Here are a few things you should know about keeping backyard chickens: Poultry are “poop machines” — but cleaning up after them is “less maintenance than a cat’s litter box.” You can let them range free around the yard — just watch out for predatory eagles (and your garden: “Chickens will annihilate it.”). Chickens are “not pets,” except when “they’re very much our pets.” Clearly, fowl guardianship is a highly personal endeavor.

I gleaned these scraps of wisdom last Saturday, when I attended a citywide open house of sorts for backyard chicken enthusiasts. On Seattle Tilth’s annual Chicken Coop & Urban Farm Tour, the keepers of the local flocks open up their coops and let the curious poke around. Of course, I was among them. I’ve been taken with the fantasy of backyard chickens for awhile now — waking in the morning to soft bawk-bawk-bawking, whipping up fluffy omelets with just-laid eggs — so I had to see how closely real chicken husbandry matched my daydreams. Is it difficult? Is it stinky? Do I really have what it takes to be a hen mother? It was time to find out.

Unlike in my Midwestern hometown, where my friend must force her 4-year-old son into 4-H so she can get an otherwise-verboten chicken permit, Seattle law generously allows for eight chickens per household. “And you don’t need as many as you think you do,” flock-haver Chris Bajuk told me. He gets three eggs a day from his four chickens, which roost in a mobile coop of his own design. When the birds successfully mow a patch of grass down to the dirt, Chris just wheels it to a fresh corner of the yard.

Chris Bajuk’s coop on wheels.

This mobility is key, as Chris is a renter and got his landlord’s permission for the coop on the condition that he could pack it up when he moved. A renter! My eyes went starry. I’d assumed that the dream of chicken ownership was out of reach for me until I had my own land (or at the very least, enough cash to afford a classy, sage-colored coop), but now …

“Hey, do you think our building would let us keep chickens in the side yard?” I asked my boyfriend, Ted, when I got home.

“No,” he replied.

“But what if we built a mobile coop? It’s only about the size of a doghouse,” I said. A doghouse big enough for Cujo, I added to myself, but still.

“We don’t have a fence — what if someone wheels our chickens off?” Ted said. Chicken theft — I hadn’t thought of that.

Regardless, I’d learned a valuable lesson: You don’t need that much space to house chickens.

The other setups I saw on the coop tour featured more elaborate, permanent structures. They ranged from the prefab habitations (a store-bought coop built to resemble a mini barn, inside a reinforced dog kennel-turned-chicken run) to the specialized, it-took-me-six-months-to-design-it variety (roomy and raised, with a poop-through mesh floor for easy cleaning). Jennifer Keeler’s tall chicken shed in particular caught my eye. Streamlined and airy, it looked like something out of a Pottery Barn catalog (in reality, Jennifer’s husband built it).

Jennifer Keeler’s killer coop.

Two golden hens pecked peacefully at the lawn while we looked around, unconcerned about the equally free-range family dog. A couple of young pullets were confined to a mini-coop across the yard — for their own protection, Jennifer assured us, as adult hens viciously maintain the — ha! — pecking order. A fifth hen peeked out from behind the back door, quarantined because she was suffering from a bout of poultry wheezes.

The coop was part chicken house, part love shack. “We’ve bonded with them,” Jennifer said, describing tranquil backyard moments spent with both hens maneuvering for position in her lap. Her young son informed us that “We’re not going to eat them,” and of course not. Anyone could see these hens were a part of the family (the part that provides farm-fresh breakfasts, which gives them a leg up on at least 60 percent of my relatives).

I’d learned another vital lesson. As John Lennon might say, when it comes to chicken rearing, in the end, the eggs you take are equal to the love you make.

As impressive as all these coops were (and I only saw a fraction of the 58 yards on the tour), all paled in comparison to the urban-farm fairyland run by Ingela Wanerstrand. Behind her ordinary-looking house lie a chicken coop with an edible-garden roof, a beehive, a glorious vegetable garden, and a goat yard with three pudgy little goats. “Making chevre is ridiculously easy,” Ingela was saying as I approached the paddock. I want your life, I thought. And I want your fine cheeses even more.

Who you callin’ chicken?

Patience, patience. I’d learned my final lesson: Dream bigger. Backyard chickens are just the beginning. Why stop there when it’s possible to set up an entire backyard farm? (No kidding: In Seattle, you can even keep cows and sheep if you have enough space.) I’m no prepper, but if the dreaded meltdown of society ever does come upon us, I’m heading straight over there. We’d be safe — the woman has bees, people.

I may not be able to realize my dream of a backyard chicken coop just yet, but I left the tour more hopeful than ever. The hosts had shown me that chicken husbandry was easier than I imagined, even for a newbie like me. In the meantime, I’ll be mentally designing my ideal coop and studying up on the difference between a Buff Orpington and a Black Australorp. Oh, and I’m making myself totally available for chicken-sitting to any local farmers in need. All I ask in return is an egg or two (but I wouldn’t turn down a pat of homemade chevre).

Bay Area locavores and caterpillars rejoice: An edible urban jungle is poised to sprout in San Francisco.

