In this issue:
- "Bless You for the Food You Grow"
- KCCUA Attracts Support from Local and National Funders
- Eat Half Your Lawn!
- The Square Foot Revolution
- Giving to KCCUA Yields Abundance All Year Long
- Field Notes from the Kansas City Community Farm
- A Street Block in KC's Inner City May Soon Become "21st Century Green"
- Reuse, Reduce, Recycle:  Topeka, KS, Greenhouse to Have Second Life in Kansas City
- Volunteers Wanted:  KCCUA's 3rd Biennial Urban Farms Tour, 2009
- Calendar of Events

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"Bless You for the Food You Grow"
Day of gleaning connects consumers to soil and local food

By Katherine Kelly

I'm determined to find in the ongoing reports of rising food prices, economic recession, and a world contaminated by man-made chemicals, the possibility that a healthier, saner, and more sustainable food system will emerge.  It is human nature to hit bottom before we decide to reform our lives.  Our US food system hasn't truly hit bottom, but as a society we have now had plenty of those negative prods that may finally mobilize us into widespread action.

Like a lot of other people, I find a parable for change in the story about the Miller vegetable farm in Platteville, CO.  As widely reported over recent days (see: Colorado farm's food giveaway draws thousands), the family decided to open their leek, potato, and carrot fields for gleaning for the holiday.  Some 40,000 people showed up, spent the day picking, and carried away more than 600,000 pounds of vegetables, at an average of 15 pounds per man, woman and child.

As a farmer, I imagine the dynamics and interactions around this event.

First, there is the Miller's decision to give away the produce that they would probably normally plow into the ground to feed next year's crops.  On a farm that size, it would cost them more to harvest all those left-overs than they would earn by selling them.  They know that times are hard and that people are hungry.  They take the rare step of inviting gleaners onto their farm; engaging in a form of charity and moral action we've almost forgotten.

I picture the families who decided to get in their cars and drive to this farm, presumably many of them from Denver, some 45 minutes away.  They chose to spend their day bending, pulling, and digging in the soil for potatoes that can be bought at the nearby Walmart for $8.00 for 20 pounds and for carrots that go for $1.28 for two pounds.

As the families left with their bags of produce, I picture them thanking the Millers and their field crew, leaving behind empty fields.

In thinking about what happened there, I find dozens of interesting questions and likely interactions.  How many of those 40,000 people had ever been to a vegetable farm before?  How many had ever tugged a leek from the soil?  How many of the children who trooped after their parents had ever seen potatoes nestled into the ground, much less understood that if they dug them, they could eat them?

And I imagine the dynamic between the gleaners and the farmers.  It seems unlikely that most of the harvesters had ever met face-to-face the farmer who grew their food.  It is even more unlikely that they had felt a direct and tangible gratitude to the agriculturalist.

On the Millers' side of the experience, as farmers who presumably move their produce through wholesale channels, they have most likely missed out on that curiously intimate relationship between the person who grows the food and the person who eats it.  It must indeed have been overwhelming for them to meet, in a single day, so many people who would find sustenance from their food.

If I imagine out from that one day event, I can even project that some of those 40,000 consumers may turn into producers themselves.  Their children, having seen the carrots pulled from the ground, may become lobbyists for a small home garden.  The parents, armed with the new understanding of a handful of potatoes still dusty with soil, could decide to stop in at the local garden center and say "I want to grow some potatoes.  How do you do that?"  And they could, in extended gratitude, decide to take a trip to their local farmers' market and renew that experience of looking the farmer in the eye.

The farmers could decide that they valued that direct connection as well and could set up an on-site stand or send a family member to the farmers' market with produce to sell.  The local food banks could be invited to an ongoing relationship, with gleaning becoming a regular part of their growing cycle. The farmers could find that they like having people on their land, and begin to organize volunteer days or regular events to invite people to the fields.

It is out of moments like these that change will arise.  Sweeping, global issues make us sit up and pay attention, shrinking home budgets bring the issues home, but most of us make change through relationship and direct experience.  We may find the capacity for hope and change, like the Millers and the gleaners, in muscles tired from physical exertion, in dusty handshakes, and in a rare moment of looking someone directly in the eye and saying "Bless you for the food you grow" and "You are welcome".

