Just Pickin Greens

How to start an Urban Farm!

Well its been a week and a half since i have been here in this city. Things have definitely changed. A LOT! New faces all over the place, old hang outs gone, new buildings up and running and favorite people missing. But, the good thing is it seems like all my friends that still remain are very much the way I remember them…amazing!

People are into this ya’ll. I think i met more people in the past week involved with urban Agriculture than ever before…and all of them right here in this city. So, if you don’t know the situation here it is.

My friend Elissa just recently bought a house on Emerald St, in East Kensington Philadelphia. The house is incredible and she invited me to move in. So I am currently writing this on my brand new bedroom floor (no bed yet, anyone have any leads?) and its lovely. My windows face east. The morning sun bursts into my room like a bolt of lightning and it does this because of an awesome thing called vacant land! Directly across the street from our house is 6 empty, vacant lots that are just screaming to be cleaned, worked and grown on. We are hoping to start clearing the weeds and cleaning up all the garbage next week.

So How to start and Urban Farm isn’t an easy question.

Elissa and I had our first meeting which we like to call “FREAK OUT SESSION”!

First of course we thought of names…i know thats not priority but we had to start with something fun! (By the way…Elissa is all about fun…Its great to be around someone so positive and lively!…although…she wants to put up a badmitton court in our backyard…I’m not into it right now but we shall see?!)

So we have many names but we like Farmadelphia…except that we can’t really be one farm with that that name so then we decided to each take 10 minutes without the other around and just write what we envision our farm and organization to be. She asked me not to post her’s ( i know lame) but here is mine!!

“Patrick envisions A world, a city, a space where everyone of all races, creeds and ages shares in the Beautiful realities of life. A place where people can feel the connection between themselves and the food that nourishes them, the roof that shields them, the water that hydrates them and the people they share this planet with. I want to grow and provide food for the people around me, teach those people how to ultimately grow their own food and eventually join together and share in the bounty that we create and provide everyone with the opportunity to take or buy the food from us and return all profits to that same community. I envision offering free classes, workshops, community events and gatherings where we can join together in our diversity.

I dream of a city that sustains itself solely off the land that neighbors our homes, that is neglected and abandoned. I want to see these spaces transformed from vacant and ghostly rectangular nothingness into vibrant, green, positive and nutritive gardens, which produce the food that allows us to keep our bodies functioning and provides a safe, peaceful and enlivening environment to any and all who is open to the world that is at our fingertips. I believe that educating people from the elderly to children and exposing them to the wonderful alchemy of growing something and the beauty of the natural world will have a major impact not only on the individual but on the community, our culture, our society and ultimately our country.

I envision a local economy that thrives and sustains the greater community, contributes and works with the communities that surround it and ultimately is connected to the greater national and international community through our own culture, techniques, traditions and goods.

I believe that this vision starts with our backyards and our neighbors. It will gain movement through our attitudes, communication and honesty. And it will gain strength through the nourishment we give ourselves and the connection we have with the ground we stand on and the people we co-exist with.”

YEAH I KNOW….I’m an idealist…but c’mon…all you really need is some faith and some dedication and it doesn’t seem so hard to achieve, right?

So next we wrote down all the things we will absolutely positively need before we can even start this process. that list looks like this:

What do we need to have by spring?
GET RID OF THE VAN (Some random old VW van is parked in our lots)
Land
Soil
Water
Hands
Money
Tools
Wood
Seeds

So that doesn’t sem too daunting right…escept once its broken down on how to get it all its a bit much. So we have the land but we need to have some sort of ligitimate and maybe even legal access or ownership of it. I will post pictures of the land very soon!!!

Next we need to take a soil test and test for any heavy metals, toxins and minerals. As some of you may know urban environments are riddled with lead because of the use of lead paint on exteriors of houses, especially vacant lots where houses used to stand. WE DON”T want to eat lead…or we will go insane…seriously! Also, arsenic, cadmium and some other crazy metal is found often in vacant urban lands. We also need to check for chlorine and other chemicals and toxins in the soil. Apparently Penn state does a very cheap if not free soil test. We plan on gettin the hook up through Elissa’s work…but keep that on the Down Low…shit I just published it on the internet! So once we get the tests back two things could happen. If we have tons of bad stuff in our soil will either have to build very tall rasied beds to plant in or bioremediate the soil. Bio remediation is the act of using plants, like sunflowers, brassicas and others to pull heavy metals and toxins out of the soil. It takes a very long time, as in YEARS, to completely remediate the soil…but its worth it i think. We would have to take those plants to the dump because of the high amounts of crap in them. But at least that stuff won’t be in the soil. Then we can plant right into the ground. But if the tests come back okay then we will just plant in the soil right away and that would make our project much easier. Of course we will also have to supplement with compost and possibly top soil depending.

Next we have to figure out our water source. We could use city water but that will be expensive as hell and is full of flouride and chlorine….which we don’t really want. So we plan on building a rain water catchment system off of a shed that we wil need to store our tools and other such things. Then we will need to figure out how we will irrigate. Overhead or drip or both and how will we pump it…gravity or with an electric pump?

Then, and maybe this should be earlier in the list, we need to find more hands to help us. This one is a bit overwhelming. Its always hard to convince people to help when there is always so many more exciting things to be done. But we gotta get used to it if we wanna connect with people.

NEXT is the big one. MONEY! Who the hell knows how this will be achieved. We have dreams of some anonymous donor just tossing 100,000 bucks at us…HOW COOL WOULD THAT BE! Any takers? We do have some ideas for fundraisders and we are tossing around the idea of making this all a non-profit! Non-profits are quite complicated though and we aren’t sure if we want to deal with all that bureaucratic BS. But its easier to get grants with a non-profit. These are decisions that need to be made soon though!

Then we need some tools…like shovels, hoes, forks, rakes, hammers, nails, screws and so on and on. Anyone got any old tools they’re gettin rid of!

Then we need wood to build raised beds and the rain water catchment!

AND FINALLY!

If all the previous things go well and all are acheived we need to get SEEDS! That food we plan on growing don’t just magically appear. Of course thats a lot of money too but we have found out about quite a few seed grant programs and donations from seed compaanies that we would probably qualify for! But regardless I have ordered us almost every single 2009 seed catalog available…I won’t need to read a book for months now!

AND THERE YA GO…thats how Elissa and I have figured out How to Start our Urban Farm! If anyone has any pointers or things you think we missed that we will need before spring…LET US KNOW!

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