City Farming - Community Garden - Backyard Gardens

City Farm is a personal or community-run project in urban areas, which involves people interacting and working with animals and plants. They aim to improve community relationships and offer an awareness of agriculture and farming to people who live in built-up areas. Farming Tools.

Gardening is the practice of growing and cultivating plants such as root vegetables, leaf vegetables, fruits, and herbs, are grown for consumption, or use as dyes, or for medicinal or cosmetic use.



Farm to Table promotes serving local food at restaurants and school cafeterias, preferably through direct acquisition from the producer (which might be a winery, brewery, ranch, fishery, or other type of food producer which is not strictly a "farm"). Farm to Fridge.

Local Food connects food producers and food consumers in the same geographic region; in order to develop more self-reliant and resilient food networks, improve local economies, or for health, environmental, community, or social impact in a particular place.

Urban Gardening may improve human health: Microbial exposure boosts immune system. A one-month indoor gardening period increased the bacterial diversity of the skin and was associated with higher levels of anti-inflammatory molecules in the blood.

Market Garden is the relatively small-scale production of fruits, vegetables and flowers as cash crops, frequently sold directly to consumers and restaurants. The diversity of crops grown on a small area of land, typically from under one acre (0.4 ha) to a few acres, or sometimes in green houses distinguishes it from other types of farming. Such a farm on a larger scale is sometimes called a truck farm. A market garden is a business that provides a wide range and steady supply of fresh produce through the local growing season. Unlike large, industrial farms, which practice monoculture and mechanization, many different crops and varieties are grown and more manual labour and gardening techniques are used. The small output requires selling through such local fresh produce outlets as on-farm stands, farmers' markets, community-supported agriculture subscriptions, restaurants and independent produce stores. Market gardening and orchard farming are closely related to horticulture, which concerns the growing of fruits and vegetables.

Vertical Farming - Green Houses - Indoor Growing Kits

Permaculture - Community Garden - Organic Food Growing

Roimata Food Commons was created to promote organic, self-grown produce to encourage community resilience. 95+ heritage fruit and nut trees, 1000+ south island endemic natives planted.

Fertilizers - Seeds - Plant Intelligence

How Farming could employ Africa's young workforce — and help build peace: Kola Masha (video and text)

I Only Ate Food That I Grew Or Foraged For One Year, No Food Stores and no Restaurants (youtube) - Ate over 300 species of food, grew 100 different kinds of food, forged 200 different kinds of food. Made his own flour by dehydrating cassava and yam. Fermented a lot of foods. doing all this living Florida in a tiny house and growing food in front yard gardens and community gardens.

Farms to Schools
Farm to School
HGSF Ghana
Food for Life
Farming Countryside Education
Agri Aware
Farm to Cafeteria Canada
VT Feed
Organic Schools - Aust-organic
Kitchen Garden Foundation
Garden to Table.

City Blossoms develops creative kid-driven green spaces.

RecoveryPark mission is to re-build on vacant land, create jobs and help to revitalize this historic Detroit neighborhood.

Master Gardener Program are volunteer programs that train individuals in the science and art of gardening. These individuals pass on the information they learned during their training, as volunteers who advise and educate the public on gardening and horticulture.

Outdoor School Programs

Food Security - Farmers Markets - Feeding the Hungry

We need to do things on a large scale, and we need to do things on a small scale simultaneously. The parts must be representative of the whole. Big farms or mass production can be very effective and efficient if they're done right. If we can manage to do things on a large scale, and if we have the capabilities to do such large tasks, then we should. But we also need individual players who also understand their capabilities and can also be producers themselves. Each citizen must understand their responsibility to the whole system. Most of our problems are the result of people not having enough knowledge and information, which they need in order to be self reliant and be conscious contributors of society, instead of just being mindless consumers, which most of the time ends up doing more harm than good. Humans are an intelligent species, but human intelligence needs knowledge and information in order for human intelligence to be utilized. This is why schools, universities and the media needs to be updated so that we can foster human intelligence. Every education system needs to fully understand human intelligence and provide every student the necessary knowledge and information needed to maximize their own individual human intelligence. We have the technology, we have the skills, we have the people, all we need now is the will and the action.