Katherine Kelly can be reached at katherine@kccua.org.

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KCCUA Attracts Support from Local and National Funders
Urban Farmer Development Program and Juniper Gardens Training Farm receive financial backing

By Semie Rogers

In the last months, KCCUA has been very fortunate to receive national and local support for its work to help urban farms start up and grow.  So many of you helped in this effort.  You all share in our success!

Boston's Cedar Tree Foundation awarded us $70,000 over two years to support Urban Farmer Development.  Urban Farmer Development is our core work helping farmers throughout the metro area.  Program Officer Greg Horner spent two days with us to learn about urban agriculture in Kansas City.  Together we toured the Troostwood Youth Garden, Lew Edmister's urban gem on the West Side, Sherri Harvel's farm in the Washington Wheatley neighborhood, and the Juniper Gardens Training Farm.

About 50 farmers and friends came out to meet and greet Greg Horner at a dinner KCCUA hosted at Bad Seed Farmers Market at 19th and McGee in Kansas City, MO.  Our thanks go to Brooke Salvaggio and Dan Heryer at Bad Seed, and to the chefs and restaurants who sponsored our dinner and who support local agriculture:  Jane Zieha from Blue Bird Bistro, Jasper Mirabile, Jr. from Jasper's, Ted Habinger of Room 39, Jennifer Maloney of Café Sebastienne in the Kemper Art Museum, and Rebecca Miller at Whole Foods.

We also received a $25,000 grant from Impact KC.  Impact KC is a group of local philanthropists who pool their money to fund projects that have a significant impact on life in Kansas City.  We will use the money to expand the Training Farm at the Juniper Gardens housing development in northeast Kansas City, KS.  Impact KC funding will allow us to train new farmers from the Juniper Gardens neighborhood.

Two more national funders also supported the Juniper Gardens project.  The Presbyterian Hunger Program gave $10,000 to help "address the root causes of hunger."  We're honored to receive their funding.  Addressing the root causes of hunger is exactly what the Juniper Gardens project does.  We're helping people earn stable incomes in a very low income area, bringing access to fresh produce to an area with one grocery store in a 6-mile radius, and growing skills for self-sufficiency that will last a lifetime.

Heifer's MORE project--which seeks to expand access to organic vegetables for low income people--has awarded us $14,000 over two years.  KCCUA was one of three local programs chosen nationally for this grant.  Heifer funding will buy seeds and supplies at Juniper Gardens.

And, in case you haven't heard, Kansas City's own PITCH Magazine named KCCUA 2008 Nonprofit of the Year.

We appreciate the support and vote of confidence by all our donors.  In the name of urban farmers and consumers throughout Kansas City, we thank you!

Semie Rogers can be reached at semie@kccua.org.

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Eat Half Your Lawn!
America's biggest cultivated crop delivers benefits but is costing far more

Jac Smit grew up on the edge of town.  At age twenty he had worked in five branches of agriculture.  He took a junior college degree with a concentration in horticulture.  Next he was accepted in the Harvard Graduate School of Design in City Planning and graduated as president of the Harvard Organization of Student Planners.  As a Ford Foundation planning advisor to the Calcutta Metropolitan Planning Authority he generated urban agriculture plans for the new port of Haldia and the 'Steel City' of Durgapur.  With the Peace Corps he established a self-help urban agriculture project for East Pakistani refugees.  In 1991 he was contracted by United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the World Bank to carry out a global survey of urban agriculture which laid the foundation for his best-selling book Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities, launched at the Global Urban Summit in 1996.  In 1992 Jac was the senior founder of The Urban Agriculture Network.  This small not-for-profit service organization has the world's largest urban agriculture library. Today he is a writer for the Internet, periodicals and chapters of books, and a speaker and lecturer.  Our sincere thanks to Jac for contributing his reflections to Urban Grown.

By Jac Smit

The lawns we see through our windshields and from the window as we land at an urban airport were born, as a landscape element, after World War Two.  My early experience was pushing a wooden handled mower for business men in Levittown, Long Island, after school.  Today I get passed on my way to work by medium-sized trucks pulling trailers with three or four ride-on mowers and an equal number of day laborers.

