Inside Urban Green

Consumer Website Review » Home Farming - Triscuit - Kraft Foods

This website is promoting a national "home farming day" and is funding a number of community gardens in low income neighborhoods around the country.

It is a partnership between Kraft Foods/Triscuit and Urban Farming, both of Michigan. Read their recent press release.

The project gardening expert is "hortitainer" Paul James. Watch the container gardening video (not embeddable or linkable) in particular for a sample of expert advice. His feet are firmly planted in a prior age of dirt and drain holes. He is a smooth talker as are all of the morning show gardener types. It is unfortunate that he has not kept up with the times in his profession.

Bottom LIne

Considering the low educational value and the outdated practices promoted by this project (see scorecard following) it is a fair question to ask if this is "good green money" from Kraft? I have no doubt they will get a return on their investment by selling a ton of their "center aisles" stuff, much of it in low income neighborhoods.

What's  your opinion? Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman where are you when we need you?

Site Searches Scorecard follows:

New York » Kraft Foods Spreads Triscuits on New Yorkers

There are other words that you can substitute for Triscuits in the headline above. On my way home from Manhattan yesterday, I stopped by the Triscuit/Kraft Foods "Home Farming Day" PR event at Madison Square Park.

What I heard and saw hurt my ears and eyes, it was that bad. It was raining lightly but I was praying for a flood. I am a veteran of Coney Island sideshow barkers since childhood. In my view, that's where this event belonged.

Have a look at a photo of the Flat Iron Building (right by the park) from 1905 after the jump.

Who Says The Word Garden Is Synonymous With Dirt?

See the “41 million” statistic in the following article. To start with, it is bad form to quote statistics without the source. Most likely, the writer is quoting a National Gardening Association stat.

Are all of the 41 million vegetable gardens in the ground? Of course not! She implies as much though by writing, "are sure to coax even more people outdoors to dig in the dirt”.

If the statistic is from an NGA survey, did they ask respondents if they grew their food in the ground or in containers? If they did, it would be interesting to know the numbers.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you probably know my rather low opinion of the professional knowledge of most garden writers and "hortitainers". It isn't much better for the NGA.

In my experience, the majority of this group lives in a prior century of dirt gardening rural America.

All they seem to know and believe is that "dirt is good" when the fact of the matter is that most of us now live in cities where "dirt" is not so good. The urban reality is that tillable land in the city is scare and often contaminated.