Biointensive Agriculture is an organic agricultural system that focuses on achieving maximum yields from a minimum area of land, while simultaneously increasing biodiversity and sustaining the soil fertility. The goal of the method is long term sustainability on a closed system basis. It is particularly effective for backyard gardeners and smallholder farmers in developing countries, and also has been used successfully on small-scale commercial farms. Bio-intensive Gardening or farming uses 8 key principles to increase yields and reduce the use of water and other natural resources. 1: Deep soil preparation. Loosening the soil down to 24 inches sounds like a lot of work. Typical agriculture only goes 6 to 8 inches deep. That’s where the soil life is, and it gets destroyed when you plow deeply and use chemicals and fertilizers. In the bio-intensive system, double digging is a form of conservation tillage that produces higher yields. It also encourages deeper soil life, root development and water retention, and encourages nutrient cycling and the ways in which nutrients move from the physical environment into living organisms, and are then returned back to the environment. 2: Close plant spacing. Rather than planting in rows, biointensive growers plant in hexagonal shapes, which is the most efficient form to pack things in. Hexagons are the shape of water crystals. Bees use the hexagon in honeycombs. When the soil is prepared deeply, and plants are spaced close together, roots can grow deeper. That helps increase yields from two to six times the yields from conventional agriculture.3: Composting. Instead of heaping compost in distant piles, biointensive growers pile materials in their gardens. Nutrients naturally leach out directly into the growing beds, not into some marginal space. Cold composting technique is when the compost material takes longer to cure, but it becomes more diverse, and produces more compost out. Hot piles consume organic matter fast, as microbes release carbon into the atmosphere. Instead of bringing in outside manures, biointensive gardeners focus on growing our own compost, and devote at least 60 percent of our growing area to dual-purpose crops which grow both food and compost. 4: Carbon farming. This principle focuses on growing crops that produce a lot of mature biomass that can be returned to the soil as compost. These crops include sorghum, rye, wheat, millet and barley, among others. Crops that have edible seeds, like oats and quinoa, also feed the growers. The goal is after composting, these residues, to return three to five 5-gallon buckets of compost per growing year, per bed. 5: Calorie farming. This involves growing certain calorie-dense root crops, such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, parsnips and leeks that yield well in small areas. With an optimum balance of carbon crops and special root crops, a grower could produce a nutritionally balanced diet in minimal space. Ecology Action is working on a diet design that when grown, will enable 1 person to grow a complete diet, income and maintain soil fertility in an area less than 1,000 square feet. 6: Companion planting. Companion planting allows us to maximize the relationships between plants, insects and people. It’s about choosing plants that help other plants by repelling certain pests, for example, or growing plants like legumes that help fix nitrogen in the soil for other crops. 7: Planting open-pollinated seeds. Saving and growing open-pollinated seeds saves money, since these seeds grow true-to-type. Saving OP seeds also keeps the genetic plant pool more diverse, so diseases or pests are less likely to wipe out entire crops. 8: Keeping a whole system perspective. Responsibility comes with growing food. As a system, biointensive agriculture strives to grow the soil, then food, then income. It’s more about income, food, then soil. A whole system perspective honors the web of life in the garden and uses all the principles to increase yields and sustain the soil.

Agrivoltaic is a food garden grown under raised solar panels, where the plants will have a combination of shade and sun, so not all crop types are not suitable for this particular environment. Agrophotovoltaics denotes the development the same area of land for both solar photovoltaic power as well as for agriculture. The coexistence of solar panels and crops implies a sharing of light between these two types of production. A system of mounts or cables to raise the solar array some five metres above the surface in order to allow farm machinery access to the land, or a system where solar panelling is installed on the roof of a greenhouse. The shading produced by such as system has negative effects on the crop production, but it is hoped that the production of energy may offset such losses. Sheep can be grazed among conventional solar panels without any modification required. Agricultural land is the most suitable for solar farms in terms of efficiency: the most profit/power can be generated by the solar industry by replacing farming land with fields of solar panels, as opposed to using barren land. This is primarily because photovoltaic systems in general decrease in efficiency at higher temperatures, and farmland has generally been created in areas with moisture -the cooling effects of vapour pressure is an important factor in increasing panel efficiency. one report roughly estimates that covering less than 1% of the world's cropland with conventional solar arrays could generate all the world's present electricity demands (assuming the sun stops moving and we no longer have clouds, and assuming no access is needed and the entirety of that area was covered in panels). Additionally, some define agrivoltaics as simply installing solar panels on the roof of the barn or livestock shed. Some small projects in the USA where beehives are installed at the edge of an existing conventional solar array have been called agrivoltaic systems.

