As the name suggests, in the gathering our main activity was brainstorming—always a fun thing to do, I think! You can download the results of our brainstorming to read exactly what we came up with. We organized the ideas into 10 categories and gave them “juicy” titles to help us connect more viscerally to these ideas. Broadly speaking our categories  spanned from creating online resources and ways to connect folks who want to grow food with places to do that; community education and workshops on all sorts of urban food topics but definitely on how to grow food; finding ways to heal the soil and community in the proposed urban farm location (see post); eating food together; making food more physically accessible; and getting better food into our public schools. The next steps include meeting in committees (or as we prefer to call them, nests) to develop plans to get some things done!

If you wanted to participate but were not able to make it, or just didn’t hear about it in time, we still want your participation! Download the brainstorm results and let me know what your interest is. Then I’ll make sure that you are connected with your “nest” of interest to get involved.

My goal is to create a listServ to help facilitate discussions and get people DOing! (If any of you have ever set up a listServ, I’d greatly appreciate your assistance! Email me at urbanharvest.gso@gmail.com) As I emphasized in the meeting, Urban Harvest is happy to facilitate, lead, organize, partner, or just help make connections. We realize this is about Greensboro, not about Urban Harvest, and the more people we have empowered and excited about doing something, the more success we can have as an entire community! Thanks to everyone who attended, and for everyone else, we hope to see you next time!

The Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS) is seeking highly-motivated undergraduate students from a variety of different backgrounds, with a strong interest in sustainable agriculture, to participate in a unique 8-week summer internship (June 6-July 29, 2011).  CEFS summer interns will learn about the concepts and practices of various aspects of sustainable agriculture from expert faculty and staff at CEFS and through hands-on farm work, lectures and discussions, community engagement, and field trips to local farms and markets.  Additionally, students will work in pairs with a CEFS faculty mentor to learn about an aspect of sustainable agriculture research.

For more information please see: http://www.cefs.ncsu.edu/getinvolved/internships.html

The deadline for applications is Tuesday, March 1, 2011.

This is why we want to invite you to our first Urban Food Visioning Session. So many of you have expressed interest in getting involved with Urban Harvest, and as you know we are currently an all-volunteer organization. We’ve been successful at small steps and small victories with a small number of people, but we have power in numbers. So we’d like you to join us around the “kitchen table” to tackle something a little larger. Come with your project ideas, and an open mind to others’ project ideas, and we’ll create an action plan to forge a greener, healthier Greensboro! Since this will be a “kitchen table” session, plan to eat with us!

What: Urban Food Visioning
Date: Saturday, January 15th, 2011
Time: 3-5 pm with dinner to follow
Place: TBD (depends on how many people will attend)

Please RSVP by Jan 8th to urbanharvest.gso@gmail.com

Urban winter garden with beet sprouts and onion transplants

In this blog, of course, the “basket” refers to harvesting out of our own backyards, small farms or community gardens (yay, Dunleith!) and “canvas” seems to be the bag of choice at the local organic food store (well, maybe at the local farmers’ market, too, but you get the idea). Many of us who grew this year, took great advantage of all of the good fresh choices that came out of our gardens. Some of us even canned, froze or otherwise processed some of that goodness in preparation for the long winter ahead. But now that Fall is here, the fresh-out-of-the-garden selections are, in most cases, fewer and less diverse. What’s a person to do?

I think I’ve already laid down some suggestions above, preserving your own produce chief among them. For instance, our extra (and widely varied) tomatoes from the summer went for sauce that can provide a warm and hearty pasta meal this winter, along with our own garlic and onions, and maybe some of those peppers that we froze. Many of our muscadine grapes, along with some interesting herbal additions from the garden, were turned into delicious jellies that can grace our toast on a cold morning. An abundance of figs were processed into a sweet syrup for winter teas and hot beverages and the preserves are ideal for marinating locally and humanely raised meats. We have but to use our imaginations to come up with scores of ideas to lengthen the season and still have delicious meals with local and/or organic ingredients. It’s easier than you think it is to do, and there may be some trial and error involved, but the results can be both amazing and tasty.

Supplementing from our local organic food stores is also an option. Personally, I balk at buying grapes from Chile or blueberries from Argentina, but sometimes the 6 year old in your shopping cart wins that argument. But there are lots of other options that you know were raised responsibly if not exactly locally. And some of these can be processed for later winter consumption as well.

So, I guess what I’m really saying in the final analysis is: harvest, prepare and eat from your own gardens when possible; supplement from the local farmers’ markets and organic food stores, supporting their health and growth in the process; learn to process what’s locally and organically available for the leaner times through the winter season; and maybe even start thinking about greenhouse or coldframe production. Heck, Elliot Coleman in MAINE grows wonderful produce year ’round (see Four Season Harvest and Winter Harvest Handbook if you don’t believe me)! But, all in all, it’s a continuum, folks. We’re all headed toward that local and organic ideal one step at a time, each at our own pace. But the more we all do it, the more local and organic farming there is, at whatever level, the more possible it becomes to have access to everything we need for a healthier and more sustainable food lifestyle. To me, that’s quite a nice gift for the holidays.

As an organization with both sustainable agriculture and urban agriculture at our core, we often find these 2 techniques [sustainable and urban] to sometimes be out of sync with one another. The primary concern I have with the majority of urban ag out there, is the quality of the soil. (ie. Can it be sustainable if we often need to purchase compost/manure? If we don’t bring in new healthy soil, are we able to produce food in a healthy and sustainable way?) Growing food is great, and necessary for sustainability, but if you’re growing in contaminated soil, you create other problems, and that is not a sustainable solution. Healthy soil is most essential ingredient to the work we do, and to our civilization as a whole. If cities are to become more sustainable, healing the soil has to be a priority. And if urban agriculture is to be truly sustainable, it too has to be based on healthy soils. So this new pollution cleanup technique should be integrated to any urban ag system as well as all municipal water treatments. This is will lead to more sustainable and healthy urban agriculture.