City supervisors approved legislation Tuesday that will help grassroots farming groups replace barren concrete and forests of weeds on vacant land and rooftops with veggie gardens, chicken coops, and honeybee hives. And the move cements San Francisco’s role as a national leader in urban food production.

“[San Franciscans] are thought of as foodies, and environmentalists,” said Laura Tam, a policy director at the nonprofit San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association (SPUR), which helped push the new rules forward. “This is a marrying of our sustainability objectives with the reputation that we have in the world.”

The legislation [PDF] follows zoning changes last year that made it easier to operate small farms and legal to sell food grown in San Francisco. This new set of laws will take it further by removing additional bureaucratic barriers for hopeful gardeners and actively searching for land they can use while providing them with seeds, tools, and advice.

A major focus of the bill is community gardening — neighbors coming together to organize, till, and cultivate plots of land in mini-farms that are managed cooperatively.

Aided by $120,000 in city funding in its first year, the Urban Agriculture Program will hire a city official or nonprofit organization to oversee all community gardening within San Francisco. The city’s utility agency will also provide additional funds to support two farms on land that it owns.

The program will audit city-owned land and rooftops in a quest to dig up potential new public gardening sites. It will also develop incentives for owners of vacant lots to allow their land to be used for community farming.

Passage of the bill follows a rise in popularity of urban farming nationally, which has been fueled by the locavore and organic food movements, and by the recession, which has left lots vacant and families hungry.

A handful of urban food gardens have popped up in recent years throughout San Francisco. Some are on public land and others are on private lots in high-density neighborhoods that are slated to be developed after the economy improves.

But hopeful gardeners still wait for years to be assigned a plot in many of the city’s community gardens. Meanwhile, some urban farmers have complained about having to seek approval and support from as many as seven different city departments. (The new program is designed to cut through that bureaucracy by creating a central office dedicated to urban farming.)

“We’re not going to be growing wheat in Golden Gate Park — that’s not why we have cities,” said Jason Mark, a co-manager at Alemany Farm, a three-acre growing co-op in San Francisco, which is cheering on the new program. “That said, there’s very real potential for backyard food cultivation and for community gardens and community farms to boost our organic fruit and vegetable production and egg production,” he said.

The co-op grows several tons of carrots, beets, kale, strawberries, plums, and other organic goodies every year that are shared among its members, among residents of nearby housing projects.

But the benefits of urban gardening extend beyond food security and health. Local agronomists say that allowing more people to get their hands dirty will help residents of the city reconnect with their environment.

“Our most important harvest is really education, toward the goal of culture change,” Mark said.

San Francisco Supervisor John Avalos, whose district is near Alemany Farm, co-sponsored the legislation. He said he’s noticed a real spike in interest in urban agriculture in recent years.

“This will make a big difference in my district. I think it’s really this ‘back to the earth’ mentality, if you will,” Avalos said. “I think there was a belief that agriculture was something that happened outside of San Francisco. We’re seeing now that there is a real way of making it happen in San Francisco.”

San Francisco’s adoption of the new urban farming programs follows a trend that has seen Detroit, Portland, Baltimore, New York, Seattle, Oakland, and other major cities craft programs and laws in recent years to encourage agriculture and gardening within city limits.

Robin Shulman, author of a new book about urban agriculture in New York called Eat the City, praised San Francisco’s program for its emphasis on community gardening — as opposed to private backyard gardening or commercial, for-profit harvests .

“This San Francisco initiative seems to go a bit further,” she said. “The legislation mentions specifically that these are to be community gardens with multiple plots and that people would be working together.”

Correction: This story incorrectly reported that Alemany Farm currently sells produce to neighborhood farmers markets. The farm was also described as being in John Avalos’ district. In fact, it is in very close proximity.

New York City recently revised its zoning rules to encourage green development — in particular, rooftop agriculture. From the New York Times:

Fed by the interest in locally grown produce, the new farm operations in New York are selling greens and other vegetables by the boxful to organically inclined residents, and by the bushel to supermarket chains like Whole Foods. …

For city officials, the rise of commercial agriculture has ancillary benefits, as well. Rooftop farms have the potential to capture millions of gallons of storm water and divert it from the sewer system, which can overflow when it rains. And harvesting produce in the boroughs means fewer trucks on local roadways and lower greenhouse gas emissions, a goal of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration. …

[Brooklyn Grange's Ben] Flanner pointed out two benefits to an agricultural aerie — plentiful sun and an absence of pests. “There are a number of parallels with regular agriculture,” he said. “What we don’t have are deer or foxes or rodents.”

One challenge: wind, which can whip between buildings and topple delicate seedlings.

We’d particularly like to congratulate the Times reporter who wrote the story, Lisa Foderaro, for her spectacular analogy between the city’s rooftop farms and the cult classic TV show Green Acres. Its theme song is below should your memory need jogging and / or your nostalgia need boosting.

Yet another advantage of greening New York’s roofs: marital harmony.

Not too long ago, we turned some of the most productive agricultural land in the world into suburbs. The business of building homes has slowed since the 2008 recession, but it continues to be true that no matter how well-suited a spot was to growing food, if a developer wants to make money, they’ll cover farmland with houses.

