I guess I'm a "part-time" member of the Green City Growers (GCG) team, working on a business plan with a team of fellow BGI students based upon GCG's business. Of course, I know little to nothing about farming or gardening besides gleaning information about our incredibly energy intensive and "unhealthy" industrial food system from reports like this one from the Post Carbon Institute and (of course) Michael Pollan's and Mark Bittman's books on the massive changes required in our industrialized food system.
Anyway, I decided to stop by at the Heartbeat Collective in Jamaica Plain for a little while at the Urban Intensive Workshop and see what it's all about. Most of my work with GCG has been through e-mails and phone calls with Jessie and Gabe, and for all my hemming and hawing about local food, I'd yet to plant a single seedling in anything. In fact, the Cyclamen I bought for work lasted a few months before I managed to kill it (I think with too much water, at least that's what Joe the Gardener thought).
It was great! There were about ten "students" there listening to Gabe passionately talk about the creation of urban food systems. Jessie mixed up a great salad along with a vegan pasta salad for lunch. Then we dove in and built a 4'x4' raised bed complete with soil mixing (1/3 Intervale diverse compost. 1/3 sphagnum peat, 1/3 coarse horticultural vermiculite - the "lite" is for more than one reason!). I loved the fact that Gabe talked about the fact that the materials going into the construction of the bed were NOT local nor sustainable; the wood came from Home Depot (GCG is working on gaining access to New England Fir), the Intervale compost is from The Intervale Center in Burlington, VT, the peat's from somewhere in the UK (GCG would prefer to use a material derived from coconut shells, but its availability is spotty and it comes from the East Indies) and the vermiculite...who knows.
GCG is acting, not waiting for the perfect solution; they'll help develop it.
The hands on construction project of the bed was great, and we all pitched in to the completion. Their commitment to making a micro-farm that has the best possible odds of success for the urban farmer (or one of their customers) was clear to me. They used the best possible soil mixture for this climate, planted their own starts, and installed a timed irrigation system to ensure the proper plant hydration.
Now, to develop a solar powered rain catchment with a timer system to provide the watering system (the WPI geek in me is re-emerging!)
