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Urban Farming and Cities

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Editorial La Finquita Community Garden in Holyoke

Editorial La Finquita Community Garden in Holyoke

The growth of community gardens, educational farms, school greenhouses, college plots, backyard growers, rooftop gardens and container operations in urban areas of the US indicates the current breadth of interest in producing food by city residents. Such a flowering has not been seen in many years. The history of agriculture in cities, however, goes back thousands of years and may surprise some readers. We have traced that history here.
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Growing on City Land in the State’s Poorest City

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Green Team selling their produce from Costello Urban Farm at the Lawrence Farmer's Market. FullSizeRenderLawrence, Massachusetts, called “The City of the Damned” in a 2012 Boston Magazine feature, has seen some hard times. According to 2014 data the national median number of violent crimes per 1000 residents is 3.8 and the Massachusetts rate is 3.9. Lawrence comes in at 11.1. It is also the state’s poorest city (per capita income less than $17,000 per year), has the highest unemployment rate (over twice the state as a whole) and has been poorly led — it’s last mayor was investigated by state and federal officials for corruption (an aide was convicted and received 18 months) while a state-appointed overseer managed the city’s finances.

But it wasn’t always so. Sitting on both sides of the Merrimack River at a point where a series of natural falls of 5 feet or so were not sufficient to drive water powered equipment, the future city of Lawrence occupied a site containing enough drop, if engineered, to support a massive output of power. The wealth-producing potential of water power had been amply demonstrated a generation earlier in Massachusetts, first at Waltham by Francis Lowell and then at Lowell itself, only 11 miles upstream from this new site. The call went out for investors and in 1845 Abbot and Amos Lawrence raised a million dollars, created Boston Associates, and purchased seven square miles of land on either side of the Merrimack River.
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Assessing Urban Impacted Soil for Urban Gardening

from a Guide Prepared by Toronto Public Health

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Introduction

F E3 Garden Zone DepthUrban gardening is gaining momentum in North America. Urban gardening can provide broad health, environmental, social and economic benefits.

Often the land available for increasing the urban land base for community gardening are lands that are vacant, abandoned, or previously used for purposes other than food production. Despite a growing interest to garden on these lands, previous and current activities on or next to these sites might have resulted in con-tamination of the soil.

This guide is a decision-support tool used to identify areas that may be contaminated but could be suitable for food production and to identify appropriate ex-posure reduction actions based on the condition of the site.
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Bed-Stuy’s Hattie Carthan Community Garden

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City sign hangs on the fence surrounding the garden

photo by Jack Kittredge City sign hangs on the fence surrounding the garden

The Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of the borough of Brooklyn in New York City is composed of about 150,000 souls. Dutch farmers were the original European settlers, but the region slowly developed from farms to villages to towns to a city because of closeness to Manhattan. By the 1870s rowhouses began to be constructed here and the neighborhood adopted its current look.

After the completion of the Fulton Street IND transportation line in 1936, many people left an overcrowded Harlem for better housing options among Bed-Stuy’s historic brownstones. During World War Two a large influx of southern African Americans came to work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and a resulting largely successful effort at ‘blockbusting’ by real estate agents and speculators to drive out whites left the neighborhood with a 85% black population by 1960. Over time it has become a center for Brooklyn’s African American culture.
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Providence’s “Sidewalk Ends Farm” Brings Back Urban Soil

by Sanne Kure-Jensen

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Farmer Tess Brown-Lavoie talks about compost and soil remediation at a CRAFT workshop. Attendees enjoyed a tour of the ‘greens factory’ and learned how to grow a never-ending supply of salad and arugula through biointensive production and succession planting.

Farmer Tess Brown-Lavoie talks about compost and soil remediation at a CRAFT workshop. Attendees enjoyed a tour of the ‘greens factory’ and learned how to grow a never-ending
supply of salad and arugula through biointensive production and succession planting.

Three young women turned their love of gardening into a thriving farm business. After college Fay Strongin, and sisters Laura Brown-Lavoie and Tess Brown-Lavoie, did not seek desk jobs but instead decided to start farming on an abandoned lot just minutes from busy downtown Providence, in Rhode Island.

The future farmers searched every side street in ever-increasing circles, seeking an open lot. They researched lot ownerships at city hall and reached out to landowners. “It took a lot of detective work and repeated efforts to connect with the owner of the abandoned lot on Harrison Street that became Sidewalk Ends Farm,” Tess said. The three sought a written multiyear lease, but faced communication challenges with the landowner. The farm team eventually secured verbal permission from the lot owner to farm the land for a year.

Harrison Street neighbors said there had been a rundown house at number 47 until it was torn down in the 1970s. Invasive vines and brush had completely taken over the lot. As the team began clearing away the brush, they found building debris, concrete and rubble in the cellar hole. Like many abandoned lots, this one had become the neighborhood’s dumping ground. The farmers found bottles and broken glass near every fence line.
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Lead in Urban Soils

by Jack Kittredge, incorporating information from The Food Project (Boston) and Worcester Roots

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Lead is a widespread problem in America’s urban areas. Years of driving with leaded gasoline, using lead paint on our houses, and running our water through pipes joined with lead solder have seriously contaminated our soils.

Background concentrations of lead in agricultural soils average 10 parts per million. In urban soils, however, lead levels typically are much higher. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that some 21 million pre-1940s homes contain lead paint. When 125 inner city gardens were tested in Boston in 2000, 82% of them had lead levels above the reportable limit of 400 parts per million (ppm). We have banned leaded gas and lead in paint, but the element does not migrate easily nor is it taken up in plants or degraded by biological activity.
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