In the aftermath of the housing bubble, interesting signs have begun to suggest that the economics of dirt may be shifting. In fact it might one day be more valuable to grow food on a plot of land than to plop a house down on top of it. A few farmers recently made a killing buying back the farms they’d cashed out on. Meanwhile, the value of farmland in Iowa has increased by 33 percent, setting off speculation that farmland could be the next bubble. (It’s a bubble fueled by corn for ethanol and therefore food for cars instead of people, but still, it holds promise.) And then there is the matter of the failed shopping mall in Cleveland that began doing double-duty as a greenhouse.

All of this raises the question: What about those farms that have already been converted into subdivisions? Once someone has thoughtfully poured concrete over most of your neighborhood, should you try to un-concrete it and make it a farm again? Could the McMansions of Brentwood become fertile fields again?

Science says yes, absolutely. You wouldn’t want to tear up asphalt (it’s regrettably full of carcinogenic hydrocarbons), but concrete is a different story — and it’s fairly non-toxic. According to Garrison Sposito, chair of the soil sciences division at the University of California-Berkeley, the soil underneath can be unearthed, and put to work. But it will take time before it really comes back to life, he warns. Much of what makes soil grow plants well are creatures like worms and microfauna that would not have hung around under the sidewalk once most of the air and water disappeared. They would have hightailed it out of there.

That said, Sposito adds, the top foot of dirt in any urban area is never going to be great for farming at first. It could be filled with trash, construction debris, weedkiller, and lead from automobile exhaust. All these things require different levels of remediation; for instance lead is often treated with ground-up fish bones [PDF].

People looking to farm in urban areas say that smashing concrete and making way for food is possible, but with qualifications. “Most of the time you can simply use a sledgehammer and break it into chunks,” writes Patrick Crouch, who farms at Earthworm Farm in Detroit. “Then use a large steel bar to get underneath and pry it up.” Concrete, he adds, is heavy. “I have spent hours, no, days, breaking it up, and I can tell you that while there are certain enjoyable aspects of the process, most of it is back-breaking work.” The high alkalinity of the soil in Detroit is a direct result of being surrounded by so much concrete, according to Crouch. Quicklime, which is used in making cement, has a way of harshing the soil around it.

The largest lot Crouch has ever cleared, he says, was about two-thirds of an acre. The crew took a bulldozer and scraped the site down to the subsoil. They grew food the first year it was planted, but it took at least 12 years of composting and cover crops to get close to approximating anything like Crouch’s ideal of a good pile of dirt.

So, can it be done? Yes. Should you try it? That depends on how much you like hitting things with a sledgehammer. Or how effective you are at persuading other people to hit things with a sledgehammer. Either way, you won’t have to break up a layer of concrete more than once to gain a whole new appreciation for the importance of keeping fertile soil from being paved over in the first place.

On a rooftop a few dozen blocks south of my apartment, there’s a beehive. The hive’s owner, a woman named Susan, keeps what she described as an Italian species of bee, Carniolans. (In reality, the species is from Slovenia.) Pedigree aside (we are talking about the tony Upper West Side, after all), Carniolans have other traits to recommend them. They’re more docile, for example, and more resistant to certain diseases. They are also more prone to swarming.

This week, The New York Times reported that bee swarms are increasingly appearing around the city.

This spring in New York City, clumps of homeless bees have turned up, often in inconvenient public places, at nearly double the rate of past years. A warm winter followed by an early spring, experts say, has created optimal breeding conditions. That may have caught some beekeepers off guard, especially those who have taken up the practice in recent years.

There’s a link between hive overcrowding and swarming. When a hive becomes too crowded, bees can be displaced. New beekeepers, the Times suggests, can be unprepared to deal with a number of bees suddenly looking for a place to stay. The New York City real estate market is tough for everyone.

Bee swarms are frightening. Several weeks ago, my wife and I encountered one on a light pole in Central Park. An audible hum; a teeming mass orbited by a few stragglers. We did what anyone would do: took pictures, Instagrammed them, quickly moved on. (See above!)

James Fischer, director of education for NYC Beekeeping (the organization with which Susan also volunteers), suggests that such a reaction is unwarranted. “A swarm is as harmless as a cat up a tree,” he told me, “and just as newsworthy.”

Fischer isn’t convinced that the number of swarms has actually increased. Those mentioned by the Times have been reported elsewhere. My spotting notwithstanding, Fischer notes that those who participate in NYC Beekeeping’s free training sessions “haven’t seen any more swarms this year than last.” He notes that swarms only happen on sunny days, possibly meaning that sightings have been clustered together during a generally rainy spring.

If there are more swarms, though, it could be a good sign.

“This year, all the rules were broken,” said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a researcher at the University of Maryland who helped to lead a national survey of managed honey bee colonies released this month. It showed that about 21.9 percent of bee colonies nationwide died over the winter, a substantial drop from the 30 percent average losses reported in the previous five years.

When asked if this meant a rebound in the population, Mr. vanEngelsdorp said on Skype from Pretoria, South Africa, “It’s too early to tell.”

