Inside Urban Green

A Harlem School Learns About High Tech Food Production

Parent Shekema Young (left) and magnet specialist Tina Wong check out one of the crops.

Below - Getting a close-up view are (from left) PTA President Symone Manning, School Leadership Team member Karen Shields and Community Education Council District 3 President Christine Annechino. Photos by Miller Photography

The students at PS 208 in Harlem are learning some good plant science now that they have a new hydroponics light garden in their school.

The garden was installed in a partnership with New York Sun Works. Sorry that there weren't pictures of the students, but we know they are there learning some good stuff about modern edible plant growing methods. This will help prepare them for the present and future world of food production technology.

It's not only good science but this garden is available year round not just in the warm weather growing season. It is far more compatible with the school schedule that, of course, includes summer recess.

The major benefit of many outdoor school gardens is lost because the students are on summer vacation at the height of the growing season. Many of them also suffer from poor maintenance over the summer. A school garden can go down in a hurry in a heat wave.

I would add that this indoor hydroponic garden is good, but a rolling rack light garden with adjustable shelves and plants growing in sub-irrigated planters (SIPs) is even better.

The hydroponic garden is growing lettuce, kale and other leafy greens. With SIPs, the students could grow and experiment with a much wider range of plants from tomatoes to cactus. That is exactly what I do in the CuGreen plant lab. I even grow coffee trees.

via www.uft.org

One more New York City school is going green, thanks to a partnership with New York Sun Works’ The Greenhouse Project, which aims at improving environmental science offerings in urban settings. The group recently completed installing a state-of-the-art hydroponic greenhouse science lab in Harlem’s PS 208, the Alain L. Locke Magnet School for Environmental Stewardship, which celebrated its garden inauguration with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on March 9. Read more...

 

Instaplanta System » Horticultural Therapy, Enabled Gardens, School Gardens, Home Gardens

I recently had the pleasure of meeting two women who are in the process of launching a new horticultural therapy professional practice. We may collaborate on a health center project they support. It would be my pleasure to do so. As a senior with two knees due for replacement, I can relate to the needs of those who are not physically able to practice traditional dirt gardening.

The planter system shown here is a product of a UK company named Instaplanta. In my opinion there is a huge market for systems of this type to serve the needs of those who are physically limited at any age.

Add the fact that there is a huge baby boomer generation entering retirement age. Then add the current interest in school gardening. A system of this type is a natural for all of these needs. It is a natural for urban greenscaping.

The only thing misssing in this system is sub-irrigation. It would be easy to add a sub-irrigated planter insert (SIP) feature.

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School Gardening » Send a Cow to NYC...Please!

Bag Gardens in a UK school from Send a Cow on Vimeo.

Quote, "Hum, I'll give it a chance!"  Cheers to the educators in this U.K. school.

Making a Bag Garden in Uganda from Send a Cow on Vimeo.

Send a Cow could do much good work here in New York City where we have a very small group of highly vocal but uncreative "three sisters farmers" who seem to know just one note on a scale of many notes. They play ad nauseum only in the key of "d for dirt." Apparently that is all they know...or want to know.

We would be much better off as a society if children were taught school gardening to honor all cultures and learn to play all the notes in the scale, in all keys.

These African style Bag Gardens are a great project for school kids to get stuck into. See how they did just that in a school in Bath, UK. Bag gardens are part of the African Gardens project run by charity Send a Cow. See SendaCow.org for more info and to buy a kit.

The high-quality version of these videos can be found on our Cabbages & Cowpats DVD. Order a copy here. (PDF Order Form)

TEDxManhattan Leads the Way About Lead and Good Food

This is a screen shot from the TEDxManattan “Changing the Way We Eat” event held this past Saturday in New York and live streamed to a large audience on the web. The speaker is Paul Lightfoot, CEO of BrightFarms the company that is developing a business installing hydroponic greenhouses on supermarket roofs.

Dollars to donuts Paul did not know that he was standing by a hydroponic lettuce grower in the shape of the TEDx logo. It is also likely that few in the audience did either until the end of the program when this video was shown. Then the lettuce was out of the logo so to speak! Have a look and Tweet away.

The video is also on Vimeo.

This is National Lead Poisoning Prevention Week ... Oct 23-29, 2011

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Thanks to a post on the Root Simple blog (formerly known as Homegrown Evolution), I learned that this is National Lead Poisoning Prevention Week.

I have been diligently researching this subject over the past year. My finding demonstrates what I view as malfeasance on the part of NYC horticultural institutions and the USDA Extension program in failing to adequately alert the public to the widespread urban gardening problem of toxic metals soil contamination, lead in particular.

There is one clear message. For the safety of you and your children, do not grow edible plants in urban soil without first having the soil tested for toxic metals contamination.

Stay tuned. There is much more to come in a series of posts on the subject that will continue through the coming week. This is clearly a topic that deserves your Tweets and Facebook postings.

via www.rootsimple.com

It's been one hell of a week. First we find out, via a soil test, that our backyard may have high levels of lead and zinc. We'll write a lot more about this once I confirm the results--I've sent in another sample to a different lab. And my doctor has agreed to give me a blood test. Whatever the results, I want to help get out the word about this serious issue--ironically, next week is National Lead Poisoning Prevention Week.

Illinois » Farming Concrete...Here Kitty, Kitty

It struck me that this sub-irrigated portable mini garden made from recycled kitty litter buckets had a colorful and playful quality and thought it would make a neat kids garden.

We have thousands of schools across the country that do not have school gardens. What they do have in abundance however is concrete, kids, and art and science teachers.

Working with sub-irrigated planters (SIPs) like these who knows the creative designs that would come out of the minds of art and science teachers working together? These SIPs are science based but in my view have play dough and finger paint qualities.

