(Photo via Shepherd’s Notebook)

Les amis, you’re all invited to come and plant garlic with the FoodCycles crew Sat Nov 7, starting 10 am to 2 pm – directions are http://bit.ly/1GYyWQ. Please RSVP by Doodle (http://doodle.com/5a9hztg32tmptgdc) or email foodcycles@gmail.com.

Several beds of healthy, fantastic garlic will be ready for spring! Are you wondering how wonderful garlic is for you? Check out the resources below! When its fresh, local and organic you really focus all of the awesome good nutrients into it so that you need less of it to improve your health. Of course its best when you combine it with other wonderful foods too!

THE WONDERS OF GARLIC

Garlic has a powerful antioxidant called “allicin” that is known to be the world’s most powerful antioxidant. Interestingly enough, allicin has to break down first to work. That means the antioxidant has to die first to give its most powerful benefits — better start crushing that garlic!

Garlic is believed to help with the following:
Colds: By boosting the immune system. Make yourself stronger so you don’t need antibiotics.
Cancer: Ditto. Garlic can also stop bad chemicals from starting cancer or slow it.
Heart disease: It helps your body naturally manage cholesterol. It increases good cholesterol (HDL) while lowering bad cholesterol (LDL). And just to let you know, eating egg yolks with cholesterol isn’t really that bad for you – just depends.
Hypertension: it can drop your blood pressure by thinning your blood. Another way to fight work place stress?
Infections: garlic is known for its “kill bacteria” ability and “kill a lot of other things that don’t make you feel well”. It was used to treat a lot of diseases before.
Impotence: Garlic can boost a useful thing chemical in your body that improves blood circulation.
Pregnancy: garlic can help boost weight gain for low weight babies and prevent other baby diseases.

QUICK FACT

Apparently eating fennel seeds (like those served in Indian restaurants) helps to kill the garlic smell.

So come on by and plant some garlic so that you can get your hands on some of this wonderful fresh, local organic garlic come spring! Your body will thank you plenty

RESOURCES

Unlocking the Benefits of Garlic – NY Times
Freshly Crushed Garlic Better for the Heart
Chemists Shed Light on Health Benefits of Garlic
Love That Garlic? Fresh May Be Healthier…
Garlic Chemical Table Treats All Diabetes: not that we recommend using tablets simply because it isn’t the whole food and is probably missing something…
Oils from Spices And Garlic Help Food Safety
Recipe for Healthy Garlic? Crush It! (2nd article on crushing)
Health Benefits of Garlic from the Pennington Nutrition Series
Health Benefits of Garlic Resource
Garlic

Fall for Garlic, Surprise Spring is a post from: FoodCycles

Technorati Tags: allicin, antibacterial, antifungal, antioxidants, antiviral, blood, cancer, garlic, health benefits, heart disease, hydrogen sulfide, nitrogen oxide synthase

(Time: 2 min 48 s)

Vince McDermott did a short video on what FoodCycles does! Wow, he got a whole tour down to the “T” – haha, I couldn’t even pull that off.

Vince you’re always welcome on the farm any day we’re around. And hopefully we’ll be around more often soon.

To a spring of new change when it comes!

Twitter
FoodCycles for “A” Soil Education #video (wonderful work @vincemcdermott !) http://bit.ly/1zijR1 #city #farm #Toronto #urban

FoodCycles for “A” Soil Education is a post from: FoodCycles

Technorati Tags: city farm, cycles, Education, Food, Gardening, indoor, market garden, raised beds, sprouts, tours, Urban Agriculture, video, worm composting

There’s a city farming/urban agriculture conference called “Opportunities for Action: An Urban Agriculture Symposium” taking place in Guelph, Ontario on Friday, November 20, 2009. The event aims to inspire and find ways to move city farming forward. You can register at Backyard Bounty or contact Shannon Lee Stirling.

Opportunities for Action: An Urban Agriculture Symposium | Backyard Bounty: “On Friday November 20th 2009 Backyard Bounty and the University of Guelph will be hosting the first symposium on urban agriculture in Guelph. Opportunities for Action: An Urban Agriculture Symposium will bring together the movers and shakers in the Urban Agriculture scene.  The Symposium aims to not only inspire action but address key issues and provide connections that enable the Urban Agriculture movement to advance.”

