MILWAUKEE (AP) - Urban farmer Will Allen says even city people need to go back to the soil.

The former pro basketball player points to the ex-garden center in Milwaukee that he transformed into an urban vegetable farm with chickens, ducks and goats in a small barnyard out back.

Living in a city makes it easy to forget where food comes from, or maybe, if you grew up in one like I did, you never really get to learn. This is why urban farming is so brilliant: not only does it make local food a reality for urban dwellers, but it also encourages us, even in subliminal ways, to think about buying other local food more often. The recent In These Times article on “Farming the Concrete Jungle” explores urban agriculture—a term that includes commercial farms, community gardens, and backyard gardens—in different cities around the country, from the benighted (West Oakland, which has 40 times more liquor stores than grocery stores) to the…well, mostly the benighted. But isn’t that where good food is most needed?

According to the 2000 Census, which the article quotes, 80 percent of Americans now live in cities or suburbs, where fruits and vegetables can spend two weeks in transit until arriving. But if the soil between the sidewalk and the curb tests low enough in lead, why not try to coax something out of it? City Slicker in California grew 6,500 pounds of produce on less than one acre of land last year, and the Added Value farm in Red Hook, Brooklyn grows masses of veg in a foot of soil taken from the Bronx Zoo that lies over an old, asphalt baseball diamond. ItÂ’s almost as if toxins make the tomatoes grow. ;

The Hadrian Awards, held in Newcastle Civic Centre, take place every two years to celebrate and promote the best in architecture and design of the built environment in the North-East and Cumbria.

The 2007 Awards were the first to be jointly organised by a new partnership between the Royal Institute of British Architects North- East, Northern Architecture, the North of England Civic Trust and the regional branch of the Landscape Institute.
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Another award went to the Ouseburn Farm building in Newcastle, which is a symbol of the revival of the urban farm in the Lower Ouseburn Valley following closure which saw the land – once the site of lead works – decontaminated.

Newton Architects worked on the building, which hosts various groups and organisations, recycles rainwater to flush toilets, has a green roof of sedum plants and solar panels.

It also features an artwork window which includes old photographs of residents from the area.

Beardsley Community Farm grows and gives away 3,000-plus pounds of vegetables each year but this parcel of ground is neither big nor rural.

Located off Western Avenue in the shadow of downtown Knoxville, Beardsley is an urban demonstration garden. Its seven acres were once part of the campus of Beardsley Middle School that closed in 1991.

Part of the Knoxville-Knox County Community Action Committees urban agriculture program, Beardsley recently won the National Gardening Associations 2007 Mantis Award for Community Gardens. Its reward was a lightweight tiller/cultivator.

Forget the 100-mile diet. What’s really in vogue these days is the 100-yard diet, where eating locally means eating what’s in your and your neighbors’ backyards. Particularly intriguing are the new breed of urban farmers, city dwellers who’ve made it their mission to produce most or all of their food within whatever (confined, urban, often difficult to cultivate) space is available.

Over at the Your City Farmer blog, “intrepid urban farmer” Novella Carpenter tried the 100-yard diet (a phrase she coined) for a month, subsisting on ducks, rabbits, chickens, pigs, bees, vegetables and more that she raised on a rented plot of land in Oakland, California. What I particularly love about Carpenter’s blog (which she continued to write after her 30-day experiment was finished) is that it doesn’t conceal the warts of farming–you hear about the gross things (rendering duck fat; cruising Dumpsters for pig feed and supplies) as well as the sublime (making nocino, a type of liquor, out of green walnuts, cinnamon, honey, and vodka.) Your City Farmer is more of a traditional diary-style blog than an informational guide, but it will inspire you to at learn more about your food and how you can produce more of it yourself; I don’t know how to raise and butcher a rabbit, but now I want to find out.

Vertical farms could do for agriculture what skyscrapers did for office space.

The term “urban farming” may conjure up a community garden where locals grow a few heads of lettuce. But academics envisage something different for the hungry world of the 21st century: a vertical farm that will do for agriculture what the skyscraper did for office space. Build a 21-story circular greenhouse, says Dickson Despommier, an environmental scientist at Columbia University, and it can be as productive as 588 acres of land growing, say, 12 million heads of lettuce a vear.

LAKE WALES, Fla. Find out how to transform your yard into a butterfly garden during Historic Bok Sanctuarys how-to workshops. Butterfly expert Gil Daigneau, owner of Urban Farm and Butterfly Garden in Lakeland, will teach you everything you need to know to start and maintain a successful butterfly garden. Youll learn to identify host and nectar plants along with planting techniques to create maximum eye-appeal. And, to support conservation practices, youll learn about Florida-friendly plants that attract butterflies.

