Grow your own edible landscape

Daniela, who sent me the initial NY Times article that spurned the "Farming at your Back Doorstep" posting, sent me the link to the New York Times' By Design blog that I also thought was worth sharing. This blog entry, in comparison with the article posted earlier, introduces the idea of urban agriculture not as a bourgeois fad but rather as a piece of a larger movement towards locally produced food. Allison Arieff, the blog writer, hired Trevor Paque of My Farm to build a garden in her San Francisco backyard, replacing her "water dependent grass patch" with an edible landscape. Arieef also responds to those who see this as a "lazy locovore" trend by pointing towards the "collaboration, community, and connections to food, neighbors, and land" that has been created by this movement that is "slowly loosing it's elitist associations".

Arieff then goes onto to describe a few other related projects both locally, in her home town of San Francisco, and nationally. The two projects she talks about that I really got excited about are the San Francisco Victory Garden at Civic Center and P.F.1, this summer's PS1/MOMA Young Architect Program winner. The San Francisco Victory Garden is sponsored by Slow Food Nation, a nonprofit organization that is part of the slow food movement, which will be producing a three day celebration of American food over Labor Day weekend. Both are really interesting projects, which I will talk about in later postings. What I like about Arieff's posting is that she places urban agriculture in the context of a greater movement and shows the increasing urban consciousness about where our food comes from.