(Via Backyard Bounty.)

Making Opportunities for City Farming is a post from: FoodCycles

Technorati Tags: city farming, Guelph, inspiration, networking, Ontario, symposium, Urban Agriculture

(Photo via Greenbiz.com and TonyTheTiger)

ROOFS YOU CAN EAT

Sky Vegetables takes a slightly unique twist in rooftop gardening by covering all the administrative stuff, having others put in the equipment and make its money only from the sale of vegetables. What’s good is that it aims to use proven technologies like solar to help it take off. At the same time its pretty high up there on the technology needs and not very affordable for communities to implement without major government and business investment. That’s probably one of the big criticisms for vertical farming towers that Dickson Despommier envisions too.

Sky Vegetables: Taking Green Roofs to New Heights | GreenBiz.com: “The vision is both simple and elegant: green rooftops, not just as gardens, but as urban agriculture hubs for herbs and edible greens, utilizing off-the-shelf hydroponics and aquaponics equipment in greenhouses to grow food to sell for profit within the community.
The idea came to Agoada just before his senior year at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, from which he graduated last year. ‘I saw the community gardens in Chicago and thought that it was fantastic that they were building community by growing food and doing it in the city,’ he told me recently. ‘So I went back my senior year at Wisconsin and received three credits for doing a feasibility study to see if rooftops could be commercial farming locations.’”

(Via Greenbiz.com.)

HOW INGREDIENTS SET YOU BACK

At the same time embodied energy and lifecycle analysis have to be considered. Even with my work here at FoodCycles I’m always keeping in mind the amount of energy, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions that went into making the compost or growing the food. That’s why we try to buy locally as much as possible and to choose ingredients or stuff that’s made with no extra chemicals or fertilizers — gas fuel and chemicals will set you back like crazy. Distance is key and whether it has extra chemicals is even bigger — that’s why local AND organic for food is so big for us. We try our best.

Anyway, can you imagine how much power and chemicals go into making solar panels? I love them lots except we’ve got to keep improving them and putting more money into that technology.

The only solution is if humanity finds the secret of the sun — fusion power and creates completely clean energy. It makes more power than the power you put in. A dream for now — so I guess we’ll have to deal with reality.

CONCLUSION

Either way, Sky Vegetables and other similar city farming projects are definitely a huge step in the right direction. Compared to conventional chemical farming that keeps shipping food over 4000 km away on average (so that’s not local and not organic), Sky Vegetables is still a breath of fresh air. So beautiful kudos if it helps to inspire!

Sky Vegetables Take Roofs to New Heights is a post from: FoodCycles

Technorati Tags: city farming, embodied energy, energy, entrepreneurship, Green Business, Green Roofs, Greenhouse, Hydroponics, lifecycle analysis, lifecycle assessment, solar energy, Urban Agriculture, wind energy

NYC’s Cool New Backyard Farms: Growing More Than Just Produce from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

Backyard farming – City of Toronto has 5000 ha (2500 acres) of rooftop space alone, Downsview Park has at least 500 acres – in Toronto there’s a huge amount of space to use – even using a bit would make TO a greener, more food secure place.

According to Stacey Murphy of bk farmyards, 250 square ft can feed up to 4-6 people over a season – then you can “can” the food you can’t eat or get what you can’t grow from other farmers.

From Backyard to Farmyard « Idealist in NYC: “Did you know there are 10,000 acres of unused land in New York City? What would happen if even a fraction of that was put to use to grow food for New Yorkers?

This is one of the questions that led Stacey Murphy to start bk farmyards, an urban agriculture project that uses a unique model. Their slogan is, ‘You have the land, we grow the produce,’ and they do just that, turning their customer’s yards into food producing ‘farmyards.’ They also hope to grow food ‘between the cracks of urban development,’ by creating farmyards on under utilized land held by the city and developers.”

(Via Idealist in NYC.)

New York Has 10,000 Acres of Farmland is a post from: FoodCycles

Technorati Tags: backyard farming, downsview park, Toronto

(Photo via American Feast)

How can city and country farming be the key to fixing the economy? How can it give a real alternative to the way we eat, live and work? Dr. Wayne Roberts gives you the whole 9 yards.

