urban agriculture
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Cool digs for urban chickens [SLIDESHOW]
So you’ve consulted your city’s municipal code regarding backyard poultry — or just decided, “Cluck the neighbors, I’m getting chickens!” Next you’ll need a home for your birds that offers room to roam, warmth in winter and ventilation in summer, and protection from urban thugs like dogs and raccoons. (For details on space requirements and […]
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Philly’s Greensgrow farm: An unconventional hybrid that works
Mary Seton Corboy sweating in her bee suit on the living roof of the Greensgrow farm’s storage trailer.(Photos ©Michael Hanson) It’s sunny and 94 degrees, and the pavement’s steaming after a thunderstorm rolled sideways through north Philly. Mary Seton Corboy wears a full-body, white bee suit. She stands atop a small trailer’s grassy roof on […]
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Brooklyn’s Eagle Street is poster child for urban farming
January 2011 update: Many of the photos have been removed from this series so they can be published in a Breaking Through Concrete book, forthcoming this year from UC Press. Karen Turner, 25, wants to farm 100 acres in Texas. Her family has lived on 10 acres in San Antonio since she was a child. […]
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Chicken expert Gail Damerow answers newbie questions
Cluck, cluck, cluck. Bwaak! These are not sounds I expect to hear on a stroll in my North Oakland, Calif. neighborhood — the usual soundtrack is more like thumping bass, sirens, and the rattle of fast-food paper bags. And yet chickens are pecking in backyards on practically every block, in converted sheds and rickety but […]
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DC’s Common Good City Farm: ‘Museum farm’ or real deal?
Neighbors used to avoid this area in the LeDroit Park neighborhood of Washington, DC, the site of an abandoned school, before Common Good City Farm grew there.(Photos ©Michael Hanson) “You got any more arugula?” A middle-aged man has just walked up to the street side of the chain-link fence. He peers through the gaps in […]
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Keeping up with Jones Valley Urban Farm
January 2011 update: Many of the photos have been removed from this series so they can be published in a Breaking Through Concrete book, forthcoming this year from UC Press. In fall 2001, Edwin Marty and Page Allison drove across the country, back home, to start a farm. That might be when the Breaking Through […]
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Vietnamese gardeners in New Orleans offer much food for thought
January 2011 update: Many of the photos have been removed from this series so they can be published in a Breaking Through Concrete book, forthcoming this year from UC Press. East New Orleans is lush and crumbling. Sometimes it feels like the built environment — the convenience stores, sugar factories, distant oil refineries, houses, brick […]
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Denver busts urban farming’s yuppie stereotype
January 2011 update: Many of the photos have been removed from this series so they can be published in a Breaking Through Concrete book, forthcoming this year from UC Press. When we were still in Seattle, preparing for this project, a few friends asked if this was a tour of ‘yuppie urban farm projects.’ Isn’t […]
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Urban farms don’t make money — so what?
City Slicker Farms in West Oakland does more than just grow food for the local residents.(Bonnie Powell photo)Over on Earth Island Journal, Sena Christian has an excellent, rigorously reported article about the tough economics of urban farming. She focuses on some of the more famous city farms of the Bay Area, where EIJ is based […]