A rebound would be welcome. Bee populations worldwide are collapsing. In North America and Europe, it’s partly due to an as-yet-unexplainable affliction known as colony collapse disorder. Here and elsewhere, there are other causes as-yet-unknown. The event* where I met Susan the beekeeper was the one I wrote about on Monday, the kick-off of Pollinator Week. Pollinator Week, a project of the Pollinator Partnership, is an effort to raise awareness about the issues impacting pollinators — bees, birds, bats — and what that means for our food supply. The week wraps up today.

In 2010, New York City lifted its ban on apiaries. The rules now are surprisingly lax, meaning that it’s up to organizations like NYC Beekeeping to continue to educate keepers and try to police behavior. From the Times:

“It’s up to beekeepers to practice swarm prevention techniques and regular hive maintenance,” said Andrew Coté, the president and founder of the New York City Beekeepers Association, adding that many beekeepers were “poor stewards” for not regularly inspecting their hives. “If they treated their dog or cat in the same way, they would be taken up on charges,” he said. …

Mr. Coté advocates stricter regulations. “But you can’t regulate common sense,” he added.

Any more than you can regulate the behavior of bees. Not that we shouldn’t try.

Learn more about how to encourage bee population growth.

* Here’s something I learned at the same event: a male carpenter bee is so docile as to be able to be caught in your hands. Males have yellow faces, so if a giant bee is flying toward you and it has a yellow face, feel free to grab it! You could probably even carry it in your mouth. Go ahead; try that.**

** Our lawyers have advised me to say that you should not do this.

Update: A reader noted that Carniolans are not an Italian species, but are native instead to Slovenia.

A former editor at Dwell and co-founder of the Foodprint Project, Sarah Rich thinks and writes about food as a key component of today’s urban landscape. So when she and photographer Matthew Benson traveled the country recently documenting 16 public and private food-producing operations for their new book, Urban Farms, it was no surprise that the final product turned out to be an intelligent, inspiring work of art.

We spoke with Rich about the new book, the difference between a farm and a garden, and how urban farmers are moving beyond the trend factor.

Q. Why did you write Urban Farms? What was the ultimate goal?

A. There’s a lot of debate about urban farming as a solution that will feed cities in the future, but I was more interested in looking at it from an anthropological angle. I wanted to write about the other things urban farming can do for a city — whether that’s creating green jobs, community building, environmental restoration, land-use planning, or any number of other things. While farms are essentially food-growing operations, they serve so many other functions in an urban environment.

Q. Were there projects that stuck out to you that you want to mention?

A. One of the stories I talk about a lot is the Catherine Ferguson Academy. The farm was started by a biology teacher who was told that all the girls in the school needed to do dissection. The girls who attend are all pregnant or have babies, so he was concerned because the formaldehyde that comes with the dissection specimens in biology labs is really toxic.

He got some rabbits so that the girls could do live dissection without having to be exposed to the chemicals. And the farm just kind of grew from there. The girls got really into the animals and they got chickens and ducks and bees and started growing food and it’s turned into a much more holistic curriculum. They created a little market and they make value-added goods. And there’s all this education that’s come out of this one work-around for high school graduation credit. That was a really cool success story where putting a farm into an environment where kids don’t usually get exposed to that worked really well.

Q. What was most surprising or unexpected about the process of putting together the book?

A. In my experience, when you call people up and say, “I want to put you in a book,” they’re excited. So I was surprised that some of the farmers were either neutral or actively not interested in having me come visit.

Urban farming is so popular in the media right now, but most of the people I wrote about aren’t doing it to get media attention. Especially in places like Detroit or New Orleans — these are pretty serious community restoration efforts. And a lot of the time the media hasn’t portrayed these cities in a way the people who live there want them portrayed. So I definitely came up against some resistance. On the other hand there were people who were very receptive. But in all cases there was a general desire for this not to be portrayed as a trend.

There were some older farmers who talked about young people who get a job doing urban farming for a year and then go become investment bankers. And I do think that’s happening to a certain degree, but I would say the majority of the people I spoke to were very much committed to the places where they lived; they were pretty rooted.

Q. In the book you talk about the difference between an urban farm and an urban garden. Want to share what you learned?

A. Initially I thought urban farms must have animals, so I started seeking out all the farms that had goats, chickens, or pigs. But I soon realized that animals aren’t the only things that set these farms apart.

I started asking the urban farmers I visited what they saw as the difference. I really liked the way the manager at Chicago’s City Farm put it. “If you have a plot of land with some food growing on it and you can wake up on a day when the weather is horrible and make some tea and sit around and wait ’til the weather improves before you go outside — then it’s a garden,” he said. “But if you have to pull on your boots and your jacket and get out there to tend to the crops — even in bad weather — then it’s a farm.”

As I took it, he meant if you’re really relying on this space for your own sustenance — whether that’s for your caloric or financial needs — and it’s actually your real support system, then you’re a farmer.

Q. You’ve done a lot of work related to architecture and urban planning — at Dwell and with the Foodprint Project. Do you think architects and urban planners are paying more attention to food?

