Vertical veggies to sprout on Skid Row, thanks to Poly group

[flashl]

Students and staff help create panels of plants that have been moved to L.A. to hang on walls for use by homeless and low-income residents

San Luis Obispo
By Nick Wilson

Some Cal Poly students and staff have their minds set on growing 4,000 fruit and vegetable plants in the concrete jungle of Los Angeles — on the walls of four downtown buildings.

They helped load trucks last week with panels of plants that they made and plan to mount.

The group hopes the so-called “edible walls” will benefit many homeless and low-income residents in housing complexes in the city’s Skid Row area and at Miguel Contreras Learning Complex, a downtown high school.

The method of farming on walls addresses the lack of space in the urban area; the sideways-resting planters span 30 feet across.

The project installed just over a week ago is a collaboration between the university and the nonprofit group Urban Farming, which has helped start rooftop and community gardens in cities such as New York, Detroit and St. Louis, as well as abroad.

[nilram]

1. Woo-hoo, Go Poly!

Damn, I enjoyed going to school there, <mumble> years ago...

[flashl]

2. I can't hear you. nt

:rofl:

[YOY]

3. Wonder how cost effective this would be...

n/t

[flashl]

4. Grow Your Own

NY Times
July 28, 2008

“Edible landscape” seems to be going head to head with “staycation” as the most popular catch phrase of Summer 2008. Lawns may not be disappearing before our very eyes, but citizens are definitely swapping out blades of grass for bushels of beans in increasing numbers.

...

Two months ago, I learned about My Farm, run by mortgage-broker-turned-farmer Trevor Paque. My Farm is essentially an urban take on community-sponsored agriculture (CSAs). With CSAs, individuals essentially invest in rural farms to help support their operations and are given a weekly box of fresh produce in return. With My Farm (and similar operations found in cities including New York and Portland, Ore.), you can grow food in your own backyard with the assistance of urban farmers like Paque. In one day, he created our 120-square-foot backyard farm — landscaping with found materials from the yard, installing a drip-irrigation system and planting heirloom seeds. Now he comes once a week to harvest a box of organic and ridiculously local produce for us — plus an additional box, which he sells to another family in our neighborhood.

This costs us about $100 a month, and has allowed us to replace our water-dependent grass patch with an edible landscape. After just three months in business, Paque has a waiting list of over 200 people and is scrambling to keep up with demand.

Urban agriculture has been around since at least the 18th century, but it’s an idea whose time has truly come — now — in the United States. The reasons range from the fact that our hands are always found glued to computer keys and not even occasionally in the dirt, to the scary existence of industrially grown tomatoes that may (or may not) cause salmonella, to the fact that a drive to the market can now cost more than the food you purchase there.