As I'm writing this, transforming lawns to food production is exploding in Europe and America.  And its potential may still be underrated.  Is this attractive goal doable?  Not easily.  It will require community, metropolitan and national, business and citizen associations working with municipal, state and national governments.  And there are benefits for all.

NASA in 2007 identified 23 million acres of lawn in the United States.  The second-place cultivated crop is corn at seven million. Lawn requires more water, fertilizer and weed and insect treatment per acre than corn or any other major crop.  It is the single greatest polluter of our creeks, ponds, rivers and bays.

For the purpose of this short article I am referring to lawn as: Front-side-back residential lawn; university, government and institution lawn; corporate offices and office park lawns, golf course greens, and portions of schoolyards, city parks, and amusement parks.

Yesterday I experienced both the National Mall (from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial), and our neighborhood baseball diamond.  They are serving national and community purposes.  No change recommended here.  And I do endorse vegetables on the White House south/back lawn.

I contributed to the book "Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes" (CPUL) a couple of years ago.  This urban planning/design principle opens the possibility of my title: "Eat Half Your Lawn".

CPUL means that we can green our cities and metropolitan areas at no cost to government.  The benefits include:

- Maintaining and improving the landscape,
- Urban Carbon Farming, sequestering carbon dioxide,
- Restoring the soil and conserving water,
- Reducing the urban heat island effect and its contribution to global warming,
- Reducing air pollution borne sicknesses, particularly to children suffering from ozone,
- Reducing fossil fuel consumption,
- Producing fresh, local, healthy food,
- Building the "Main Street" economy through production of diverse crops.

Returning to NASA, in 2004 they determined that the three percent of the USA that is within streetlights has ten times the environmental productive capacity per acre as the 29 percent which was being farmed at that time.  Some of that has to do with the concentration of population and streetlights close to our ocean shores, lakes and rivers where the best soil and access to water exist in warmer climates.  Fortunately, this land is also closer to market.

As we are all agreed, United Nations to Sacramento and the White House, reducing carbon dioxide is important and urban carbon farming, by replacing some lawn with a diversity of plant material, is a top effective carbon sequestering method.  Converting a lawn to food production reduces the global warming and polluting factors of agriculture including shipping, storage, packaging and waste.  And most authorities find that the quality of our diet improves.

A key factor in this practice is reducing the consumption per food calorie of fossil fuels, so-called food miles.  Studies find that our current global food system uses seven to 14 fossil fuel calories for every food calorie that you consume at your dinner table or at McDonalds.

After graduation from Long Island Agriculture and Technical Institute (LAITI) I started my own landscape design and construction business.  A key principle was "lawn as a rug not a carpet".  A circular, oval or rectangular greensward framed by flowers, vegetables, shrubs, trellises and small trees.  Here I define a carpet as a wall-to-wall floor cover and a rug as an ornamental woven, shaped material surrounded by wood or other floor material.  This practice, adopted as a principle, can be applied to a good deal of our urban open space.

"Eat Half Your Lawn" does not mean introducing a rural farm landscape into the city.  It means having a more diversified landscape which is productive.  Good practice can be studied in many urban places worldwide including, at the beginning of the alphabet, Belgium, Cuba and Denmark.

There is clearly more business to be generated than there is in today's "lawn care".  Citizen associations can be motivated by the health and environment for living benefits.  Governments will use it as a tool to meet climate change goals and to reduce costs of health care, maintaining idle land and infrastructure, and managing waste.  The City Beautiful competition may be regenerated.

Government can support the new productive urban landscape by providing the small and middle farmers with storage, processing and marketing facilities at an incentive price.  Schools, libraries, hospitals, playgrounds and churches could be assisted in establishing model gardens.  A key implementation program will be government paying for carbon sequestering.  Each and every crop will need to be rated and tracked--think "Google Earth".  An annual payment could be made in cash or credit against taxes.

A lesser, and less popular, incentive would be setting a specific measure for the maximum percentage of lawn per site, which if exceeded will generate a measured tax levy.