Succession Planting is to plant early in the season with cool-season crops, then as those crops are harvested, they are replaced with warm-season crops in the summer months and when the cool weather returns, then plant cool-season crops again in the fall. This way the garden is continually in production, which allows you to maximize yield through strategic planting.

City Farming Knowledge

An average 600-square-foot garden costs around $70 to plant and Produces about 300 pounds of fresh produce worth around $600.00. (24.5 feet by 24.5 feet). Land or Space Needed.

The average person eats over 1500 pounds of food a year. This is just the average diet, not all diets are good. Averaging around 200 lbs of Meat, over 300 lbs of Cream, Milk and Cheese, 35 lbs of Eggs, over 150 lbs of Bread and Grains, 125 lbs of Potatoes and over 200 lbs of Fruit. 141 pounds of Sweeteners (including 42 pounds of Corn Syrup a year). 85 pounds of Fats (Butter and Oil). (Theses amounts vary depending on your diet).

Food Consumption Data.
Agriculture Council of America (ACA)
Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
Backyard Vegetable Garden.

Garden Planner Software - Garden Plan Pro

Onfarm is a powerful platform that allows you to manage all your AG Data in one place Data Collection Data Management.

Agsolver is complete field analysis land management precision agriculture data including yield maps, soil sample data, and fertilizer application data, in combination with simulation tools to guide better management decisions. Insurance against a bad harvest.

Advanced Farming Tools - Organizations that Help Farmers

Number of Vegetable Plants Per Person needed for one year of Food? The number of Plants per person varies depending on their preferred diet, and also other factors like, climate, weather, draughts, soil, plant diseases, pests, and squeezing in a second harvest. Having a green house with vertical farming methods also could determine how much growing space is needed.

Growing Enough Food to Feed a Family (youtube)

How Much Do You Need to Plant? (youtube)

How Much Food Can I Grow Around My House? (youtube)

Perennial Plant is a plant that lives more than two years. Perennial plants can be short-lived (only a few years) or they can be long-lived, as are some woody plants like trees. Many perennials have developed specialized features that allow them to survive extreme climatic and environmental conditions. Perennials, especially small flowering plants, that grow and bloom over the spring and summer, die back every autumn and winter, and then return in the spring from their rootstock, are known as herbaceous perennials.

Annual Plant is a plant that completes its life cycle within one year and then dies, going from germination to the production of seeds.

Biennial Plant is a flowering plant that takes two years to complete its biological lifecycle. In the first year, the plant grows leaves, stems, and roots (vegetative structures), then it enters a period of dormancy over the colder months. Usually the stem remains very short and the leaves are low to the ground, forming a rosette. Many biennials require a cold treatment, or vernalization, before they will flower. During the next spring or summer, the stem of the biennial plant elongates greatly, or "bolts". The plant then flowers, producing fruits and seeds before it finally dies. There are far fewer biennials than either perennial plants or annual plants. Under extreme climatic conditions, a biennial plant may complete its life cycle rapidly (e.g., in three months instead of two years). This is quite common in vegetable or flower seedlings that were vernalized before they were planted in the ground. This behavior leads to many normally biennial plants being treated as annuals in some areas. Conversely, an annual grown under extremely favorable conditions may have highly successful seed propagation, giving it the appearance of being biennial or perennial. Some short-lived perennials may appear to be biennial rather than perennial. True biennials flower only once, while many perennials will flower every year once mature. From a gardener's perspective, a plant's status as annual, biennial, or perennial often varies based on location or purpose. Biennials grown for flowers, fruits, or seeds need to be grown for two years. Biennials that are grown for edible leaves or roots are grown for just one year (and not grown on a second year to run to seed). Examples of biennial plants are members of the onion family including leek, some members of the cabbage family, common mullein, parsley, fennel, Lunaria, silverbeet, Black-eyed Susan, Sweet William, colic weed, carrot, and some hollyhocks. Plant breeders have produced annual cultivars of several biennials that will flower the first year from seed, for example, foxglove and stock.

How Many Food Plants do I need to Grow to feed one Person for One Year?

