Fundraiser for Chicago's Largest Community Vegetable Garden on August 5th!

Join The Peterson Garden Project on August 15th for an adventure in community gardening – retro style!

WHO: The Peterson Garden Project is an organic, community vegetable garden on the southwest corner of Peterson and Campbell in Chicago’s 40th Ward. The garden contains 157 raised-bed gardens, and is Chicago’s largest community garden devoted to growing edibles. The site was part of an original WW2 Victory Garden from 1942-1945, and was re-launched for Chicago residents who, like those gardeners almost 70 years ago, want to work with their neighbors to grow their own food. The project was founded by LaManda Joy, an award-winning gardener who blogs about urban gardening at The Yarden.

WHAT: A wine tasting fundraiser from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. on Thursday, August 5 to raise money for the garden and a documentary about the project entitled “Victory! The Home-grown Documentary". Tickets range from $40 to $85, and can be purchased here.

WHY: Local chefs Kathy Skutecki, Chris Stoye, The Scrumptious Pantry’s Lee Greene, Celeste Dolan and Tracy Kellner of Provenance Food & Wine will offer appetizers accompanied by an assortment of fine wines from Vinejoy. Folk musician Alison O’Konis will provide the evening’s music. Local jewelry studio gray workshop will show new jewelry designs, and proceeds from sales will benefit The Peterson Garden Project. 

Be sure to check out The Peterson Garden Project on Twitter and Facebook as well!

Blogs We Like: Breaking Through Concrete

The Southwest Tour rolled to a stop late last week, and while we're anchored in Chicago, editing the videos we filmed over the past month, I'd like to suggest another site to check out: Breaking Through Concrete.  

The project is similar in many ways to OrganicNation.tv: The crew is currently taking a road trip across the country, shooting video and taking photos of farms along the way. There are a few wrinkles though. First, the vehicle is a short bus powered by diesel and veggie grease (pictured above), which looks really rad. Second, they focus mostly on urban farms (although they seem to be making a bunch of rural stops too).

Part of what makes this project great is the skill level of the team. Brothers David and Michael Hanson are at the core; David is a freelance journalist, and Michael is a magazine photographer. They got a contract to put together a book about urban farming, which will be made using material from the trip. The Hansons are joined by documentary filmmaker Charlie Hoxie.

The BTC boys are currently about halfway through a seven-week road trip. Follow them at Grist or on their own blog, and check out their first video dispatch (embedded below) that was put together by Michael Hanson:

-Mark

Visiting Granata Farms, An Urban Farm in Denver

While producing a video about SAME Café, the pay-what-you-can restaurant on Denver's Northwest Side, co-owner Libby Birky suggested that we check out Granata Farms, which provides a lot of the fresh, organic vegetables served at SAME Café. So while we were in Denver, we met up with Elaine Granata at her one-acre plot on Clarkson Street.

Elaine told us that she started the urban farm, which is made up of three city plots in different locations, after she lost her own farm in the country. Remarkably, she runs the farm by herself, growing a diverse mix of greens, herbs, tomatoes, beans and squash. She sells her produce to multiple restaurants in Denver as well as her fourteen-member CSA.

Elaine uses organic farming techniques, including mulching and fabric row covers, and does not use any chemicals on her plants. She's considering applying for organic certification next year.

Urban farming hasn't come without it's challenges. Elaine deals with vandalism in her plots; recently she's had her wheelbarrow stolen and her carrots dug up. But she's optimistic about the renewed interest in organic farming among city dwellers and hopes to continue her work for a long time to come.

-Dorothée and Mark

A Chicago Aquaponics Update

Photo by: Dave 48Earlier this winter I wrote a story for the Chicago magazine Mindful Metropolis about the possibility of urban farmers to start farming with aquaponics in Chicago (read the full article here). One of the people I interviewed for the story is John Edel, an entrepreneur who hopes to convert a large, unused building into a vertical farm with aquaponics grow beds.

When I met Edel in November, he took me to another building he had rehabbed in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood. Edel showed the basement where he hoped to start experimenting with some small-scale aquaponics with the help of some Illinois Institute of Technology students, but none of the systems had been finished when I visited.

Recently, I got an update from Edel, along with these neat wide-angle photos of the kits he's working on. "The system keeps improving, we have 100 tilapia fingerlings in the tank now and aeroponics above," Edel says. There's no word yet on whether Edel will be able to obtain the property he's been eying, or how soon he'd be able to get his vertical farming operation off the ground, but he's hopeful that it will happen sometime this year.

You can keep up with Edel's project by following his blog, The Plant Chicago.