The professions of city planning, landscape architecture, architecture, forestry and agriculture will all have a dynamic role to play and fees to earn.

Many groups world-wide are already engaged, from 'Smart Growth' planners (green) to Farmers Markets (local food).  With the global food-energy-climate nexus crisis, this is a good time to ratchet up the agenda: "Eat Half Your Lawn" transforming over ten million acres from mowed grass to other productive plants, lettuce to chestnuts.  This goal can be a major element in our passing a healthy planet on to our grandchildren.

References:

1. American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn; 2002, Ted Steinberg
2. Carbon Farming, http://www.cityfarmer.org/deskSmit.html#desk
3. Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes, Andre Viljeon et al 2006, London Univ. Publications
4. Design for Human Ecosystems, [236 +] John T. Lyle, 1985, Van Nostrand
5. Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, 2006, Lesley Stern
6. Farming in Nature's Image, [133 +] Judith D. Soule & Jon Piper 1992, Island Press
7. Food Not Lawns, 2005. H. C. Flores
8. NASA Goes looking for U.S. Lawns from Space, 2007, http://dirt.asla.org/
9. Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development, John T. Lyle, 1994, [102 +] John Wiley
10. Second Nature; 1991, Michael Pollan
11. www.gardening.cornell.edu/lawn
12. www.energyfarms.net/node/1047

You can reach Jac Smit by email at urbanag2@cs.com.

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The Square Foot Revolution
Kansas City workshop highlights refugees' role in changing food system

By Daniel Krotz, Institute for Social and Economic Development (ISED)

Although most refugees resettled in the United States come from rural areas with agrarian economies they are placed in urban areas because the relocation services they need for education, employment, integration, etc., are provided by resettlement agencies located in cities.  Thus, one of the biggest challenges refugees initially face is how to live in cities after lifetimes in rural communities.  Involvement in urban agriculture programs is one of the strategies that help meet those challenges.

Last October, the Institute for Social and Economic Development (ISED), the Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture and Catholic Charities of Kansas City, KS, held a workshop for agencies working with refugee farmers and market gardeners. The workshop was sponsored by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services.  One of the main focuses of the workshop was to discuss whether or not refugees can become more economically self sufficient by working in urban agriculture, and how community gardens and small farmsteads otherwise contribute to refugee integration.

As we know, urban agriculture is measured not in acres but by the square foot, and by definition begins with the pairing of an unlikely adjective and noun, "urban" and "agriculture."  In more than one way--in many ways really--it is hard to get our heads around both the definition, and how that definition plays out in practical terms.  One reason for this has to do with our preconceptions about farming and about business.  When people think about agriculture--and sadly, most people never think about agriculture--they often combine nostalgia about "family" farming in rural America with concerns about how "factory-like" our food production and processing sector has become.  Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, describes our food system as "industrial production, industrial processing, and industrial eating."

Yet, as we discussed at the workshop, there are hundreds of farmers and market gardeners in the U.S. working small plots of land nestled alongside freeways, wedged between public housing units, or occupying abandoned city lots and former industrial brownfields.  How is it possible that we have missed such a remarkable amount of activity?

Partly, according to Lynn Robson, ISED's President "it's because we don't know that even very small amounts of productive land can yield substantial revenues." For example, the two urban acres that KCCUA has in production generated over $100,000 in sales in 2007.  "While refugee farmers don't typically earn or produce that much," Robson said, "they are able to save money by supplementing their families' diets with fresh, healthy food, and to supplement their monthly earnings by selling their excess at farmers markets and neighborhood grocery stores."

Larry Laverentz, the Project Manager for ORR's Refugee Agricultural Partnership Project describes other benefits for refugees, and for the communities where they live.  "Urban gardens and farms are beginning to look like one of the best ways of helping integrate refugees into the mainstream community," Laverentz says, adding that "refugee families engage in a familiar activity--farming--but are helped by organizations like KCCUA to adapt what they know to new growing conditions, learn how to add value to produce, and earn income by selling it at local venues.  Working on urban farms contributes to their physical well-being and mental health, brings families and neighbors closer together, and turns non-productive land into a community asset."

