Category: Urban agriculture

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Home is where you make it

Professor Roy Ellen, the project director, said: “This project aims to better understand the levels of agrobiodiversity found in home gardens – that is those gardens intimately linked to individual households. For example, we want to know where seed and other plant material comes from, whether it is purchased or obtained informally, who gives and receives it; who receives vegetable produce, and the economic scale of such exchanges. We wish to learn how people learn to become good home gardeners. Whilst biological diversity in itself is important, so are the skills and knowledge that maintain it.”

If you were a reasonably active member of this community and you read the above quotation you might just possibly think, “Ah. Another project to explore the value of agricultural biodiversity and the social networks that support it in some far-flung corner of the developing world. Nepal, maybe, or Burkina Faso.”

But you would be wrong. For the quote comes from an announcement of a project to study home gardens in that most English of settings, Kent. ((I’m giving it more space than Luigi’s original nibble, because I think it is worth it.)) This is exactly the sort of thing I think is sorely needed to forge links among people worldwide. I’ve not been able to find out that much more about the project, although it seems that at least some people at the University of Kent are admirably qualified. And both the Eden Project and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, “will help with the dissemination of the project output”. I hope that means that they will draw the connections to home gardeners everywhere.

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Private apple genebank

It’s easy enough to get into the habit of thinking that only institutions run genebanks. Things like government research institutes, private seed companies, university departments and maybe NGOs. In fact, of course, private enthusiasts can and do also play an important role in ex situ conservation — of fruit and veg diversity in particular. For example, there’s Gene Yale, of Skokie, near Chicago, who has a passion for collecting apple varieties and planting them in his suburban garden. He’s got over a hundred of them, including the spectacularly ugly but equally tasy Knobbed Russet. Why? Because, as he points out, he’s “nuts.” For agrobiodiversity, clearly. And in a good way. With video goodness.

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Gardening by stealth

Here’s an intriguing idea: guerrilla gardening, “gardening in public urban spaces with or without permission.” It includes

fly-by-night plantings in urban wastelands, lobbing “seed grenades” into fenced-off empty lots, planting trees in the middle of nowhere, covering traffic circles with native ground cover, sowing edible plants in school-yards, draping lamp posts with decorative creepers, developing community gardens and empowering disaffected youth by reintroducing them to the joys of dirtying one’s hands in the soil.

It’s all described in the book Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto, by David Tracey, which has been getting some good reviews. We’ve blogged before about the many benefits of school food gardens. They’re great ways of teaching kids about agrobiodiversity, as well as providing healthy, nutritious food for their snacks. We just recently passed the point where 50% of the world’s population lives in cities. I imagine we’ll become increasingly familiar with — and thankful for — the activities of urban guerrilla gardeners.