Commonwealth Club - The Urban Farming Movement

Always an entertaining and thought provoking venue, SF's Commonwealth Club is paneling a group of enterprising folk working to bring local food production back in urban environments.

The Urban Farming Movement
When: Wednesday, May 12 6:30pm
Where: 595 Market Street (conveniently kittycorner from 2 of the GardenHoe's offices)
Cost: $12 members, $20 non-m, $7 student

Panel guests:
Jason Mark, Co-manager, Alemany Farm; Editor-in-Chief, Earth Island Journal
Novella Carpenter, Author, Farm City
Christopher Burley, Founder, Hayes Valley Farm
David Gavrich (aka The Goat Whisperer), Founder, City Grazing
Sarah Rich, Writer; Editor; Co-founder, The Foodprint Project; Co-author, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century - Moderator

water fairies

I love these handpainted "water me" signs we use in the Community Garden. One of the gardeners painted them herself! Lovely!

that's what THEY said...

I'd told someone this tidbit, and got scoffed at. "More iron than HAMBURGER? Really? HAMBURGER?"

Yep. HAMBURGER. That's what THEY said, anyway....

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Pledge it!

Through Gardener's Supply Company, an employee-owned company, you can make the pledge to 'Grow what you eat' and enter to win a 3'x6' raised planter bed.



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that's with an 'e', please

See? There's a bunch of us out there! enough for promotion, anyway!

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summer of love

I released the tub of ladybugs into the garden last night, and went to check on things this morning. I was pleased to see how many had acclimated to the veggie patch, and then started to notice something else - there was a whoooole lot of luvvvvin' going on! Seriously, EVERYWHERE I looked, they were getting it on with each other.



And NO, I am not embarrassed to have been intrigued by this - this is SCIENCE, people! [wink]

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if you aren't starting your OWN garden...

... this movie just might motivate you to do so...

"King Corn is a documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation. In King Corn, Ian Cheeney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, nitrogen fertilizers, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America's most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat - and how we farm."

We can't leave it up to Big Business to source our nutrients. Take it (and a garden hoe) into your own hands!

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