A. In general I would say yes. In my experience there’s less talk of terms like “sustainability” and “green” than there was in, say, 2006 or 2007. Now I feel like these concepts are just a part of what people think about when they’re planning cities and buildings.

Gardens are becoming a more integrated piece of what it is to responsibly build a single-family residence, or an apartment building, or even a mall. More people are seeing gardening as a public health solution because you get both healthy food and physical activity out of it.

Q. How can urban farming move beyond the trend factor? What does the future of this work look like?

Chicago City Farm. (Photo by Matthew Benson.)

A. It’s going to continue to grow. Everything has its peak in terms of public attention, and I think urban farming just had its peak. But that doesn’t mean it will go away. Lifestyle writers will start writing about other things, but all the good reasons for this being something people are paying attention to will continue.

I think large-scale projects like the Victory Gardens in San Francisco and the public fruit forest in Seattle are going to be a little slower to come along, just because they take more space, money, time, and planning. But the smaller-scale projects — the ones that rely on individual citizen efforts — are going to stick around.

Q. What about the bigger, more commercial urban farming? Hantz Farms seems to be stalled for the time being, but it has certainly caused a stir in Detroit.

A. I think some of the more interesting projects I wrote about in the book are the ones that are working like start-ups. Take the Brooklyn Grange. Those guys came at it like a group of entrepreneurs would come at any type of start-up, which was very much about the revenue and the bottom line. That didn’t take away from any of the social or environmental aspects, but in order to make it work they also understood that it couldn’t just be a whimsical notion — especially in a city like New York.

Hantz Farms caused a stir not only because it was going to be so large-scale and had so much money behind it, but because of the location. There’s already so much grassroots farming going on in Detroit and so many people getting pushed out of residential areas. So I think that was the concern. What happens when you take over all these abandoned lots and fill in all these blocks with a farm? What would it feel like to be one of those people remaining in the houses that are standing?

On the other hand, I heard a grassroots urban farmer from Detroit on Evan Kleinman’s Good Food a few weeks ago, and she was very positive about the idea of the Hantz Farm being another component of the overall movement towards making the city better by creating jobs, growing food, etc. So I don’t think [large, commercial urban farms] are automatically a bad thing.

Q. What about all these renderings we’ve seen in recent years of vertical farms? Do you have thoughts on how practical they will be in the real world?

A. The Dickson Despommier model has been around for years. And I think there are huge engineering and energy-related issues around making a vertical farm like that work. But it’s important to think far outside the box for solutions to some of our biggest problems, and design concepts are great for that.

I just wrote about an inventor for Smithsonian who holds some 200 patents and has this idea for the most efficient airport design. It’s a pretty far-out idea in the sense that you’d have to rebuild all the airports from scratch in order to do what he’s proposing. But in a way it reveals all the stupid inefficiencies [of our current airports]. And that alone is a good reason to put out a crazy design proposal. I think vertical farm models can do that too. It’s like, “Imagine what would happen if we could grow all our food in a 50-story skyscraper as opposed to across all of this open land!” So it gets people thinking about how much farther out they can look for solutions.

What are fish thinking when they change genders?

When Burt’s Bees invited me to this press event, they probably didn’t expect Isabella Rossellini to be the one asking questions, much less that one. Or for her to go on and note that gender assignation is largely a human construct. And to then express curiosity about what the process is like from the fish’s perspective.

Sitting next to Rossellini, holding my notebook, I’m not really sure how to answer. After a pause, undeterred, she explains that fish are less interesting to play than insects because “sometimes they spawn, but that is it.”

Luckily for her, we were there to talk about insects — namely, bees — and sitting with people who could answer the trickier questions she raised: for example, how scientists test for neonicotinoids, a pesticide that may impact bee navigation. (“Do they take the hives? … Do they feed them?” The answers were unknown.)

Rossellini has created an unusual niche for herself. Her series for the Sundance Channel, Green Porno, introduced Americans to the exotic, alarming mating rituals of flies, snails, and praying mantises — with herself starring as each of the creatures. She enjoys the roles primarily because of the eccentricities of behavior, because of the tiny nuanced details that she likes to try and get right. And, clearly, because it is a topic about which she’s deeply curious and fascinated to learn.

Now, working with with Burt’s and the Pollinator Partnership, she’s bringing her skills to the world of bees. Today marks the beginning of Pollinator Week, the sixth iteration of an annual effort by Pollinator Partnership to celebrate “the valuable ecosystem services provided by bees, birds, butterflies, bats and beetles.” To mark the occasion — and to do a little marketing — Burt’s Bees held an informal premiere for Rossellini’s three new videos last week on a rooftop in Manhattan. Also in attendance, bees: live ones, both in a hive brought by NYC Beekeeping and a few random strays; and, ominously, dead ones, presented by the American Museum of Natural History.

The plight of the bee is well established and has impact beyond the insects themselves. Seventy percent of flowering plants need bees and other pollinators to reproduce — meaning that a great variety of food crops are at risk when bee populations are depleted. Colony collapse disorder, a still-mysterious affliction that has resulted in mass abandonment of beehives, is only one factor in the depletion of hives. As Christina Grozinger, associate professor at Penn State University and director of the Center for Pollinator Research, explained, the threat to bees “is like cancer. There are multiple causes.” The goal of the Pollinator Partnership (and, for fairly obvious reasons, Burt’s) is to raise awareness around the steps that individuals can take to build an environment friendly to bee activity, even if there isn’t necessarily a concrete step that will save them.