Eat This Recession | Alternatives Journal – Environmental Ideas + Action: “Instead of accepting today’s economic downturn as a pink slip that can’t be refused, what if our governments reacted as if they had received a Facebook invitation: by selecting ‘join cause,’ ‘learn more’ or ‘ignore’?

When faced with the possibility of a recession, panicked politicians from around the world didn’t consider a range of options; they didn’t click on ‘learn more.’ Instead, they hit ‘join cause.’ With a similar lack of vision, governments the world over are trying to spend their way out of the crisis by dumping loads of money into infrastructure projects, claiming a need for ‘shovel-ready’ projects to ‘kick start’ the recovery.”

(Via Alternatives Journal.)

PAYING YOU TO EAT LOCAL
Wayne Roberts does the math and finds that if government gave you $10 back for every $100 of local, chemical free, hormone free healthy food you bought you’d be pumping up to $15,000,000,000 (billion) Canadian back into the local economy. That would create a hell of a lot of jobs.

BUY LOCAL SAVES BIG
In fact the University of Toronto and the Town of Markham are doing just that and finding that even if they pay 10% extra at first it ends up they don’t at the end? Why? University of Toronto found that people respect the food more and waste it less, meaning U of T didn’t have to buy as much.

If every Canadian government agency did that local farmers would finally be able to meet demand from bigger supermarket stores.

BRING COMMUNITIES TO LIFE
Some of the money would have to be invested in “local food animators” who would help bring people together to buy local, environmentally friend and healthy food. The rest would go to teaching people in public agencies to make the switch to healthy, fresh local, chemical free food. All in all, if government spent $2 billion they could create 1500 long term jobs for animators and 18000 for food producers and service workers.

GREEN ROOFS GROW JOBS
1/6th of cities have flat roofs which are great for growing food. In fact, Russian cottage gardeners produced half the country’s food. In Canada’s warmer climate down south we could grow even more.

FARM ONE DAY A WEEK
Workers who go on a special plan to work 4 days and get employment insurance on the 5th day could spend that 5th day learning how to garden and cook. That could help them make up for the lost day of work according to Dr. Roberts. Of course they’d get lots of great exercise.

If 400,000 workers did it this way, they’d actually save 100,000 jobs. That’s just bloody amazing!

FARMING MAKES OTHER JOBS
There are lots of jobs that depend on farming and keeping money in the local economy. For example, if “a farmer spends new income on a haircut, the barber buys a book on wealthy barbers, the bookstore owner goes to hear a local rock band and so on.”

Some people estimate that you could create up to 1 million extra jobs this way.

The only thing standing in the way?

Government leadership.

Eat This Recession for Breakfast is a post from: FoodCycles

Technorati Tags: Agriculture, economic crisis, farming, green economy, green jobs, recession

(Photo via Window Farms.org)

Here’s a fast way to grow a salad every week right at your window! Check out http://www.windowfarms.org/

Build a little farm in your window! is a post from: FoodCycles

Technorati Tags: city farming, edible, farming, Hydroponics, modular, recycled, recycling, Urban Agriculture, vertical, window

Christen Shepherd, a gal who always wanted to be a farmer, runs a rescue farm. The farm is a safe haven for animals coming out of factory farms — this includes bald chickens, goats, hogs and pot-bellied pigs. What’s amazing is that these animals help extremely troubled kids feel happier.

How bald chickens help troubled kids – thestar.com: “The chickens are new arrivals at Cobble Hills Farm Sanctuary, a rescue farm about 20 minutes southwest of Stratford. Rescue farms typically save horses or goats or other large animals. Cobble Hills’ proprietor, Christen Shepherd, has a few of those. Now she’s trying to save these chickens – which are perhaps the most wretched of all.

Up until now, they have spent their lives in groups of a half-dozen confined to battery cages the size of a microwave oven. When they arrived here two weeks ago, they had never walked. Or roosted. Or flapped their wings.”

(Via The Toronto Star.)

How bald chickens help troubled kids is a post from: FoodCycles

Technorati Tags: animals, chickens, factory farming, farms, livestock, mental therapy, poultry, rescue

(Photo via The Epoch Times)

Looks like Toronto Chicken ain’t alone in fighting to raise chickens in a city. A Calgary gal and CLUCK are fighting the same fight on the West side of Canada. Even with more people going hungry, rising food bank use, increasing food waste and what not these brave souls are meeting stiff resistance from the powers that be. Apparently trying to be independent and sensible just ain’t allowed.

