Defiant Imagination writer Flavie interviewed two Toronto area Urban Ag proponents.The full interview is only about ten questions long, so check out all the text at the link below. I just pulled some bits that I found interesting.
Urban agriculture: an interview with Joe Nasr and June Komisar | Defiant Imagination.
Is it safe to grow food in the middle of the city?
JN: This is a very common question that we get. It depends on what you grow and where you grow it. There’s some conception that food growing away from the city is necessarily safe, but it’s actually grown with a lot of pesticides, so it’s a question of how you grow it. In the city itself it depends if you grow close to a street or in the backyard, that alone makes a difference. What you grow does as well; some plants are more susceptible to hold various pollutants and others are not. It’s not inherently safe or unsafe, it’s much more contextual.
JK: In certain urban conditions where there is either no soil, or where making it clean would be prohibitively expensive, or the land doesn’t actually belong to the people who want to do the growing, they created things like these big growing bags. In some of the Detroit community gardens and in Cuba, they have huge raised beds.
How many people can a rooftop garden feed for example?
JN: There’s a lot of research that still needs to be done. We don’t really know yet how many rooftops can be used and using which techniques, so if you take that alone there’s huge uncertainty. Real investigation needs to be done on the types of roofs, what would be appropriate on these types of roofs, what kind of access can we arrange in respect with insurance, liability and regulations, as well as how to access them, who would get up there… A lot of these things have to be sorted out, so the potential is enormous. But we don’t know what it amounts to, because there’s a lot more that needs to be found out.
JK: One of the questions is how do you extend the season, especially in Canada, where it’s cold. We went to a presentation by some spin farmers from Saskatchewan who are very strategic about when they start their planting. They say as soon as the snow is gone, they’re in the ground with hardy vegetables. Spinach will start to grow even when it’s extremely cold still. If you’re strategic about what vegetables you plant, you can really extend the season.