Well, when it comes to the garden, the time to think about spring is in the fall! We’ve got some winter “cash crops” (edibles) in the ground, as well as some winter “cover crops” (to help improve the soil). This fall, we are opening the garden up for more folks to rent a plot in the spring.

In the past we have offered the option of participating in the garden through a CSA or by renting a plot. This year, we hope to fill up more of the garden with plot renters, and from there determine whether or not we will run a CSA. After all, it is a community garden, and we want our community to have ownership.

A community plot rental is a small financial investment but a large time commitment. Plot rentals give you 10 months to tend your own community plot. Spring plots will be available Feb 1, 2011 for you to prep and plant those super early spring crops (like snow peas)! If you are interested in renting a plot at the Dunleith Community Garden, please send an email to urbanharvest.gso@gmail.com and we well send you a sign-up form.

Here’s to spring veggies!

This was our second CSA season, lasting 12 weeks (the spring CSA was 10 weeks) and we sure are learning a lot about growing, harvesting and sell food! In between our CSA seasons, we sold produce at a small farmer’s market. And as most farmer’s already know, the CSA brought in more money. I won’t necessarily say that it was more profitable, because we have a lot to learn in terms of efficiency (harvesting, washing and packing a gourmet salad mix is WAY more involved than harvesting eggplants and tossing them in the CSA crate).

There are so many models of CSA out there to learn from, but we’ve really appreciated our close personal relationships with the farmers at Goat Lady CSA! Despite the fact that we’ll have less than 1/10th the number of subscribers, we can still look to their model for a successful CSA. Two important distinctions of their model: First, members choose, on a sliding scale, how much they are willing to pay for the CSA. This creates diversity among subscribers, and allows those who can afford it, to supplement those who still need it, but cannot afford as much. Second, all members are required to volunteer some amount of time to the CSA, whether that is by harvesting, packing, delivering, working event tables, writing newsletters or any other activity that is needed. We farmers really have a lot to do out there, and when we get help from the community, it becomes all worthwhile!

Back at Dunleith, we’ve created as many beds as will fit in that 1/3 acre field. This summer we had 7 people renting plots and 7 people subscribing to the CSA. As this is a community garden, we hope that more people will become interested in doing their own gardening and we are hoping to transition more space to plot renters. Of course this means fewer shares available to the CSA, and then what is the point of diminishing returns? Well, there is a lot of time between now and the next planting season to for things to happen, so look for an update in the spring regarding the status of the CSA.

Thanks to all who participated this year – you helped make Urban Harvest and the Dunleith Community Garden a continuing success.

So what happens when an obstacle comes in the way of what we want? Well, it means to me that we have to re-evaluate our strategy. Its not a road block, merely a speed bump.

Urban Harvest has been working  very diligently—slowly but methodically—to create a fully-fleshed proposal for an urban farm.  I say full-fleshed because we tried to anticipate every question, every bit of skepticism and have an answer. We answered all the questions but one, and that one turns out to be the most important: What about the soil? A: If its contaminated, we’ll clean it up.

So as it turns out, the soil on the location we’ve chosen is contaminated—this was at one time a site for coal gassification and is considered a “brownfield,” meaning that there are likely high levels of lead, mercury and other heavy metals in the soil. This leads to the next question: do we stick with this IDEAL site and change the strategy, or do we stick with our agenda but find a new site? This is the question we are now working to answer. Obviously both options put the breaks on the plan, but in no way derails the process. In fact, it only serves to make us a stronger organization and gives us room for more credibility if we do our job well. It also gives us opportunity for building new and strengthening existing partnerships. Turn the challenge into the solution.

To go back to the issue of brownfields—so far in my research I have found a very simple and formulaic process, according to the EPA, for brownfield remediation. Your options are either A- scape off the contaminated soil and haul it away to a landfill, or B- cap it with a semi-pervious layer and build on top of that. In my mind, neither of those options are “solutions,” and hardly qualify as “remediation.” All it does is move the problem somewhere else. And if Urban Harvest is working to be a leader in sustainability—sustainable farming no less—we have to come up with a solution that truly is sustainable!

A couple of us young folk into ecological farming went to App State the other day to hear Vandana Shiva speak. She said two things that really stand out in my mind. 1- that ecological farming, or sustainable agriculture, can solve most if not all of the problems of climate change and 2- for the Edible Schoolyard to save seeds (turns out, this may be an inside joke)!

This week’s topic is the Design, Art & Technology Symposium (DATS’10 for short) coming up in Winston-Salem a few short weeks away, October 9th-11th to be exact:

One of Urban Harvest’s roles in this unique symposium is to organize a panel discussion characterized as follows:

With the issues of climate change, questionable food security, a growing obesity crisis, and a faltering sense of community in the forefront of today’s news locally, nationally and globally, a concept as old as civilized man itself, urban agricluture, is making a comeback in a quiet, but steadily growing revolution. In the US as recently as World War II, relatively small Victory Gardens accounted for as much as 40% of the nation’s fresh fruits and vegetables (Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden). Might urban agriculture be a simple tool  for living in this rapidly changing world while addressing many of the concerns raised above at the same time? Learn about the ways you can get involved in your community and help build that community at the same time around the joy of producing your own sustenance locally.

For more information on the entire DATS’10 symposium, and time and location of our panel, go to 2010.datstriad.org.