Calgary Food Policy Council: Calgary Bylaw 27: Calgary woman to fight ticket for keeping livestock in city – chickens: “A woman is going to fight a ticket in court for keeping livestock in her Calgary yard.

The woman keeps a few chickens on her property for eggs and to reduce organic waste.

She’s not the only one – Paul Hughes has four chickens in his yard and he is a member of the ‘Calgary Liberated Urban Chicken Klub,’ also known as CLUCK.

CLUCK wants changes to the city bylaw to allow people to keep six hens or fewer on their property.

Hughes says Calgary should be feeding itself and more people want the option to grow their own food.”

(Via Calgary Food Policy Council.)

Last I recall, Ontario lets you get a certain number of eggs or an “egg quota” per day. In theory most cities still don’t want you to have chickens even if the province does have this maximum amount. They have this quota to keep people from trying to compete with big egg producers with permits. (Please do correct me I haven’t had a chance to check out the latest on chicken raising laws)

Resources

Calgary Mulls Backyard Chickens

Rise of the Chickens: An Egg Salvation: What’s the story on Toronto chickens?

Toronto Chicken: the Web site of Toronto Chicken a la carte

City of Toronto Bylaw: apparently pigeons and rabbits are allowed?

Toronto Chicken Flies Under the Radar

Backyard chickens on the rise – Los Angeles Times: “Reporting from Madison, Wis. — Jen Lynch and her family live in the heart of the city but roll out of bed to the sound of clucking chickens.

Their day starts with cleaning coops, scooping out feed and hunting for eggs for morning omelets. Eight families in a three-block radius and an estimated 150 families citywide do the same.
“

(Via LA Times.)

Calgary woman fights to raise chickens is a post from: FoodCycles

Technorati Tags: animals, backyard, chickens, city, livestock, poultry, Urban Agriculture

BY GROWING ONLY 3 CROPS – EVER

Time: 10 min 58 s

Time: 10 min 50 s

AREN’T OPTIONS BETTER?

What’s fascinating is that we’ve grown the same 3 crops (corn, wheat and rice) over and over again for the last half century. Unfortunately we’ve forgotten to keep extra varieties just in case something goes wrong — like a bug that figures out how to eat corn for breakfast, dinner and lunch (and then leaves you with nothing). Alas, people have forgotten that putting all your eggs in 1 basket is a bad idea. Guess that ties nicely to our current economic crisis doesn’t it?

Greenfudge.org » Monocrop Farming: Green Revolution or environmental blunder of historic proportions?: “detrimental effects on world hunger, biodiversity, nutrition, food supplies, water toxicity and soil quality. A sweeping change from traditional farming, with its fallow fields, crop rotation and varied selection of produce, monoculture techniques are not just linked to the transition from subsistence farming to commercial agriculture, but to the widespread shift from family-owned farms to massive industrial farming complexes driven by large corporations.”

(Via Greenfudge.org.)

LET’S MILL-ET!

You know my mother introduced me to millet not to long ago. It’s a more healthier and in some ways tastier alternative to your straight white rice. Unfortunately it takes a lot of work to grow. In India too much money goes to rice and wheat so millet hasn’t had a chance to come back like the good old days.

Other interesting kinds of food grains people don’t get enough of are sorghum, quinoa, amaranth and teff.

SO HOW DO WE GET CHOICE?

It seems we’re fighting to get back variety and choice these days. Don’t you deserve great food grown with clean water, healthy soil and a lot of “diversity”? Maybe we’ve gone too far for the sake of convenience? As a city farmer here at FoodCycles I see how convenience and cheap food has made doing the right thing (growing food locally and without chemicals or hormones) so hard.

So is there a way to get choice back? Support your local community, food and farmers. Put into yourself a burning desire to try new varieties and new things — like heirloom varieties (the sort grown by FoodCycles and other organic or biodynamic farmers). Most of all don’t settle for being spoon fed limited choice and cheap food.

How to Screw Your Food Supply … is a post from: FoodCycles

Technorati Tags: corn, farming, Green Revolution, millet, monocrop, monoculture, rice, wheat