source)

I visited Urban Farming a couple summers ago, and only spent an afternoon with some of their staff and volunteers, but what I saw was really cool: open garden patches, where anyone in the neighborhood could stop by and pick some food.

While I was there, one neighbor walked over to help a volunteer crew lay down some plastic mulch, and another neighbor showed up to harvest some greens. The staff said that people generally respect the gardens and appreciate them. The gardens—more like row crops—transform vacant lots into productive land and provide new opportunities for neighbors to get outside and meet one another. Most of all, they make fresh fruits and vegetables more available in places that really need them.

Growing food for public consumption is basically the same idea championed by Darrin Nordahl in his recent book, except that he goes even farther, calling on municipalities (not only donors and volunteers) to help create these kinds of food-producing landscapes, just as they would other services like parks and farmers markets.

Where is this all going to lead? I don’t know, but I’m excited about the work Urban Farming is doing, and appreciate the unique voice they bring to the urban agriculture movement.

Urban Farming