Courtesy Stock.XCHNG

Residents in Kansas City, Mo., who want to sell produce from their home gardens may do so thanks to a new city-farming ordinance.

Last summer, if a gardener in Kansas City, Mo., wanted to put up a sign and sell a few excess tomatoes in her front yard, she’d be breaking the law. But thanks to an ordinance passed earlier this month, it’s now perfectly legal.

For Kansas City’s urban farmers, who often struggle to be taken seriously in an area with a rich history of rural agriculture business, this is a huge victory. But as some of their neighbors see it, it’s a potential nuisance.

“The city council finally had a context to really talk about food, access to food, food production and empty lots,” said Katherine Kelly, executive director of the Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture, which played a huge part in getting the urban-farming ordinance passed.

During the fall of 2009, in the midst of a citywide zoning overhaul, Kelly, along with Councilman John Sharp, began working to change Kansas City’s antiquated agriculture codes. They spent the following months drafting the ordinance. Then, on June 10, 2010, after four weeks of deliberations and public hearings, the council’s Planning and Zoning Committee recommended the ordinance to the full council, which passed it 10-3. The ordinance allows home gardeners and community gardeners to sell produce on site (including front yards and empty lots) and is slightly more restrictive with community supported agriculture operations.

For Sharp, it was a matter of getting fresh, healthy food in the hands of Kansas City’s residents.

“It’s irresponsible to be buying so many of our fruits and vegetables that are shipped halfway around the world when many similar items could be grown right here in Kansas City,” he said. “The idea is to pick fruits and vegetables at their prime and for people to acquire them and eat them at their prime.”

Because of that, the ordinance allows urban farmers to set up a temporary table and sign at any time May 15 through Oct. 15. The same freedoms are allotted to community gardeners, but anyone operating a CSA will have to apply for a special-use permit to sell on site.
 
While on-site selling wasn’t the only major change to Kansas City’s urban agriculture law, it was certainly the most contentious.

“I have nothing against gardening. I’m growing green beans in my backyard that I’m going to eat for dinner tonight,” said councilman Bill Skaggs, who was one of three council members to oppose the urban-farming ordinance. “But if I put up a veggie stand, my neighbors are gonna raise hell.”

At each Planning and Zoning Committee hearing, many home owners and real estate agents argued that allowing neighbors to sell produce on site would not only bring extra noise and traffic to their neighborhoods, but that it would cause surrounding properties to decline in value. They repeatedly claimed that there were plenty of opportunities for local farmers to sell produce at farmers’ markets. And in their neighborhoods, that may be the case. But as many advocates pointed out, Kansas City is full of “food deserts” — blighted neighborhoods where grocery options are limited to fast-food chains and whatever is available at the nearest liquor store.

“The people that were promoting this are not going to go garden in the inner city,” Skaggs argued. He also pointed out that by passing the new urban-farming ordinance, the city was regulating something that didn’t need to be regulated. Now that sales are legalized, he said, home gardeners are more restricted than before. Garden and farm-related buildings must comply with certain height restrictions, and row crops (grain, fruit and vegetable crops that are planted in rows and reach 24 inches or more in height) are not allowed in front yards if there’s a house on the lot.

Still, Sharp believes this will be a good thing for Kansas City, as well as other cities.

“I’d much rather have a well-maintained community garden in a vacant lot, than a vacant lot with weeds and grass up to my waist, littered with trash and debris,” he said. “I hope this ordinance can serve as an example for other cities that want to encourage turning vacant lots from neighborhood blights to neighborhood amenities.”

According to the KCCUA, it’s only one step in the right direction—but a big one.

“It’s not like codes are going to be the thing that tips the balance,” Kelly warned. “In order to make Kansas City a food-healthy place we need to be pushing on a number of fronts. The codes are one piece of it.”

For now, Kelly said, the KCCUA is working on a document she’s calling “A Dummy’s Guide to Kansas City’s Urban Agriculture Codes” and assisting urban farmers who want to apply for special-use permits to sell on-site.

As she said minutes after the council passed the ordinance, “We’re growing, and growth takes time.”

Photo by Audrey Pavia

Randy with Rio, who haunts his dreams.

My husband Randy grew up in the mean streets of New York City, in a tough Italian-American neighborhood. While kids living in rural communities were raising lambs for 4-H, Randy was fighting off muggers, crazy people and bullies. He learned to survive with his fists.

Fast-forward a few decades later. Randy is now the prime caretaker of our small urban farm. He tends to the chickens during the day, tossing them scratch, fetching eggs from the nest boxes and keeping the coop supplied with food and water. He also manages our three horses for me while I’m at work, walking them to the community arena for turnouts, cleaning their stalls and filling up their water barrels.

It would seem that his life on our tiny 1/2-acre urban farm is about as different from his youth in Manhattan as it gets. Apparently, not so. I found this out the hard way the other night.

It was 5:30 a.m. and I was sound asleep when I felt a blow to my left eye. I sat up in bed with my hand covering my face, and yelled “Ouch!” 

“Huh?” came a sleepy mumble from my husband beside me. “What happened?”

“You just socked me in the eye!” I told him as I got out of bed and staggered to the bathroom mirror to check out the damage.

“I was having a nightmare,” he said. “I was playing basketball at Madison Square Garden, and there were horses on the court. One of them started guarding me, and he tried to bite me. So I punched him.”

I immediately thought of how Rio, our 2-year-old gelding, is constantly swinging his mouth around in play, acting as if he is going to bite. Since Randy spends the most time with Rio, he spends a lot of time dodging these phantom bites. Apparently, Rio’s behavior is affecting Randy’s sleep.

