"101 creative and inspiring ideas to grow edible and decorative plants in urban environments"--

There are twenty million acres of lawns in North America. In their current form, these unproductive expanses of grass represent a significant financial and environmental cost. However, viewed through a different lens, they can also be seen as a tremendous source of opportunity. Access to land is a major barrier for many people who want to enter the agricultural sector, and urban and suburban yards have huge potential for would-be farmers wanting to become part of this growing movement. The Urban Farmer is a comprehensive, hands-on, practical manual to help you learn the techniques and business strategies you need to make a good living growing high-yield, high-value crops right in your own backyard (or someone else's). Major benefits include: Low capital investment and overhead costs Reduced need for expensive infrastructure Easy access to markets Growing food in the city means that fresh crops may travel only a few blocks from field to table, making this innovative approach the next logical step in the local food movement. Based on a scalable, easily reproduced business model, The Urban Farmer is your complete guide to minimizing risk and maximizing profit by using intensive production in small leased or borrowed spaces. Curtis Stone is the owner/operator of Green City Acres, a commercial urban farm growing vegetables for farmers markets, restaurants, and retail outlets. During his slower months, Curtis works as a public speaker, teacher, and consultant, sharing his story to inspire a new generation of farmers.

The "how-to" guide for a new generation of farmers from the author of Farm City and a leading urban garden educator. In this indispensable guide, Farm City author Novella Carpenter and Willow Rosenthal share their experience as successful urban farmers and provide practical blueprints-complete with rich visual material-for novice and experienced growers looking to bring the principles of ethical food to the city streets. The Essential Urban Farmer guides readers from day one to market day, advising on how to find the perfect site, design a landscape, and cultivate crops. For anyone who has ever grown herbs on windowsills, or tomatoes on fire escapes, this is an invaluable volume with the potential to change our menus, our health, and our cities forever.

'Excellent book.' Nigella Lawson 'Charming, inspiring, uplifting... pure lovely.' Marian Keyes 'Read Rhapsody in Green. A novelist's beautiful, useful essays about her tiny garden.' India Knight 'Glorious...for anyone who loves fruit, vegetables, herbs and language. It makes you see them with new eyes.' Diana Henry 'A witty account of 'extreme allotmenteering' for all obsessive gardeners' Mail on Sunday 'An extremely entertaining and inspiring story of one woman's passionate transformation of a small, irregular shaped urban garden into a bountiful source of food.' Woman & Home 'A gardening book like no other, this is the author's 'love letter' to her garden. She relays warm and witty stories about the trials and tribulations throughout her gardening year.' Garden News '...this inspirational, funny book, written by someone who hankers after a homesteader's lifestyle, will make you look at even your window box in a new, more productive light.' The Simple Things 'Gardening is not a hobby but a passion: a mess of excitement and compulsion and urgency and desire. Those who practise it are botanists, evangelists, freedom fighters, midwives and saboteurs; we kill; we bleed. No, I can't drop everything to come in for dinner; it's a matter of life and death out here.' Novelist Charlotte Mendelson has a secret life. Despite owning only six square metres of urban soil and a few pots, she is an extreme gardener; the creator of a tiny but bountiful edible jungle. And like all enthusiasts, she will not rest until you share her obsession. This is the story of an amateur gardener's journey to addiction: her attempts to buy lion dung from London Zoo and to build her own cold frame; her disinhibited composting and creative approach to design; her prejudices (roses, purple flowers, people with orchards); and her passions: quinces, salad-leaves, herbs, Japanese greens and ancient British apples. It is a story of where fantasy meets reality, of the slow onset of a consuming love and, most of all, of how gardening, however peculiar, can save your life.

This book provides an interdisciplinary overview of the role of gardens in cities throughout different historical periods. It shows that, thanks to various forms of spatial and social organisation, gardens are part of the material urban landscape, biodiversity, symbolic and social shape, and assets of our cities, and are increasingly becoming valued as an ‘order’ to follow. Gardens have long been part of the development of cities, serving different purposes through the ages: shaping neighborhoods to promote health or hygiene, introducing aesthetic or biological elements, gathering the citizens around a social purpose, and providing food and diversity in times of crisis. Highlighting examples that can serve as the basis for comparisons, the chapters offer a brief panorama of experiences and models of gardens in the city – in the European context and in various periods of history – while also discussing issues related to garden cities, urban agriculture and community gardens. The contributors are university staff from various disciplines in the human and life sciences, in discourse with other academics but also with practitioners who are interested in experiences with urban gardens and in promoting an awareness of their spatial, social and ‘philosophical’ goals throughout history. The book will appeal to urban geographers, sociologists and historians, but also to urban ecologists dealing with ecosystem services, biodiversity and sustainable development in cities. From a more operational standpoint, landscape planners and architects are sure to find many of the projects enlightening and inspirational.

While most of the existing literature on community gardens and urban agriculture share a tendency towards either an advocacy view or a rather dismissive approach on the grounds of the co-optation of food growing, self-help and voluntarism to the neoliberal agenda, this collection investigates and reflects on the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of these initiatives. It questions to what extent they address social inequality and injustice and interrogates them as forms of political agency that contest, transform and re-signify ‘the urban’. Claims for land access, the right to food, the social benefits of city greening/community conviviality, and insurgent forms of planning, are multiplying within policy, advocacy and academic literature; and are becoming increasingly manifested through the practice of urban gardening. These claims are symptomatic of the way issues of social reproduction intersect with the environment, as well as the fact that urban planning and the production of space remains a crucial point of an ever-evolving debate on equity and justice in the city. Amid a mushrooming over positive literature, this book explores the initiatives of urban gardening critically rather than apologetically. The contributors acknowledge that these initiatives are happening within neoliberal environments, which promote –among other things - urban competition, the dismantling of the welfare state, the erasure of public space and ongoing austerity. These initiatives, thus, can either be manifestation of new forms of solidarity, political agency and citizenship or new tools for enclosure, inequality and exclusion. In designing this book, the progressive stance of these initiatives has therefore been taken as a research question, rather than as an assumption. The result is a collection of chapters that explore potentials and limitations of political gardening as a practice to envision and implement a more sustainable and just city.

In a bustling, urban neighborhood, count the ways one little lot becomes a beautiful community vegetable garden. Count all the ways (one to ten) an urban community unites to clean up an abandoned lot. From building planter boxes to pulling weeds to planting seeds, everyone works together to transform the lot into a bountiful vegetable garden. As the garden grows, strangers become friends, eventually sharing in a special feast with the harvest they grew.