Artichokes: 1-4 plants per person
Asparagus: 10-12 plants per person
Beans, Bush: 10-20 plants per person
Beans, Lima: 10-20 plants per person
Beans, Pole: 10-20 plants per person
Beets: 10-20 plants per person
Broccoli: 5-10 plants per person
Brussels Sprouts: 2-8 plants per person
Cabbage: 3-10 plants per person
Carrots: 10-40 plants per person
Cauliflower: 3-5 plants per person
Celeriac: 1-5 plants per person
Celery: 3-8 plants per person
Corn: 12-40 plants per person
Cucumbers: 3-5 plants per person
Eggplant: 1 plant per person, plus 2-3 extra per family
Kale: 1 5’ row per person
Lettuce: 10-12 plants per person
Melons: 2-6 plants per person
Onions: 40-80 plants per person
Peas: 25-60 plants per person
Peppers: 5-6 plants per person
Potatoes: 10-30 plants per person
Pumpkins: 1 plant per person
Rhubarb: 2-3 crowns per person
Spinach: 10-20 plants per person
Summer Squash: 2-4 plants per person
Winter Squash: 2 plants per person
Sweet Potatoes: 5 plants per person
Tomatoes: 2-5 plants per person.

How much Space or Land is needed to grow enough food for one person for a whole year? 4,000 square feet, and up to 8,000 square feet of land, to grow enough food for several people a year. 1/4 acre = 10,890  1 acre = 43,560 square feet. (vegetarian diet) - Urban Agroecoloy: 6,000 lbs of food on 1/10th acre - Urban Homestead - Urban Permaculture (youtube).

Intensive Plant Spacing increases the return and also helps control weeds and save on water. These are the basic, most frequently used spacing's in the square foot garden: The 3-inch spacing accommodates beets, carrots, onions and radishes. The 4-inch spacing is for bush beans and spinach.

Sprouts or Micro-Greens is only 10–14 days from seeding to harvest.

MOBY - An Inner City Community Garden Project (video uploaded on Oct 10, 2006,  27 min.)

If you start cool-weather crops such as kale, collards, and lettuces indoors, you can transplant them into the ground as it begins to warm up, then harvest the greens weeks ahead of schedule.

Most gardeners understand that the soil in big cities is often contaminated with lead. Most soil tests look for lead, cadmium and arsenic. But they don't test things like petrochemicals left behind by cars, or cleaning solvents, which might have seeped into the soil from an old Laundromat. They are carcinogenic, and they're dangerous to ingest or even breathe in.  Journals

How to Grow Your Own Food - How to Grow and Harvest Food

City Farmer.info - City Farmer.org - Growing Places Indy

Lufa Farms - Community Garden

Farmers Markets

Growing Circular Food Systems in a Growing City

Home Grown Food Summit - Epic Gardening

Urban Agriculture is the practice of cultivating, processing, and distributing food in or around a village, town, or city. Urban agriculture can also involve animal husbandry, aquaculture, agroforestry, urban beekeeping, and horticulture. These activities occur in peri-urban areas as well, and peri-urban agriculture may have different characteristics.

Urban Farming - Urban Farm Online - Urban Farm

Tilling Urban Terrain - Urban Ag Summit - Clean Air Gardening

Waste to Energy - Composting - Hemp

Water Management - Green House Micro Climates

There's too much Food being Wasted

Photos of what People Eat around the World

Urban Agriculture Bill - Farming the City

596 Acres maps vacant lots in New York City and advocates for community stewardship of that land. In New York City alone, there are more than 15,000 parcels of vacant land. Urban Agriculture.

Edible Landscapes

Growing Food instead of Non-Edible Plants

Edible Lawns - Edible Landscaping

From Lawns to Edible Landscapes (youtube)

Edible Landscapes London

Pam Warhurst Edible Landscapes (video)

Forest Gardens - Grass - Seeds - Plant Maintenance.

Container Gardens

Container Garden is the practice of growing plants, including edible plants, exclusively in containers instead of planting them in the ground.

Raised-bed Gardening is a form of gardening in which the soil is enclosed in three-to-four-foot-wide (1.0–1.2 m) containment units ("beds"), which are usually made of wood, rock, or concrete and which can be of any length or shape. The soil is raised above the surrounding soil (approximately six inches to waist-high) and may be enriched with compost. Vegetable plants are spaced in geometric patterns, much closer together than in conventional row gardening. The spacing is such that when the vegetables are fully grown, their leaves just barely touch each other, creating a microclimate in which weed growth is suppressed and moisture is conserved.