We receive many requests from garden clubs and other organizations interested in a fun and educational group outing for their members, says Stephanie Conner, Sanctuary group sales representative. With more than 50 identified varieties of butterflies at the Sanctuary, workshops on butterfly gardening are especially popular.

As family schedules move into work and school mode this weekend, subtle changes signal the beginnings of a shift in season. Daylight hours are shrinking and nights are cooling. The dews have begun.

Sprightly carpets of pink and white ivy-leaved cyclamen now in full bloom are one of my garden’s key markers that summer is winding down. They coincide with a flurry of fruit picking. Blueberries are still ripening, along with prune plums, fall raspberries, figs, and apples.

Feast of Fields, the annual grazing event that is as near as city dwellers get to a country harvest festival, has always been a movable feast. Originally held on a farm in the Fraser Valley, it had one misguided year at the VanDusen Botanical Garden before returning to its rural roots, most recently at Vista D’oro Farms in Langley. This year, it takes its white tents, delicious fare, local wine, and foot-tapping music to a former haunt, the UBC Farm. With no clogged highways to travel, Vancouverites might rate this the best location of all.

As you wander the meadow, napkin and glass in hand, making decisions like “Nu or Rare? Which restaurant shall I bestow my custom on next?” you could be forgiven for thinking that this is just a sybaritic afternoon in the sun, but there’s more going on. There are reasons behind it, including this year’s switch to a location that’s a 24-hectare bit of rusticity 20 minutes from downtown. “We’re holding it at UBC Farm because we want to highlight the importance of keeping an urban farm in production,” says Heather Pritchard, executive director of FarmFolk/CityFolk, which organizesand benefits fromthis annual fundraiser. Last year, the three annual Feast of Fields events (Whistler and Vancouver Island host the others) delivered 45 percent of the funding that lets the organization be somewhat independent of granting agencies.

Jorge Carmenate edges his stocky, mid-40s frame under the canopy of a neem tree and our small, pink-cheeked group follows suit. Even in the mid-morning, the heat in central Cuba is searing. Carmenate welcomes us to El Rabanito, a three-hectare market garden in a mixed commercial and residential neighbourhood in the city of Ciego de avila. He’s thrilled that yet another group of Canadians and Americans have come to see what is one of the nation’s top-producing organoponicos, the urban organic farm co-operatives that are the cornerstone of how Cuba manages to feed its 11.4 million citizens, using as little as five per cent of the energy that it takes its neighbours to the north.

El Rabanito is one stop on a 14-day food tour of Cuba, organized by Bowen Island, B.C.-based agronomist Wendy Holm. She coordinates sustainable agriculture exchanges between Cuban and Canadian farmers and organizes a yearly tour specifically designed for chefs and foodies curious about how Cuba has emerged as a world leader in community-based agriculture, urban farming, and organic food production. It’s not a gourmet tour de force, rather a frank look at the reality of the Cuban food production and distribution system. Largely state-orchestrated with a few free market concessions, it’s also state-supported. Farmers in Cuba are at the top tier of state salaries, some earning more than doctors and lawyers. And the state provides incredible resources to farmers. As such, it was the only country in the World Wildlife Fund’s 2006 Living Planet report that even came close to meeting targets for sustainable living and development. In the same report, Canada had the fourth-heaviest per-capita ecological footprint.

In a city where residents are now buying water on the black market, city fathers have outlawed urban farming, dealing a massive blow to low income families that depend on vegetable gardens for food and income.

Vegetable gardens are a major source of food and income when sold in the citys high density suburbs were beef shortages have resulted to many relying on vegetables on daily basis.

At 9 a.m. on a cool, bright Saturday in mid-June, Robert Burns and Diana Baldelomar set up a farm stand outside the YMCA in Bostons Dorchester neighborhood. The stand is simple: a tent to keep out the sun, two folding tables set in an L-shape and a handful of zinc washtubs filled with two inches of water. In the tubs stand heads of green and red lettuce, greens, broccoli, and bunches of mint and basil.

When two women approach and ask the price of the greens, Baldelomar tells them that the turnip, mustard and collard greens are a dollar a bunch. Honey, the woman says, in this neighborhood, if someone asks you for greens, they are only talking about the collards. Her companion asks, Did you ship it in from the country?