A major goal of the Refugee Agricultural Partnership Project (RAPP) is to help refugees if a career in agriculture is something they want to pursue.  Not all refugees involved in the RAPP project will become farmers, but the program is a good introduction to production methods, business planning, marketing and sales, and sales tax payments.  If and when a refugee decides to farm on a full time basis--or as a second job to supplement wage income--RAPP project staff is available to help him or her access land, secure a loan for equipment, and to become a "customer" of USDA and Extension Services for further education and training.

"Square foot" farming may seem like a revolutionary idea to many Americans, but visitors to the developing countries where many refugees come from will see very small plots of urban land in production.  In Kosovo, for example, nearly every backyard is a vineyard, and nearly every city boulevard in Algeria is also an olive grove.  "Food isn't taken for granted in such countries," says Lynn Robson, "but is part of the fabric of daily life. Refugees intuitively seem to understand how personal our relationship with the land is, and with what it produces."

For more information about the Refugee Agricultural Partnership Project contact Daniel Krotz, Institute for Social and Economic Development (ISED), at danielkrotz@gmail.com or visit www.ised.us.

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Giving to KCCUA Yields Abundance All Year Long

 

By Semie Rogers

 

This holiday season, take a minute to reflect on the kind of world you want to live in.  We all hope for peace and prosperity, a just world whose resources are well-tended for the future.  KCCUA is changing our city and people's lives for the better.  Gifts from donors to KCCUA this year will allow us to:

- Put healthy food in poor neighborhoods--growing fresh fruits and vegetables in the community gets good food to people who have the least access.
- Teach people skills so they transform their lives and their communities.
- Turn abandoned lots into a productive, cared-for resource.
- Grow the number of farmers who bring good food to tables across Kansas City.

As you enjoy the friendship and abundance of the season, please consider a gift to KCCUA as a way to make tables across Kansas City bountiful all year long.  Donations multiply many times over, growing into healthy food for our city and a steady income for a hard-working farmer.  Just click Donate Now here or via the button at the top of this page.  A new donation option is to have your pledge paid in monthly or quarterly installments.  For instance, a $120 donation could be $10 per month or $30 quarterly.  If you prefer you can mail a check to KCCUA, PO Box 6043, Kansas City, KS 66106.

Thank you for thinking of a gift to KCCUA.  Your support is helping change Kansas City for the better.

If you would like to discuss a donation or fundraising event with Semie, please contact her at semie@kccua.org.

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Field Notes from the Kansas City Community Farm

By Daniel Dermitzel

This has been a season of much learning here at the Community Farm; and this continues into the winter.  Yesterday, on the first Tuesday of December, we harvested beautiful greens and roots from our winter production trials.  Arugula, spinach, salad mix, turnips and carrots.  While the snow was melting around us and with another round of white stuff coming today, it was a pleasure to pull up the row covers and expose these gifts of nature.  The trial has already produced some interesting information about germination and growth rates of different crops.  We'll try to record as much of this information as possible and make it available through our website in the spring.  One of the simple things we're doing that's giving us some helpful data is (almost) daily temperature logging.  With that we're developing a better understanding of our farm's micro-climate as well as the insulating qualities of the high tunnels, row covers and poly sheeting we use to keep crops alive.

Another trial we conducted this year involved no-till production.  Inspired by the wonderful work of Patrice Gros at Foundation Farm, who came to Kansas City to teach his method, we gave it a try.  We selected four beds and simply stopped tilling them, covered them with straw mulch and proceeded to do all the seeding, transplanting, weeding, bed renovation and replanting through this layer of mulch.  There is hardly much new here--gardeners have been doing this in one form or another for a long time--and yet most intensive vegetable growers have come to rely heavily on their rototillers to quickly create clean, fine seedbeds that are well-suited to mechanical seeders and transplanters and that promote seed germination and seedling growth.  Why then is there such an interest in no-till agriculture?  Because tillage can destroy soil life and structure and trigger mineralization of organic matter, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and decreasing soil fertility.  Learn more about the benefits of organic no-till farming and Patrice's techniques at http://www.kcnotill.org/.  We'll also give a brief presentation of what worked and didn't work in our farm trial at the Great Plains Vegetable Growers Conference in January.