Hügelkultur is a horticultural technique where a mound constructed from decaying wood debris and other compostable biomass plant materials is later (or immediately) planted as a raised bed. Adopted by permaculture advocates, it is suggested the technique helps to improve soil fertility, water retention, and soil warming, thus benefiting plants grown on or near such mounds.

Freight Farms container farming technology.

Container Gardens - Raised Growing Beds - Boxes for Plants

Soil Health - Food Coops

Earth Box - Home Farming - Fruits and Veggies More Matters

Edible Landscaping - Foraging Wild Foods

Portable Rolling Planters - Portable Raised Bed Planter - Portable Elevated Planter Box

Green House Micro Climates

Noocity Growbed - Ultimate Urban Gardening System - Noocity Website

Balcony Garden Photos - Micro-Greens

How to Start a Vegetable Garden with Food Scraps - How to Grow Food from Leftovers

Stephen Ritz Growing Green (video) - How to Grow Vegetables in Sacks (youtube)

Planting and Gardening Tips - Farm Schools - Farming Tips.

Up on the Roof - Roof Top Gardening

Green Roof is a roof of a building that is partially or completely covered with vegetation and a growing medium, planted over a waterproofing membrane. It may also include additional layers such as a root barrier and drainage and irrigation systems. Container gardens on roofs, where plants are maintained in pots, are not generally considered to be true green roofs, although this is debated. Rooftop ponds are another form of green roofs which are used to treat greywater.

Roof Garden is a garden on the roof of a building. Besides the decorative benefit, roof plantings may provide food, temperature control, hydrological benefits, architectural enhancement, habitats or corridors for wildlife, recreational opportunities, and in large scale it may even have ecological benefits. The practice of cultivating food on the rooftop of buildings is sometimes referred to as rooftop farming. Rooftop farming is usually done using green roof, hydroponics, aeroponics or air-dynaponics systems or container gardens.

Roof Top Farming - Green Roofs

Rooftop Farming (youtube)

Roof Top Farms - Farm Roof

Urban Farm Online - Easiest Garden

Grow Veg - Gotham Greens

The Farmery - Bright Farms - Earth Easy

How to Grow Potatoes in a Container (youtube)

Non-GMO Organic Seed Potatoes

Be careful about the materials that you're using to build a raised bed. The wood could be treated with chemicals that you don't want touching your fruits and veggies.

Growing Your Own Food  - Tips

How to Plant a Vegetable Garden

Planting and Gardening Tips
How to Plant a Vegetable Garden. Grow some of your own food by starting a vegetable garden. (youtube)
How to Grow Your Own Food
Grow Food
Gardening Journey
Hungry City Book
Farming Tips

Subsistence Agriculture is self-sufficiency farming in which the farmers focus on growing enough food to feed themselves and their families. The output is mostly for local requirements with little or no surplus for trade. The typical subsistence farm has a range of crops and animals needed by the family to feed and clothe themselves during the year. Planting decisions are made principally with an eye toward what the family will need during the coming year, and secondarily toward market prices.

Seeds - Raised Growing Beds - How Much Food Can I Grow Around My House

Forest Garden

Ron Finley: Guerilla Gardener in South Central LA (video)

Carolyn Steel: How Food Shapes our Cities (video)

