Showing posts with label guerilla gardening. Show all posts
Showing posts with label guerilla gardening. Show all posts

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Fukuoka seedballs for guerrilla gardening in city shafts

Cory Whitney

Some of my mates have a new flat in downtown Manhattan near the South Street Seaport Museum. I love that place. The view of the city is great - looking out from the balcony - but the view of the city looking down is rather dismal.

Manhattan's city blocks have these thin air shafts running through - a depressed early version of the shaft running through the Empire's Deathstar. - Looking down from the balcony at the little spots of soil in the shaft below I daydreamed of a small cryptoforest there.
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Photo 'Tenement Air Shaft Balcony' bv William Bode

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A photo by New York photographer, John Albok


A photo of the bottom of an airshaft
by PJ The Sprite in St. Paul

I see a role for metropolitan guerilla gardening using seedballs. This could easily be done following the exemplary methodologies of the No Work Farming Master Masanobu Fukuoka as I have seen some farmers and activists doing in Iceland 1-2.


A photo of a seedball taken by Aravind Reddy
Bangalore Bombing on Green Mission near Bengaluru

More on how to make seedballs from the excellent book Freedom Gardens

More radical seedball ideas from Seedballs R Us


References

  1. Whitney, Cory W. “Conservation Ethnobotany in the North Atlantic.” Non-Wood News; NWFP Digest, 2011.
  2. Whitney, Cory William. “A Survey of Wild Collection and Cultivation of Indigenous Species in Iceland and the Faroe Islands.” University of Kassel, 2011.

Friday, June 22, 2012

Dangers of Urban Farming


Photo by Maggie Jones Urban Photographer

I just had an interesting question about the dangers of farming by roadsides.

Whereas, here in Asia, farming in the roadside spaces happens naturally and no-one really seems to wonder about the safety of it. The opposite is true in the West. 

It seems that the modern western movement toward 'guerilla gardening' and urban farming has met with a mix of caution and paranoia. 

Urban farming should be a practical and worry free system of agricultural production. 

It requires some forethought about buffer zones, and some proper soil tests before getting started. However, the dangers appear to be minimal and only in some amount of heavy metals in leafy greens.