You can reach Daniel Dermitzel by email at daniel@kccua.org.

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A Street Block in KC's Inner City May Soon Become "21st Century Green"
Planners and residents include urban agriculture in neighborhood revitalization plan

By Joey Pruett and Jacob Wagner, Ph.D.

Over the past year, the Urban Planning and Design program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) has formed a partnership with the Washington Wheatley Neighborhood Association in Kansas City's Third District.  The purpose of the partnership has been to develop a neighborhood action plan that would lead to a series of catalytic projects for neighborhood revitalization.

One such project envisioned in the plan is a newly-created "21st Century Green Block", a neighborhood demonstration project that would include urban agriculture, environmental education, a green roof, energy-efficient buildings and more.  Other projects include rain gardens, community gardens and native plant gardens on nearby school grounds.

During the planning process, the team's land use survey revealed that the Washington Wheatley neighborhood contained some 95 acres of vacant lots.  In addition, air quality monitoring showed that residents of the area are exposed to high levels of particulate matter from Interstate 70 and a railway line--an issue that caught the attention of Jill DeWitt from Burroughs Audubon, the Kansas City chapter of the Audubon Society.

 

With such a surplus of vacant land and high levels of air pollution, the team needed new strategies to transform the underutilized space from a community problem to a community asset.  The team sought advice from KCCUA on implementing urban agriculture as a strategy for both vacant land management and community economic development.  KCCUA is also working to help the partnership access technical assistance for urban soil testing.

With the initial planning process completed, the group sought funding to implement the plan, including money to jumpstart a community gardening project, the installation of rain gardens and green roofs as well as the creation of the 21st Century Green Block.  This fall the Washington Wheatley Neighborhood Association, in collaboration with UMKC, Burroughs Audubon and other partners began the Green Block project.  As part of Audubon's national "TogetherGreen" initiative, the project seeks to raise awareness about global warming and to educate a new generation of ecologists.

The project also includes two neighborhood schools, Phillis Wheatley Elementary and Crispus Attucks Elementary, where the team plans to implement rain gardens, sensory gardens, vegetable gardens, and native plant gardens on school grounds.  In the future, the project will implement green solutions on a street block along Prospect Avenue between 24th Street and 24th Terrace.  This block, which includes 45,000 square feet of vacant land, will become a pilot project to demonstrate innovate techniques for dealing with the neighborhood's vacant lots.  Another goal is to construct a green roof on top of the KC Storage building located here.  It would become the first green roof in Kansas City's Third Council District.

 

The 21st Century Green Block project will raise awareness about environmental conservation, global warming, and the importance of locally grown food, while developing new strategies for vacant land management and air quality mitigation.  Through the implementation of these green solutions in Washington Wheatley, this plan will foster community pride and beauty while involving residents in activities that can help improve their quality of life.  Supporters believe that by providing a central location for the demonstration of these conservation activities, the project can serve as a catalyst for broader neighborhood revitalization and public health improvement.

For more information contact Dr. Jacob Wagner at the UMKC Department of Architecture, Urban Planning and Design at (816) 235-6053.

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Reuse, Reduce, Recycle:  Topeka, KS, Greenhouse to Have Second Life in Kansas City
Tracking every bolt, clamp and wire is valuable learning experience as we choose "used" over "new" more often

By Daniel Dermitzel

When I first looked at the pictures sent to me by Iris Gonzalez of Topeka, KS, I sensed that the time had come for us to attempt a complete tear-down and rebuild of a full-fledged greenhouse.  Iris and her husband Mike had decided to donate the structure to anyone willing to dismantle it.  We at KCCUA felt that it was an opportunity we couldn't pass up.

Reusing farm infrastructure whenever possible makes sense from an environmental, energy-savings perspective.  Structures like a greenhouse contain a considerable amount of "embedded energy", energy that was used to design, build and assemble them.  This goes beyond the energy and other investments applied to extracting and processing the raw materials; it also includes the labor and design expertise by all involved.  Leaving such structures abandoned before the end of their useful life means wasting at least part of that energy.  And with rising prices for raw materials like steel, copper and lumber there is an increasing economic incentive to reuse these structures, in addition to the environmental one.  While it may be difficult to know the real costs of moving a greenhouse from one city to another, we felt this was at the very least an opportunity to learn some good lessons about what's really involved in what seems at first a rather daunting process.