Pam Warhurst Edible Landscapes (video) - Incredible Edible Town

Stephen Ritz Growing Green (video) - Green Bronx Machine

City Farming - Farm Schools - Farming Ideas

Cooperative Extension System Office Locations

Matrix Planting is a form of self-sustaining gardening, with a focus on attractive rather than food-bearing plants. Matrix planting is based on matching plant to space. The idea is that, when done successfully, plants replace spades, rakes, and hoes as the controllers of what goes on in the garden. Wildflowers grow all over the world with no help from humans. They are successful because the plants within each plant community have established a balance with one another: they each obtain a share of resources, living space, and opportunities to reproduce. Matrix planting is based on this natural model. It aims to set up similar self-sustaining communities in gardens, by bringing together plants that meld with one another in a balance: all survive and flourish; weeds are excluded. Matrix planting is based on choosing and managing plants in ways which enable them to form similar matrices in the garden. The aim is to enable the plants to occupy the ground and the space above it so effectively that no space is left for weeds and to do this in ways that are decorative and sympathetic to the setting of the garden. The aim of matrix planting is 1) encourage the plants you do want, and 2) discourage the plants you do not want. The key to success lies in the choice of plants. Ill-judged choices result in excessive dominance by one or two species, and the disappearance of those that cannot cope. Well judged choices lead to the establishment of persistent communities of plants which are diverse, self-renewing, resistant to invasion by weeds, and look attractive. It is not possible to plant and walk away as matrices take time to develop and depend on positive, rather than neutral, management. The strongest matrices consist of a succession of layers of vegetation through which sunlight filters, until at ground level there is enough only to support plants that can cope with very little light. The best examples of such matrices occur in deciduous woodlands, but that does not mean all gardens have to become micro-forests—effective matrices can also be formed by shrubs and perennials in mixed borders. Some may argue that matrix planting is just another term for ground cover, but matrix planting is concerned with successive layers of vegetation, one above the other, through which plants form multi-dimensional communities. Few would refer to the stratified vegetation of a wood as ground cover, though seen from a bird’s-eye view the cover is most effective. The essential quality of a plant matrix is the occupation of space, and matrix planting draws inspiration from the ways plants grow together naturally yet it is not a mere imitation of nature.

Slow Gardening encourages participants to savor everything they do, using all the senses, through all seasons, regardless of garden type of style.

Slow Food is an alternative to fast food that strives to preserve traditional and regional cuisine and encourages farming of plants, seeds and livestock characteristic of the local ecosystem.

Micro-Greens - Sprouts

Farmers Markets

City Soil is often Contaminated - Soil Testing

Preparing British Garden Snails - Gordon Ramsay (youtube)

Helix Aspersa is known by the common name garden snail, is a species of land snail. As such it is a terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusc in the family Helicidae, which include the most commonly familiar land snails. Of all terrestrial molluscs, this species may well be the most widely known. In English texts it was classified under the name Helix aspersa for over two centuries, but the prevailing classification now places it in the genus Cornu.

Edible Landscapes

City Seeds Farm Since 2010, we have been a small urban farming business in Toronto that uses residential backyards
to grow a wide range of vegetables. Bicycle-powered backyard farming in Toronto.

Urban farming has increased 29 percent between 2008 and 2013 from 7 million to 9 million people. But we are still losing Farms.

Did you know that 90% of onions grown are consumed in their country of origin?

Increased Food Security and Food Self-Sufficiency Strategy (PDF)

Green House Micro Climates - Easiest Vegetables to Grow In a Small Space (youtube)

How To Regrow Vegetables From Your Kitchen Food Scraps

Sweet Potatoes
MATERIALS: 1 sweet potato. 1 yellow potato. Toothpicks. Mason jar or cups. Water.
INSTRUCTIONS: Halve the sweet potatoes, and place cut side down in a jar filled with water. Use toothpicks stuck into the sweet potato to keep it slightly elevated from the bottom. Place it in direct sunlight. Replace with clean water every one to two days. Once the potatoes have roots and sprouts (called slips) about 4-5 inches long, twist the slips from the potato, and set them in their own bowl of shallow water. The slips will begin growing their own roots, and once they are one inch long, you can plant them in soil.

Lettuce
MATERIALS: 1 head lettuce. Mason jar or cup. Water
INSTRUCTIONS: 1. On a cutting board, cut two inches of the base of lettuce off. 2. Set the lettuce on its base in a glass with ½ inch of water, and place it in sunlight. Change the water every day. 3. After 5-7 days, some new leaves should have begun to sprout from the center, and roots should be forming. Transfer it to soil and you can begin harvesting leaves when they reach 6-8 inches tall.

Bok Choy
MATERIALS: 1 head bok choy. Mason jar or cup. Water
INSTRUCTIONS: On a cutting board, cut the the 2-inch base of the bok choy. Place the bok choy in a container with water and place in a sunny location. Replace with fresh water every day or two. Use a spray bottle to mist the center of the plant for extra hydration if necessary.With time, the outside of the bok choy will deteriorate and turn yellow, while the center will grow turing from a pale green to darker green. When the bok choy has grown new leafy-growth at its center, transfer it to a container with potting mix. The container must have a good drainage hole. Plant the bok choy deep, so only the tips of the new green leaves pointing up. Place in an area that gets at least 6 hours of sunlight a day. Bok choy requires a lot of water, so water generously.

Scallions
MATERIALS: 1 bunch scallions. Mason jar or cup. Water.
INSTRUCTIONS: On a cutting board, trim the base of the scallions, keeping approximately 2 inches of the roots and base intact. Place the roots in ½ inch of water with sunlight. Change the water every other day. Transfer to soil after 5-7 days or keep in the glass of water. You can begin harvesting when they are fully grown.

