An Edible Schoolyard Grows in Brooklyn

Yesterday Historic P.S. 39 The Henry Bristow Landmark School in Park Slope, Brooklyn launched an innovative Edible Community Garden (ECG) pilot program. The program plans to integrate the garden into the school’s curriculum, food program, and the surrounding community and is based in an edible micro-garden, showcasing modern planting methods appropriate for urban challenges. 

The growing obesity epidemic across the US has highlighted the critical link between children’s health and nutrition, and improving school food has been recognized as one important area where cities can tackle the problem at a local level.  School gardens have been recognized as engaging, hands on solutions to this issue. With the stated goal of engaging students in all aspects of farm to fork activities from inception to harvest, the project hopes to foster curiosity and a desire to understanding where food comes from in the students and community, as well as encouraging healthy lifestyle choices, and teach them in a hands-on way what it means to be environmental stewards.  

Currently, outside of several well-publicized and intensively funded school garden initiatives, few examples exist in the US that can quickly and affordably enable communities to tackle nutritional and food justice issues right now.  The pilot project hopes to team P.S. 39 staff with parents and community members in order to build a showcase school garden that aims to become a template and inclusive model of urban micro-farming for schools, homes, and businesses across the country, all within a 6 month time period.

P.S. 39 ECG intends to implement a garden-based learning curriculum where scientific principles come to life. The edible garden will be used to engage students with hands-on learning experiences from ‘seed to plate’ throughout the growing seasons.  The elementary classes will study, plant, maintain, harvest and enjoy the edible plants through curriculum-tied activities, learning about scientific principals through hands on experience. 

The pilot program will be based in pioneering sub-irrigated micro-garden planter technology, ideal for urban environments. Sub-irrigated planter systems (SIPs), store water and oxygen below the potting mix and roots, conserving water and nutrients, and are therefore more accessible and environmentally friendly alternative to conventional gardens.   The beneficial closed loop system dramatically increases yields, and aboveground planter system is ideal for urban lots without open soil areas or with possibly contaminated soil.   Through the use of readily available recycled containers such as shipping pallets and soda bottles, SIP design makes ‘plots’ portable and easy to maintain, as well as, providing an economically efficient solutions for communities with limited resources

The Edible Community Garden Pilot Program represents an integral component of a larger district-wide movement to become a pilot district for wellness in the schools.  Other local schools are also growing food in school gardens, implementing salad bars and healthier menus in their cafeterias, reducing styrofoam and waste, integrating food choices into the curriculum, and helping families learn to cook healthier meals.

Hopefully this innovative project will prove inspirational to other schools in the New York area and beyond, but also show that these projects can be successful even with limited time, funding and experience, so that all communities see that enjoying the fruits of their labors is within their reach.

Window Farming: Growing Food in your Flat

A new project has introduced city slickers with a new, innovative way to grow food in their homes, by using their  creating new ways  apartment windows.  The Windowfarm project creates kits that allow urban apartment dwellers to grow a diverse group of plants in a modular, hydroponic "farm" kit that hangs in front of window frames.  

Windowfarms use repurposed plastic bottles (supplied by the purchaser) along with a pump and irrigation system that circulates nutrient-laden water to your plants. The vertical systems open design allow apartment residents to grow up to 32 vegetable plants in a typical apartment window, ranging from tomatoes, snow peas, and lettuces, to many other vegatables, allowing urban dwellers to produce their own fresh produce and herbs year- round, as well as potentially cutting down on grocery bills.  The company also sees the projects as a potential way to address food deserts in areas experiencing food poverty and environmental injustices (particularly low income neighborhoods).  While this may be an idealistic view, the company has also created educational units to be used in classrooms, and runs a contest so that even schools lacking funding can incorporate them into science/ classroom curriculum. 

The company considers the projects to be “R&D-I-Y, or research and develop it yourself.” Windowfarms founder, Brooklynite Britta Riley, sees the kits as a “public mass collaboration on hydroponic food growing research & development,” and a way for non-experts to contribute to the green revolution.  Currently over 17,000 people world over have joined the window farming community and the kits are being used as far as China and


To learn more about Windowfarms kits, click here.
To listen to more about Windowfarms on NPR, click here.

Master's Dissertation: Growing Cohesive Communities

This research looked in to the potential for urban farms to aid in strengthening communities.  As many urban gardens and farms currently contribute only minimally to local food security, this research hoped to highlight another way in which institutes of urban agriculture contribute to the sustainability of local areas.  Currently, many urban green spaces in large cities face increasing pressure from various development interests.  This research hopes to illustrate one of many reasons that these spaces should be not only preserved by, but also receive increasing support from local governments.  While this research was carried out in London, many of the characteristics of the study, population, and city make it applicable to other large cities, especially New York.

In recent years the UK government policy has become increasingly concerned with discovering innovative ways to build local community cohesion, with a focus on promoting civic interaction that builds trust, understanding and a sense of place.  This paper brings together the concepts of ‘micro-publics’ (Amin, 2002) and ‘open public arenas’ (Healey, 1996) to suggest types of institutions that can serve this purpose and proposes that urban farms are one such institution.  To date, while other social benefits are acknowledged, the majority of research on urban agriculture (UA) has focused on food production and environmental concerns.  Furthermore, there remains a dearth of research looking specifically at urban farms, to which this paper hopes to contribute. This research uses the case study of Hackney City Farm in Hackney, one of the most diverse boroughs in London, to show how urban farming has the potential to bring diverse groups together and allow cohesion to be formed. Furthermore it shows that, despite concern that building stronger communities can cause exclusion, the cohesion built on urban farms has the potential to be inclusive of the broader community. It closes with recommendations for the increased support of urban farms by local authorities, but allows that further research is needed to increase the robustness of data in this field.

Urban Farms: Fertile Ground for the Growth of  Community Cohesion?