Author Archive

This week, I wanted to dive into the world of urban homesteading blogs.  What does it take to run a successful one?  How do you get started?  What are the key lessons?  For insight, I turned to Erica Strauss.  Erica blogs about urban homesteading, gardening, and keeping a productive home at Northwest Edible Life.  Before focusing her efforts on her homestead, she owned a successful personal chef and catering business.  Now she nurtures vegetables, fruit and two beautiful children on one-third of an acre in suburban Seattle.  I’ve been reading Erica’s blog for a while now, and she was kind enough to share some of her insight with GitC readers. 1. Your blog, Northwest Edible Life, focuses on your homesteading adventures. Tell me, how did you get involved in urban homesteading? Urban Homesteading for me is really a gardening hobby that’s gotten way out of hand. I started growing veggies

Thanks to Antonio Roman-Alcalá at Eat Local Guide for publishing a great article on San Francisco’s new urban agriculture legislation.  According to the article: The new legislation has amended the zoning code to allow agricultural activities in all parts of the city, as well as defining the parameters by which urban agriculturists can sell their products. According to Roman-Alcalá, planners in the community were very aware of urban agriculture needs when writing the code – “ this legislation is proof that ‘the system,’ as ossified and change-resistant as it may seem, can occasionally work, with the combined efforts of the right people in positions of power and aware, active community members.” I strongly suggest that you head over to Eat Local Guide to check out the entire article.  To track legislation in other cities or states, visit the Grown in the City Interactive urban ag zoning map. Finally, enjoy some pictures of the

In the vein of the interactive, open source maps at Grown in the City, the team has launched an crowd-sourced job board. The job board contains food system jobs from around the internet and can be accessed in the following ways: 1. Directly at http://growninthecity.com/job-postings/ 2. Through http://www.foodsystemjobs.org or http://www.foodsystemplanningjobs.org which both redirect back to Grown in the City. Like the maps, the job board gives you the option to list your own job posting for free by filling out a simple form. We hope this will be a valuable resource for the community, and a “one stop shop” to fill the need that often comes up on the COMFOOD and other message boards.

It’s become kind of trite, so I’ll get it out of the way first: Happy Earth Day! On this day in 1970, the first Earth day celebrations were held. Actually, some trace the history of Earth Day back to Earth Week, started by a bunch of students from the University of Pennsylvania (go Quakers!)  That first effort saw some big names, many of whom were somehow connected to Penn.  According to Wikipedia, they included “Ralph Nader; Landscape Architect Ian McHarg; Nobel prize-winning Harvard Biochemist, George Wald; U.S. Senate Minority Leader, Hugh Scott; and poet, Allen Ginsberg.”  We’ve come a long way, baby, and now we’ve got NBC Universal (for better or worse) touting “green week” , and almost every child these days grows up with the mantra “reduce-reuse-recycle.”  On a somewat related topic, as I was walking to work this week, I saw a bunch of workers doing their part

The publisher of Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World was kind enough to send Grown in the City a pre-release copy of Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen’s new book. After reading through, I’m happy to report that it’s a worthy addition to any urban homesteader’s bookshelf, especially those who are just getting started. While Knutzen and Coyne’s previous book, The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City (which was also at the heart of the Dervaes trademarking controversy) covered many of the basics of the urban homesteading lifestyle, Making It takes a different approach – it’s a detailed “recipe book” of sorts for those looking to reduce their impact on the environment, use less consumer products, and (as they claim) even save some money. I can’t attest to the saving money part, because although I’ve dog-eared some pages, I haven’t tried any of

This week I spoke with Anaiis Salles.  Anaiis is the founder and Executive Director of Green Sanctuary Earth Institute of Pennsylvania. After traveling the world over a decade, exploring the Northwest and Seattle before moving to Vermont where she worked as an outreach coordinator for Senator Bernard Sanders, Anaiis has returned to her Philadelphia roots. Menu for the Future Collaboration is a ground-breaking community food hub program of GSEIPA, providing social service agencies with fresh produce, conventional and site grown. She is a new grower with City Harvest Growers Alliance. An artist and creative spirit, Salles is an avid cook, environmental activist, translating her political outreach experience with Senator Sanders into food justice work back in her home town. 1. Tell me a bit about Menu for the Future – what do you do, and who is your client base? Our community food hub program is Menu for the Future Collaboration.

Good news:  the strawberry plants I started in terra cotta pots out on the balcony are doing great.  So great, in fact, that they are a victim of their own success!  You see, it’s common wisdom to pinch back the blooms on strawberries during the first year that you grow them.  It takes a lot of energy to produce the fruit, and by pinching them back during the first year, you save all of that energy and force the plant to develop a strong, vigorous root system.  Well, the strawberries are loving their new home so much that they’ve already begun to flower (I’ve been feeding them with the compost I produce from my worm factory — and they love compost).  I purchased a June-bearing variety, but I only started them on March 16, and they’re already flowering!  Now just think about how hard it was for me to pinch off