My shock at waking up with a punch to the eye was soon replaced with hysterical laughter after hearing about this dream. As I sat doubled over on the edge of bed wiping tears from my cheeks, I couldn’t help but think how much Rio the comedian would appreciate this story if only he could understand.  

The next morning, my eye had a red mark under it where Randy’s hand had landed in its pursuit of the fouling equine. I still thought it was pretty funny, and couldn’t wait to get to the office and tell my co-workers the story of how my husband popped me in the eye.

Read more of City Stock »

At the beginning of June, Ohio State University Extension horticulturists at OSU South Centers in Piketon, Ohio, were picking their high-tunnel strawberries, about a month ahead of the area’s field-grown strawberries.

But that’s not the exciting news. They are harvesting a crop grown using technology that could make fruits and vegetables accessible to anyone, anywhere—even your urban neighborhood.

Researchers are using a compost sock system as a growth medium and comparing the crop’s performance to in-ground high-tunnel strawberries. The compost socks are made of mesh materials and filled with compost. The plants are grown in the socks, with irrigation and fertility management as needed. The hope, says OSU Extension horticulturist Brad Bergefurd, is that performance and yield will be comparable to that of in-ground high-tunnel production.

“If we find the compost sock system comparable to in-soil production, that means that we can farm anywhere with high tunnels using this system as the growing medium,” Bergefurd says. “You won’t need soil.”

Bergefurd says that compost socks could make high-tunnel production even more relevant. High tunnels are popular because they allow growers to expand their growing and marketing season; they support plenty of crops on a smaller amount of land; and they need less-expensive equipment compared to larger-scale, open-field farming methods.

With compost socks, farming could be expanded to areas that generally aren’t considered ag-friendly or where fresh fruits and vegetables are not easily accessible.

“Since you don’t need soil, you don’t need a field or farmland. An old parking lot or a vacant lot in the middle of the city would work,” said Bergefurd. “I can go into the middle of Columbus (Ohio) in the morning and set up a high tunnel, and by the end of the day, I can have my vegetable garden up and going.”

Although researchers are only in their first year of evaluating the compost sock system on strawberry production, they’re seeing promising results. Researchers believe the compost socks can support a whole host of vegetables, from tomatoes to peppers to lettuce.

“The technology completely supports a multiple cropping system,” said Bergefurd. “We are testing to see whether one compost sock can support three years’ worth of crop production.”

If successful, the compost sock technology could be a way for communities to promote urban gardening, support local foods and encourage healthier eating.

“High-tunnel production with compost socks would be one answer to the food desert dilemma,” Bergefurd said. “Residents would have access to fresh fruits and vegetables right there in their community. You could literally grow food anywhere.”

Photo by Rick Gush

The newest addition to my garden glove collection.

I have a thing for gloves. Although my wife wouldn’t agree, because she’s always looking at the various scrapes, thorns and wounds on my hands and scornfully telling me I’m an idiot for not wearing gloves when I work in the garden. But the fact is that I do really enjoy wearing gloves, and I have a long history of owning lots of pairs of garden and work gloves. When I lived in Colorado I made an “art” collection of 150 old left-handed gloves and put it up on a wall in a bar where I cashed my paychecks.

These days, I have a bunch of different gloves and I regularly buy a dozen new pairs at the ag fair in Chiavari every January. I also have some more exotic gloves, like my rose pruning gloves with the extra long gauntlets and my not-yet-used white leather gloves that are, oddly, a souvenir from the Mont Blanc tunnel in the Alps. I’m waiting for a special occasion to wear those. I also have legions of regular work gloves of all kinds, including welder’s gloves and several rubber and disposable types. 

I even recently had a fling with gloves made of fake vinyl leather. Fake vinyl leather? I was obviously contemptuous at first. I got a pair for free when I purchased a dozen pair of leather gloves at an agriculture fair a few years ago, I finally wore the things, and was amazed at how well they stood up to the beating I give my gloves. They were particularly good in wet conditions, which are usually hard on the leather gloves, and leather gloves become prematurely stiff when they dry, which these vinyl beauties do not do.

Anyway, I now have a new favorite glove type: the thin fabric gloves treated with a plastic coating. I’m probably way behind everybody else, because I’ve seen these new style gloves for a few years now, but have been, once again, prematurely contemptuous, thinking that those skimpy little plastic gloves wouldn’t be at all useful in my rugged he-man labors in the rock quarry that is our garden.

Well, I bought a pair of those skimpy gloves at an ag fair a few months ago, mostly because I was a bit bored waiting for my wife to rendezvous with me. They pair of gloves only cost a euro and a half, so they were like a souvenir. I thought, hey, maybe these would be good for making concrete or something light and wet like that. 

In fact, they are tremendous for mixing concrete. Then I tried them for hardcore work, digging virgin soil and scrubbing rocks and dirt out and then forcing it all through a series of screens to sift out the rocks. There’s no other way to do that work except to use one’s hands to scoop and shove and press the dirt through the screens. Leather gloves can easily develop holes in the fingers in a single day’s use. To make my leather gloves last longer, I usually wear them with a hole or two in the fingers for quite some time. To my pleasant surprise, the skimpy gloves not only lasted as long as the leather gloves, they were also quite comfortable.

The other news in the garden this week is the setting of some costoluto tomato fruits. These heavily ribbed tomatoes have reputation for being very finicky, and my machismo finally reached a point where I dared plant this variety this year. I’m happy to report that the plants are all quite vigorous and one can see the heavy ribbing even in all the little fruits that have set in the last few days. 

Read more of Rick’s Favorite Crops »