Onions
MATERIALS: 1 red or yellow onion. Pot. Soil.
INSTRUCTIONS: Trim the base of the onion into a cube, keeping 1-2 inches of the root base intact. Plant the onion directly into soil with a thin layer of soil covering the cut top. To make room in your garden, you can trim the sides of the onion as only the center is needed for regrowth. Harvest the onions when the green tops have yellowed and fallen over.

Ginger
MATERIALS: 1 knob of ginger. Baking dish. Water. Pot. Soil.
INSTRUCTIONS: Place the ginger in a baking dish and soak it in warm water for overnight. Ginger roots grow horizontally so fill a shallow, wide plant pot with rich, well-draining. potting soil. If you want more than one plant, you can cut the root into pieces, as long as they are at least an inch long (each should each still have at least 3 “eyes”), and as long as each plant has at least 8 inches of its own space in the pot. Plant the ginger with the eye bud pointing up below 1-2 inches of soil. Water lightly (often, but not so that it is over soaked) and keep in a warm place, though not one with huge amounts of direct sunlight per day. It will take a few months before the ginger is large enough to begin harvesting pieces from it.

Community Garden - Benefits of a Community Garden

Community Garden is a single piece of land gardened collectively by a group of people.

A community garden not only feeds people, it also brings people together, it also educates people about growing their own food. A community garden can also be used to help educate people about healthy eating habits and nutrition. A community garden can also be used to help educate people about the environment, which in turn can help people feel more connected to our earth, which can ultimately help people feel more connected to themselves, as well as other life forms. A community garden is good for the soul, and a great way to learn.

Food Coops (food security) - Worker Cooperative

Farm to Table - Local Food - Food Security - Food Stamps

Community Supported Agriculture is an alternative, locally based economic model of agriculture and food distribution. A CSA also refers to a particular network, or association of individuals, who have pledged to support one or more local farms, with growers and consumers sharing the risks and benefits of food production. CSA is a system that connects the producer and consumers within the food system more closely by allowing the consumer to subscribe to the harvest of a certain farm or group of farms. It is an alternative socioeconomic model of agriculture and food distribution that allows the producer and consumer to share the risks of farming. The model is a subcategory of civic agriculture that has an overarching goal of strengthening a sense of community through local markets. In return for subscribing to a harvest, subscribers receive either a weekly or bi-weekly box of produce or other farm goods. This includes in-season fruits and vegetables and can expand to dried goods, eggs, milk, meat, etc. Typically, farmers try to cultivate a relationship with subscribers by sending weekly letters of what is happening on the farm, inviting them for harvest, or holding an open-farm event. Some CSAs provide for contributions of labor in lieu of a portion of subscription costs. The term CSA is mostly used in the United States and Canada, but a variety of similar production and economic sub-systems are in use worldwide.

Share consists of a box of vegetables. An average share is about 19 pounds of vegetables weekly. Interested consumers purchase a share or a membership or a subscription, and in return receive a box, bag, basket of seasonal produce each week throughout the farming season.

Community Supported Agriculture - Community Supported Agriculture

Community Supported Agriculture - Community Agriculture

Community Garden - Community Farms

Community Food Bank - Community Farm Alliance

Ten Speed Greens - CSA - Funding for Farmers

Fleet Farming converting lawns into food.

Local Foods, Local Places (PDF)

14-Year-Old's Homework Assignment Sparked A Mission to Feed America's Hungry (youtube)

Katies Krops

Food Pantries help Patrons grow their own Produce

Food Marketing Institute

Good Eggs - Locally Grown

Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market

Oklahoma Food Coop

Restaurant Ideas - Food Truck Ideas

Food is Universal Edible Alphabet: Learning English and Connecting to Culture Through Cooking.

