Spin Cycle Issue #37

New urban farms help city folk grow their own food

By Amy Westervelt
Published: September 1st, 2008 | 4:12pm

In the last year, half a dozen “urban farms” have sprouted up, turning corners of city backyards and school gardens into functioning organic farms that supply the local population. In some cases, as with San Francisco’s My Farm, customers actually pay the company to plant and tend an organic garden for them. The customers get to keep as many vegetables as they need, and the rest is sold to other members of the community. In other setups, such as Portland’s City Garden Farms, land is donated to the farming effort. Land donors get tasty produce, and the farm program sells the goods at farmers’ markets and manages a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program in which members pay a monthly fee for regular deliveries of fresh produce. Still others, such as Melbourne, Australia’s Permablitz, operate on a purely volunteer basis, with people joining together to help neighbors create edible gardens.

Irrespective of how the financials break down, most of the new urban gardening initiatives incorporate some aspect of SPIN (Small Plot Intensive) agriculture, a method of organically farming small plots of urban land first developed by gardening gurus Roxanne Christensen, Wally Satzewich, and Gail Vandersteen. Christensen says that in addition to providing local food sources, urban farms are a breeding ground for new, young farmers, which the U.S. desperately needs.

Some city slickers are happy to share any land they might have, says Martin Barrett, co-founder of Portland’s City Garden Farms. “I met a girl in a coffee shop, and I was covered in dirt at 8 a.m.,” Barrett says. “I explained to her that I was farming people’s backyards, and within five minutes, she had signed over 3,500 square feet to us. It’s our biggest city garden farm so far!”

Christensen and Vandersteen just hosted the first SPIN gardening workshop in Portland in May 2008, and the two plan to do more workshops if people are interested. For more information on finding or creating an urban farm in your city, check out spinfarming.com.

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FAST FACTS
1. American purchases for home vegetable gardens increased by almost 25% from 2006 to 2007. (Source: National Gardening Association 2007 National Gardening Survey, released May 2008)

2. The W. Atlee Burpee company, the largest retailer of vegetable and herb seeds and plants in the country, reports sales of vegetable and herb seeds and plants are up by 40% in 2008 versus 2007, double the annual growth for the last five years. (Source: the New York Times, “Banking On Gardening,” June 11, 2008)

3. In the 2008 Garden Writers Association survey, vegetables went from fourth place to second, representing a major shift in purchases. (Source: Garden Writers Association “Gardening Trends 2008”)

4. Sales of vegetable seeds in the U.K. have risen 60% in 2008, a rise analysts attribute to high food prices. (Source: The Guardian, “Veg seed sales soar as credit crunch bites,” April 22, 2008)

5. According to George C. Ball, Jr. owner of the Burpee company, a $100 investment in a vegetable garden will produce $1,000 to $1,700 worth of vegetables. (Source: the New York Times, “Banking on gardening,” June 11, 2008).

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