In the three videos (one of which is above), Rossellini plays both Burt Shavitz, the eponymous founder of the company, and bees: a queen, a drone, and a worker. (If you can’t tell, the older gentleman at the beginning is the real Burt. The person wearing a beard made of newspapers is Rossellini.) Blending the same goofy costuming used in the Green Porno series with elegant cut-paper animations, the videos are short and clever.

And very depressing. The life of a bee is far nastier, much more brutish, and years shorter than any human’s. What could be more hopeless than describing the life cycle of a critical member of the ecosystem and then ending with a shrugging “wish we knew what killed them”?

It’s unavoidable, of course. We don’t know. For Americans used to videos that wrap up complex issues in ribbons of useless action (see: Kony 2012), these videos will not scratch the itch. Plant wildflowers; buy local honey; patronize organic farms. These steps are important — but admittedly might not make a difference. They’re the best we can do.

After the videos were shown, the small audience asked questions. How do queens attract drones to mate? Where is colony collapse occurring? And a very popular question, spurred by a comment from Grozinger: “What makes a queen bee ‘crappy’?”

This last prompted Rossellini to jump in, adding to the response given by a woman who has her doctorate in such matters. When we hear the word queen, she pointed out, “we imagine someone who rules and gives commands.” (This is partly the result of Shakespeare, Rossellini noted, who assumed that the most important member of the hive would be masculine, its king.) When Grozinger explained that queens could be replaced, Rossellini jumped in again, describing the royal jelly fed to young female larvae to create a new queen.

These are the sorts of things you have to know if you want to portray a bee in a movie.

In the midst of Greece’s economic crisis, one entrepreneur has come up with a novel way to earn extra cash: He’s renting out farmland. Dimitris Koutsolioutsos started gineagrotis.gr to connect city dwellers to rural farmers. The urban resident rents out a section of the farmer’s land to grow whatever produce is desired, which is then delivered to the city each week — either to the resident or, if desired, a local soup kitchen.

The benefit to the city dweller is obvious: fresh, cheap produce. For the farmer, the benefit lies in having a guaranteed market for what he makes. (Like a CSA box, but more tailored and one-to-one.)

Koutsolioutsos described his motivations to The Guardian:

“It’s about disrupting the market, creating a direct connection between the consumer and the producer,” says Koutsolioutsos. “You have a real farmer, a real man, and a real, physical piece of land that you can — indeed you must, we insist on it — go and visit. It’s an alternative way of organising food production and distribution.”

True, Europe may not be the best place to look right now for inspirational examples of capitalism at work. Nonetheless, as Koutsolioutsos’ venture illustrates, market-based economies do have a way of exposing humanity’s resourceful side.

Not all disruptive resourcefulness is as charming. Amsterdam is seeing increasing instances of people  foraging through garbage to find valuable materials for resale. It’s akin to picking out recyclable containers from a garbage can — but looking for a broader range of material, and, to residents’ chagrin, sometimes in closed garbage bags.

One the one hand, there’s a benefit: reuse of material that would otherwise go to landfills, money for people that need it. But there is a cost, besides social stigma: The city has seen a 20 percent drop in the revenue it collects from recycling, according to Radio Netherlands’ report.

The takeaway? You might take heart that, even in a chaotic, evolving world, there are plenty of ways to make a buck (or a Euro). Then again, there is that “chaotic” part.

In his new autobiographical book, The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities, we see a different side of MacArthur Genius and urban farmer Will Allen. The book takes readers behind the scenes to witness the process of trial and error behind Growing Power, the Milwaukee-based urban farm, CSA, and youth training program that put Allen on the map.

But The Good Food Revolution is much more than a how-to guide. The story extends back to Allen’s family’s escape from sharecropping, his childhood on the land, the basketball career that pulled him out of poverty and allowed him to travel, his work for various corporations — including a stint at KFC and one at Procter and Gamble — and his eventual return to farming. Alongside his own story, Allen also recounts the stories of several people who were instrumental to building Growing Power with him, many of whom experienced their first reliable and fulfilling job on the urban farm.

We spoke with Allen recently about the book, the obstacles it chronicles, last year’s gift from Walmart, and the legacy he hopes to pass on.

Q. What was it like revisiting those early days and exploring your family history?

A. My family was part of the “great migration” north and my parents got away to the Washington, D.C., area. But the fact that my father still wanted to farm was a little unusual because most African Americans who had been involved in sharecropping in the 1930s pretty much wanted to leave behind that painful history. And the fact that my father wanted to pass on his agricultural roots to my brothers and me was unusual (so many farmers didn’t, and the results are obesity, heart, disease, etc. — all those things that come from being disconnected from our food and from eating bad food).

When I was first starting out in urban ag many years ago, I would go and work in communities and people would ask me, “Why are you doing that slave’s work?” I don’t hear that today, but back then I did often.