Growing food in urban areas increased 29 percent between 2008 and 2013 from 7 million to 9 million people. Williston, VT (April 2, 2014) - During the past five years there's been a significant shift toward more Americans growing their own food in home and community gardens, increasing from 36 million households in 2008 to 42 million in 2013. The report shows that more young people, particularly millennials (ages 18-34), are the fastest growing population segment of food gardeners. In 2008 there were 8 million millennial food gardeners. That figure rose to 13 million in 2013, an increase of 63%. Millennials also nearly doubled their spending on food gardening, from $632 million in 2008 to $1.2 billion in 2013. The report found that more households with children participated in food gardening, increasing participation during the same time period by 25%, from 12 million to 15 million. Additionally, there was a 29% increase in food gardening by people living in urban areas, up from 7 million in 2008 to 9 million in 2013. Two million more households also reported participating in community gardening in 2013 than 2008, a 200% increase in five years. Garden.org

2009 Impact of Gardening in America White Paper (PDF)

Soul Fire Farm is committed to ending racism and injustice in the food system. We raise life-giving food and act in solidarity with people marginalized by food apartheid.

Black Gardeners Matter - Bread

Feeding the Hungry

Up to 90 percent of Americans could be fed entirely by food grown or raised within 100 miles of their homes.

Digital Food - vpro backlight Jun 12, 2015 (youtube)

We can feed everyone on the planet with just the land that we have. Do we need vertical farms? Yes. Not just because you can grow more food, because it relieves some of the restrictions that you would have in certain farming regions. Plus we learn more about food when we grow it under different conditions, and it gives people more options and choices. Food is not being shared fairly, and too much food is being used ineffectively and inefficiently. So if we were to correct these deficiencies, and cut down on the low quality processed foods that do more harm then good, and reduce food waste, there would be enough food for everyone.

FarmBot Genesis (youtube) Automated Robot planting, watering and soil analyzing system. Farmbotio (youtube channel) - Farmbot.io

Holistic Management in agriculture describes a systems thinking approach to managing resources. Holistic planned grazing is similar to rotational grazing but differs in that it more explicitly recognizes and provides a framework for adapting to the four basic ecosystem processes: the water cycle, the mineral cycle including the carbon cycle, energy flow, and community dynamics (the relationship between organisms in an ecosystem), giving equal importance to livestock production and social welfare. Holistic Management has been likened to "a permaculture approach to rangeland management. The Holistic Management decision-making framework uses six key steps to guide the management of resources: Define in its entirety what you are managing. No area should be treated as a single-product system. By defining the whole, people are better able to manage. This includes identifying the available resources, including money, that the manager has at his disposal. Define what you want now and for the future. Set the objectives, goals and actions needed to produce the quality of life sought, and what the life-nurturing environment must be like to sustain that quality of life far into the future. Watch for the earliest indicators of ecosystem health. Identify the ecosystem services that have deep impacts for people in both urban and rural environments, and find a way to easily monitor them. One of the best examples of an early indicator of a poorly functioning environment is patches of bare ground. An indicator of a better functioning environment is newly sprouting diversity of plants and a return or increase of wildlife. Don't limit the management tools you use. The eight tools for managing natural resources are money/labor, human creativity, grazing, animal impact, fire, rest, living organisms and science/technology. To be successful you need to use all these tools to the best of your ability. Test your decisions with questions that are designed to help ensure all your decisions are socially, environmentally and financially sound for both the short and long term. Monitor proactively, before your managed system becomes more imbalanced. This way the manager can take adaptive corrective action quickly, before the ecosystem services are lost. Always assume your plan is less than perfect and use a feedback loop that includes monitoring for the earliest signs of failure, adjusting and re-planning as needed. In other words use a "canary in a coal mine" approach. Savory stated four key principles of Holistic Managemen planned grazing, which he intended to take advantage of the symbiotic relationship between large herds of grazing animals and the grasslands that support them: Nature functions as a holistic community with a mutualistic relationship between people, animals and the land. If you remove or change the behavior of any keystone species like the large grazing herds, you have an unexpected and wide-ranging negative impact on other areas of the environment. It is absolutely crucial that any agricultural planning system must be flexible enough to adapt to nature’s complexity, since all environments are different and have constantly changing local conditions. Animal husbandry using domestic species can be used as a substitute for lost keystone species. Thus when managed properly in a way that mimics nature, agriculture can heal the land and even benefit wildlife, while at the same time benefiting people. Time and timing is the most important factor when planning land use. Not only is it crucial to understand how long to use the land for agriculture and how long to rest, it is equally important to understand exactly when and where the land is ready for that use and rest.

Holistic Grazing means using minimal equipment, technology, and money. Livestock is used as a tool to increase soil fertility and plant life. Incorporating plant organic matter and manure into the soil promotes the recycling of nutrients. These are just a few of the management skills that are used in holistic management.