We started with a trip to Topeka to take a closer look.  Armed with our cameras we snapped at every bow, wire and pipe in sight.  The structure seemed sound and relatively easy to dismantle.  When we mentioned the project to Randy Metzler, owner of Metzler Remodeling in Kansas City, MO, he was interested, too.  Randy is a frequent shopper at the Brookside Farmers Market and he liked our idea of re-building the greenhouse at the new Juniper Gardens Training Farm where it would benefit refugee farmers.  Randy generously offered to donate his company crew and tools to help.

A smaller crew spent a day removing the greenhouse covering, the heaters and the electrical system.  Working in a small group made it easy to proceed very slowly and deliberately, drawing maps and labeling parts.  The following day Randy and his crew came up, and in record-time we dismantled the entire frame, packed up every screw, wire and flashing, transported it to Kansas City and stored it in an empty barn owned by another KCCUA supporter.

What seemed like a very complex task ended up being surprisingly easy.  Understanding all the electrical circuits, for example, proved much less complicated than I first expected.  And with pictures documenting everything step-by-step we should be able to re-build the structure without too much difficulty.  Of course, there'll be some concrete to pour and electrical upgrades to install, maybe a new heater?  We'll see.  Look for more on this project in a future Urban Grown.  We hope to rebuild the structure some time in 2009.

Many thanks to:  Iris Gonzalez and Mike Cluff for donating the greenhouse and being so accommodating during the tear-down; Larry Davis and PJ Quell for donating labor, time, trucking and expertise, Steve Serbus for helping with tear-down, Randy Metzler and his crew (Drew, Ken, Elizabeth, Kristy and Joe) for such expert help (we had a fun day!), Catholic Charities of KCK for loaning the box truck, our own Semie Rogers for making the initial connection to her friends in Topeka, and to Sky and Liz Kurlbaum for helping out with storage space.

Reach Daniel Dermitzel at daniel@kccua.org.  For more information on Metzler Remodeling visit www.metzlerremodeling.com.

Volunteers Wanted:  KCCUA's 3rd Biennial Urban Farms Tour 2009
First planning meeting scheduled for December

Help us plan the 2009 Kansas City Urban Farms Tour!  Next June, KCCUA will host its third urban farms tour and we'd like you to join us in a brainstorming and organizing session.  This first meeting will be to set out goals for the Farm Tour, to brainstorm ways to make the tour even better next year and to pull together an Organizing Committee and an initial list of volunteers/supporters.  Please join us on December 10 from 5:30pm to 7:30pm at the True Light Center, Church of the Nazarene, 719 E. 31st St, Kansas City, MO 64109.  The tour will be coordinated by Janet Moss with support from Joel Wakeham, please RSVP to Janet at janetbridgeworks@sbcglobal.net!

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Calendar of Events

 

KCCUA's Third Biennial Urban Farms Tour Brainstorming and Organizing Meeting, Wednesday, December 10, 5:30pm - 7:30pm, True Light Center- Church of the Nazarene, 719 E. 31st St, Kansas City, MO 64109.  RSVP to Janet at janetbridgeworks@sbcglobal.net.

 

Great Plains Vegetable Growers Conference, January 8 - 10, Missouri Western University, Fulkerson Center, St. Joseph, MO.  For program and registration information visit http://extension.missouri.edu/buchanan/GPVGC.html.

2nd Annual Building A Sustainable Earth Community / Breaking the Silence Conference, January 16 - 18, Jack Reardon Convention Center, Kansas City, KS.  An environmental conference to empower individuals in our multi-cultural society to collaborate and promote ideas and activities which focus on building an accessible sustainable earth community that honors and preserves people and the environment.  For more information visit http://www.breakingthesilence.us/Conference-January-2009.html.

KCCUA Annual Urban Growers Meeting, Saturday, January 24.  Mark your calendars now.  More details about meeting time and location to be announced.  Come meet other growers, supporters and learn about our collaborative purchasing and greenhouse projects.

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Happy Holidays!