-Mark

Photo: Dave 48

Film Trailer: "Grown in Detroit"

This gorgeous film from Dutch filmmakers Mascha and Manfred Poppenk premiered at the Austin Film Festival earlier this fall, where it won the Best Documentary award, and it will be screened at the Hungry Filmmakers event in New York on Tuesday. 

"Grown in Detroit" is about The Catherine Ferguson Academy for Young Women, a high school in Detroit that offers agricultural training to young pregnant women, in addition to the regular high school curriculum.

-Mark

Farming With Fish at Growing Power

On Tuesday I wrote about the composting operation at Growing Power; today I'd like to focus on the aquaponics technology - the combination of aquaculture and hydroponics - used at the farm. We've covered aquaponics on this site before, when Dorothee and I went down to Flanagan, IL and made a video about an aquaponic farm called AquaRanch. At Growing Power they do some things similarly to what we saw at AquaRanch, but most of they're setup is very different.

At AquaRanch, Myles Harston keeps the fish in large, circular tanks that are located in a separate room from the vegetable grow beds, and he runs the waste water from the fish tanks to the grow beds. At Growing Power, space is utilized more efficiently. The fish at Growing Power are kept in long, 4-foot deep rectangular tanks that have been dug into the ground. One benefit of this design is that the ground helps to insulate the fish tanks, and it leaves more vertical space to build grow beds (and the Growing Power folks use every square inch of that extra space).

When I visited, we actually saw some workers building a new aquaponics bed (above, at left). My tour guide told us that the materials needed to construct one of the beds only costs about $4,000, with the fish tank liner accounting for most of the cost.

Above the fish tanks, the Growing Power folks have rigged a two-tiered shelf system that serves as grow beds. The water from the fish tanks, which is loaded with fish waste that's rich in nutrients and microbes, is pumped up to the elevated grow beds. The grow beds are set at a slight angle, so the water flows slowly from one end to the other. One of the most common plants grown in these type of bed is watercress (pictured at top), because it likes a lot of water and it does a good job of filtering and cleaning the fish water.

At Growing Power they use both tilapia and yellow perch in the aquaponics systems. Yellow perch are native to the Great Lakes, so they can handle cold water, but tilapia are tropical fish, so their tanks must be heated. Unlike AquaRanch, where the fish are harvested and filleted on-site, Growing Power only sells whole fish at present, but at $6 per pound it's a bargain compared to AquaRanch's $15 per pound tilapia fillets.

-Mark

Composting at Growing Power

It doesn't have much sex appeal, but composting is one of the most important techniques used at Growing Power's 2.5-acre urban farm in Milwaukee, as well as the 30-acre facility in the nearby suburb of Merton. Throughout the two-hour tour I took at Growing Power on Saturday, composting was a constant point of emphasis. It's the reason that Will Allen and his staff have a never-ending supply of nutrient-rich soil and fertilizer, and through composting they're able to divert thousands of pounds from landfills every year.

In the beginning of the tour we came upon a greenhouse where a group of volunteers were just finishing filtering worms out of a wheelbarrow full of soil (below, at left). I've got a worm bin under my kitchen counter, so I'm used to handling worms, but I was still sort of shocked to see the wriggling mass that looked like ground beef in the bottom of the wheelbarrow (below, center). A few minutes later, we bumped into Will Allen, who was busy spreading the worms throughout a big bin of compost (below, at right).

Composting at Growing Power isn't confined to the worm bins that line the insides of the greenhouse. Large heaps of compost can be found in between the greenhouses and in the small clearing near the livestock at the back of the property. Growing Power collects whole shipments of food waste directly from wholesalers, used coffee grounds from local roasters, beer mash from Lakefront Brewery, and newspapers from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The most innovative use of compost we were shown at Growing Power was as a source of heat for a small hoop house (below, at left). Compost is heaped in the corners of the greenhouse, and the heat generated by the soil bacteria in unfinished compost is captured and used as a furnace to heat the greenhouse throughout the winter. According to our guide, the center of those compost heaps can reach temperatures of 160 degrees.

-Mark

Creating Jobs & Community Gardens in Cincinnati

I'm a big fan of audio slide shows. This one from NPR's Latino USA is a little light on photos, but it does a good job describing a new program in Cincinnati that converts empty city lots into community gardens.

Faced with a dwindling population of nearby farmers, Cynthia Brown, the director of Cincinnati's Findlay Market, applied for and received a $219,000 USDA grant and created the Cultivating Healthy Entrepreneurs and Farmers (CHEF) program. "Ohio alone loses 1,000 family farms a year to agribusiness and people selling out to developers, so we need do something to keep fresh food in the city," Brown says.

-Mark