Q. You talk about the historical discrimination against black farmers by the U.S. Department of Agriculture — and their near disappearance in recent decades. Do you think Growing Power and projects like it have made more young black people want to farm?

A. Yes. First of all, we’ve had the first lady’s Let’s Move effort, and that has moved a lot of people to want to grow food in their backyards.

But I also think young people seeing me — a person of color — involved in growing food has helped many of them want to do what I’m doing. We train about 1,000 people a year and many also come back and work with us. [Growing Power now has 150 employees.] We’ve also seen a lot of farms get going since 2000 when I first started these hands-on trainings.

Q. You talk about the family that lived at the farm — a woman named Karen, who’d had a lot of hard luck before she started at Growing Power, and her son and daughter DeShell and DeShawn. Why did you choose to include their stories in the book?

A. They were just three examples of the many folks who have come from tough, stressful situations, and who I’ve seen go through a transformation by being connected to their food and the system that we developed at Growing Power. I’ve seen a lot of people come out the other side with nice lives and occupations, and even become leaders in their community — people who may have thought they’d never get beyond the challenges they faced. So I thought it was important to put a human face on the issue.

Q. Soil is a big part of the Growing Power story. What percentage of the work done there would you say goes into building soil?

A. I’ve spent a lot of energy over the years building relationships to be able to collect millions of pounds of food waste and carbon waste, and we compost it into high-quality soil. So you have to be able to build those relationships; then there’s the act itself. And you need a suitable place or process that doesn’t disturb the neighbors. We’ve composted over a million pounds of food waste at our national headquarters, 200 feet away from our neighbors. And part of that process involves engaging the community — in our case the neighbors know that we’re providing fresh food and education to the kids, and they really see it as an asset. So they’re not going to call the city if there’s a problem.

Growing food is all about the soil — especially when you’re doing organic farming. You have to grow soil. We’re in the city where all the soil is contaminated, so we grow compost and put two feet of soil on top of packed soil or concrete to grow food. And we now have food growing on about 200 acres in the city.

Q. Do you want to talk about the vertical farm Growing Power has in the works?

A. It will be the first true vertical farm. It’s a $12 million building. There are all these architectural renderings of 50-story buildings and no one has really built one yet. So we’re going to quantify the work and energy involved and tweak it, and study aquaponics, etc. It can be a model for other vertical farms.

These farms will be necessary in the future because many cities don’t have a lot of land mass. And the way we’re getting food into our cities now just isn’t sustainable. We’re also working with the universities to create a nutrition and agriculture institute starting our with master’s and doctoral students who are involved in food system work.

Will Allen on the Colbert Report. (Click to watch.)

Q. There was a lot of controversy about the million-dollar gift Growing Power accepted from Walmart last year. Do you want to talk about that?

A. First off, that money came from the Walton Foundation — many companies have a separate foundation — like Kellogg’s and the W.K. Kellogg foundation. The Walton Foundation has done some good things. And there was some misunderstanding about the gift, because we actually passed on that funding to organizations around the country that were really struggling and need training and resources to be able to move forward.

I worked for a large corporate company and, believe me, you can always find many things you don’t agree with. But I think we need to really change our attitudes when it comes to getting everyone to the table. Because the reality is that Walmart delivers a great deal of the food in this country and we need to get our local food into their stores.

It’s easy to look at things in an idealistic way — but if you’re working with people in  a disadvantaged community, you know the situation is dire.

Many insurance companies that we use today were the biggest supporters of slavery. So are we going to go back and say we’re not going to do business with you because we supported slavery?

I think we have to be more open if we’re going to change our food system — because this is really about our basic survival. People are getting sicker and sicker every day. The latest estimation I saw was that by 2030, 42 percent of Americans will be obese. We have the greatest resources of any nation in the world, so why is one out of six young people going to bed tonight without a meal? You go to native reservations and 50 percent of the folks have diabetes. So we have these terrible problems that are leading to our demise. And while it’s easy to complain, people need to jump off their computers, get out in their communities, and do something about it.

Q. Back to those early days of your project. Do you have any advice for those who are in debt and making their way through the early stages of an ambitious project?

A. You really have to have patience. It takes a long time to learn to farm. And it takes a long time to build an organization.

I hope [Growing Power] can cut the learning curve by passing on the lessons I’ve learned. I was naïve in ways. I didn’t even have a business plan. I bought a piece of property when I was still under-capitalized, and then I had broken boilers and buried gas tanks, etc., to deal with. But I was just so excited to get the property; excitement can blind you.

Growing Power has spawned a lot of similar projects around the country. More people under 40 want to do this work than they did 10 or 20 years ago. They have great ideas. But our responsibility as elders is to pass on what we’ve learned to this next generation, and that’s basically what I’m doing — trying to hand off as much as I can before I’m back on the farm, so to say.

Peebottle Farms is a series about the backyard farm Nina Lalli maintains in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn.

OMG you guys! I’m so excited to tell you all about the lush organic garden I planted at exactly the right moment for optimal nutrition and beauty, because I’m perfect. Just kidding. I planted some seeds rather randomly and then my stir-crazy chickens destroyed the whole thing.