We could easily have very low cost but highly productive school gardens like this in every public, private and day care school in America. They would go a long way in solving our obesity, poor nutrition and hunger problems.

Sub-irrigated planters (SIPs) also teach some good science and simple technology. In my experience, there is as much or more STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in gardens created from SIPs than there is in traditional dirt gardening. These DIY SIPs also teach recycling, and respect for the environment by saving water and eliminating runoff.

To enhance plant science learning, it would be an easy matter to make clear walls on one side of some of the planters so that students could see the root system and capillary action at work. This could be done quite easily with clear Plexiglas and an adhesive like Goop. Drug store type hydrogen peroxide would take care of any algae growth.

Another advantage of portable micro gardens is that the SIP components can go home with kids over the summer. A rules-based SIP “adoption” program solves the problem of summer recess maintenance and provides even more student learning opportunity. Kids can learn valuable personal self-sufficiency skills by growing food at home during summer vacation.

What we need to make this happen are mainstream parents who are not dirt gardening ideologues to speak up. Currently we have too many misguided school administrators, teachers and gardening parents who think that “garden” and “growing” are synonyms for dirt.

Many of them are hooked into thinking that grandiose greenhouse projects costing as much as $2 million dollars are necessary. For example, think Edible Schoolyards and Alice Waters. Expensive projects like these are a superfluous luxury in a down economy, with rising food prices and so many people unemployed.

The real culprit behind this dilemma is our broken horticultural education system led largely by the USDA Extension Program and urban botanical gardens. I rarely find progressive information about modern food production methods from any of these institutions. Their comfort zone seems to be from a prior century when we were a rural society and all we knew was dirt farming and gardening.

Those days are gone. We will continue to become increasingly urbanized with an even greater need for technology based food production. It is time to move forward not backwards to a bygone time of Victory Gardens in the dirt. 

Finally, if your kids school won't support a garden like this make one at home. It's easy to do. If you have questions, I'll be happy to help. Comment or email me at urbangreenscaper [AT] gmail.com

Lao Tzu - "Give a Man a Fish, Feed Him For a Day. Teach a Man to Fish, Feed Him For a Lifetime"

This morning I shot a quick video showing how well my tomatoes and peppers are doing in this years batch of self watering containers. Near the end of the video I show how easy it is to fill the water reservoir that does NOT require a PVC or copper tube in order to add more water.

via www.mammablogga.com

Idaho Junior H.S. » EarthBoxes Help Teach Science and Nutrition

You may pay a bit more for an EarthBox but you should feel good about doing it.

There is no company in the business of marketing sub-irrigated planters (SIPs) that does what EarthBox does through the efforts of their education department led by Molly Quinn Philbin.

Her group in partnership with The Growing Connection -TGC (a UN Organization) deserves far more recognition then it gets. All of the people involved in Molly's department and TGC make a very significant contribution to elevating the quality of public school plant science and nutrition.

It is a very serious omission that the White House garden and the so-called "People's Gardens" of the USDA do not include EarthBoxes as a standard alternative to in-ground growing. There are too many staffers in the USDA who did not read the memo announcing that we have become an urban society and will become more-so in the future.

Read more from the recent EarthBox newsletter.

Edmonton, Canada » Permaculture Program Teaches Students Sustainability Sensibly

Sheldon Showarth plants Kentucky Wonder beans in EarthBoxes in a physics lab. Jasper Place High School has a greenhouse project where they are developing a permaculture garden. Photographs by: Shaughn Butts, edmontonjournal.com

Rhiannon Arcand works on assembling the Aquaponic system in the greenhouse. The top tanks will be home to fish and the overflow will water plants.

It is good to see permaculture and plastics occupying the same space in an article about plant science and growing food plants.

A goodly number of "urban farming" activists I have encountered here in New York have managed to distort the meaning of the permaculture concept.

Many have a cult-like fervor on the level of religious zealotry about gardening in the ground only. In their often sanctimonious view, the only acceptable way to grow food is in the dirt, never mind that urban soil is often contaminated with toxic heavy metals. Also never mind that most urbanite in-ground gardening is less productive and uses more water.

Collective Roots « An Intelligent and Safe Urban Gardening Solution

Collective Roots is a non-profit located in East Palo Alto, California that advocates local food production.

They have discovered the safe and productive benefits of portable micro gardens (aka sub-irrigated planters (SIPs) like the EarthBox.

One good example of safe gardening is the nearby Google headquarters (aka Googleplex) garden. It is a joint project of Google and The Growing Connection, a UN organization. They chose to plant the garden in EarthBoxes, one of many portable micro garden options.

With safety as the primary goal, the first intelligent step is to have your soil tested for toxic metals contamination before growing any edible plants in the ground.

The Little School That Could » A School and Community Edible Garden of the Future

The artist applies some finishing touches.

If you have heard the term "farming concrete”, it is now a reality with no jack-hammer required. A new edible portable micro garden (with sub-irrigated planters aka SIPs) is officially opening tomorrow afternoon at 3:30 at PS 39 in Brooklyn. Just like kids, these little gardens can find their way into small spaces anywhere, even on driveways, balconies and rooftops.

I call PS 39 the "little school that could". It may be small, but the community of people who made this garden happen thinks big. It also took some big thinking and open mindedness by school principal Anita de Paz. We need many more school principals like her all across the country.

It is much too early in the Brooklyn gardening season for there to be vegetables to pick but the garden is already a work of art worth seeing. Even if you cannot make the opening tomorrow, stop by at any time and have a look. The garden is located in the front yard of PS 39 at the corner of 6th Avenue and 8th Street, Park Slope, Brooklyn.