It’s my third summer as a backyard gardener, and apparently I’m still on the curvy part of the learning curve. First of all, when exactly were we supposed to start planting this year? Instructions like “after the last frost” are vague enough in a normal year. But I think New York’s last frost may have occurred sometime in October this year because the world is ending. Since we had such a freakishly warm winter, I held out for the possibility that Mother Nature would throw some ice at us in May just to keep shit crazy.

When I did eventually plant seeds directly in the recently tested soil of my garden beds, I started out simple, with lettuces, herbs, and leafy greens. I also put in lots of flowers outside the beds — in the soil you couldn’t pay me to grow food in. A few hours of digging and hacking at the glass-and-rock filled dirt left me appalled by how out of shape I am, but I also felt pretty accomplished. Planting seeds gives me a giddy feeling. It’s a slow-burning night-before-Christmas feeling for a plant nerd like myself. As soon as I planted the seeds, I imagined my garden as a veritable orphanage for bees and butterflies, with milkweed, cosmos, zinnias, and sunflowers surrounding my glorious produce supply.

Who let the girls out?

Soon after the planting, when adorable baby arugula leaves were just poking their heads out of the dirt, someone let our six chickens out to pillage the backyard for several hours.

Okay, it was me. One of the hens made a beeline for the door of their run while I was changing their water, and slipped past me. I could probably have kept the rest in, but my heart wasn’t in it. I feel for those ladies, who are well-fed but very bored, and just dying to forage for worms and bugs out in the yard.

They snacked on some buckwheat plants I had put in for them, pecked at some weeds, and made their way toward the compost pile. I thought, “Maybe that’ll be enough.” But soon they went straight for the garden beds, murmuring and pecking. I tried to wrangle them, but six is a lot, and chickens — unlike dogs — don’t seem to speak English. In the end I managed to barricade one of the beds and my pretty blue hydrangea bush. The chickens went back to their little home when the sun set, having eaten every other plant and seed in the garden.

It was especially stupid of me to let this happen since I had already lost two-thirds of our garlic, our sage plant, and our sorrel patch to earlier chicken adventures. And the hens don’t just nibble on leaves, they go deep; they dig seeds out of the ground and break roots. You can tell yourself they’re on pest-patrol, but there’s a price to pay, even in the off-season.

Heirloom seed selection at Comstock, Ferre & Co.

A seedy adventure

So garden Christmas was cancelled, and it was my own fault. For a couple of weeks I wandered the streets, peering into the wild, green community gardens in my neighborhood and kicking myself.

Then, I heard that Comstock, Ferre & Co. — a seed company in Wethersfield, Conn. —  was about to celebrate its 201st anniversary. At the last minute, I hauled my boyfriend Tei and our dogs up I-95 for a visit. The event had bluegrass bands, cooking demos, and a panel about GMOs. But the real treat was perusing drawer upon drawer of rare heirloom seeds and meeting Jere Gettle, who bought the company with his wife Emilee two years ago. The Gettles also own Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, which Jere, now 32, started when he was only 17.

The Gettle family, of Baker Creek Seed Company.

Since the visit I’ve been reading the Gettles’ book, The Heirloom Life Gardener, and have become obsessed with the whole family. (Did I mention that Emilee is a Little House on the Prairie-style knockout and they have an adorable daughter and they’re all always smiling and holding huge bundles of squash and wearing suspenders and bonnets?)

But I knew none of this when I first asked Jere for plant advice in the greenhouse. He had such a baby face I didn’t consider that he might be the owner — and he didn’t mention it either.

Jere grew up on farms in Montana and Missouri, and was homeschooled by homesteader parents, so he was obsessed with seeds from an early age. During Jere’s teen years he learned that some of his favorite seed varieties were in danger of disappearing because of all the newer hybrids on the market made to look perfect and survive long-distance travel.

As the seed industry consolidated and companies like Monsanto and DuPont introduced genetically modified seeds in the 1990s, Jere’s obsession became his life mission. He began saving seeds at 13 and, a few years later, began sending them with a small mail-order catalog. At 22 he started traveling and collecting rare seeds in places like Mexico, Thailand, and Guatemala. Today Baker Creek sells 1,300 varieties of open-pollinated, non-GMO, non-hybrid, non-treated, non-patented seeds.

Peebottle garden beds after.

Anyway, this is the guy who was helping me decide what to plant in my silly little urban garden, and he was so enthusiastic about how many eggplants I would be able to grow that I basically forgot about what a garden failure I was and felt giddy all over again.

We picked out little wild cherry tomatoes and pink Brandywines, Pingtung and Listada De Gandia eggplants (long purples and round striped varieties, respectively), cucumbers, zucchini, some herbs, and some seeds for leafy greens he thought still had a chance of making it (black mustard, amaranth, and rainbow chard).

Back in Brooklyn the next day, it was Christmas again. I planted the new heirlooms while it drizzled, Tei pruned our huge mulberry tree to give the heat-loving eggplants the sun they deserve, and I wasn’t even cranky about my premature back pain.