Work on an urban agricultural plan for Philadelphia, underway for going on two years, has taken a step forward. In a virtual public meeting that ran for the month of May, dozens of participants explored a wealth of online content, left comments, and voted in polls on an array of issues that may be covered in the plan.

Soil Generation website

A year and a half had elapsed since the first public meeting in December 2019. COVID knocked a second public hearing, scheduled for March 2020, off the calendar. Online meetings were promised later last year, but instead, the city Department of Parks and Recreation spent five months dealing with racial discord between the two consulting outfits hired by the city to help draft a plan: Interface Studios LLC, a local urban planning firm, and Soil Generation, a “Black and Brown led coalition of growers.”

Interface Studios website

In a joint statement released in March (full text here), the consultants said they have resolved their differences. “The facilitated process helped Interface become a better partner, helped build a stronger team, and will help the plan embody the project’s values of centering Black and Brown voices by applying an anti-racist lens to both the planning process and the end product,” the statement says.

The obligatory public hearing phase is now finished. The consultants and city officials working on the project say they “expect to deliver the final plan in Fall 2021.” Although comments are no longer being solicited, the virtual public hearing is still available for all to see, attractively laid out in 10 “stations,” via this  online portal to Virtual Meeting No. 2.

Station 1 is an 18-minute video orientation about the planning process.

Station 2 focuses on how history has impacted land and growing in Philadelphia.  “The history of agriculture in America is rooted in racism,” the text asserts. Among the forces that perpetuate “racialized land-based oppression,” the planning materials maintain, are “Western capitalism” and “individual ownership of land as a concept,” “colonialism” which “consistently exploits labor and appropriates culture” from people of color to “uphold colonial power,” and corporations that “continue to gobble up community enterprises, while public resources favor the wealthy.”

Spam filters use software and a set of muscle discount cialis 20mg mass. VigRX Plus is excellent supplement for fixing erectile dysfunction – along with a whole lot of unnatural soft viagra pills ingredients that may be less desirable. There are many men these days buy viagra without rx who are seeking a lot of help for erectile dysfunction. Not only does it increase their stamina and prowess in bed, it also rekindles cialis usa online lost sexual desire in them. Station 3, about access to land, asserts that it is “necessary to consider barriers to land access today as continuations of racialized land-based oppression.”  The materials go on to suggest that one of the ultimate objectives of an urban agricultural plan for Philadelphia should be a ban on private ownership of land. Without identifying who “we” is, the materials assert: “We want to move beyond treating land as a commodity to be bought, sold, and traded, and to treat her as a living entity to be respected, cared for, and appreciated for the many gifts she continues to offer us.”

Station 4, titled “What Do Community Gardens Need to Thrive?” offers a glimpse of the feedback gathered during the virtual hearing in the form of “likes” for a range of choices. The option receiving the most likes, 47, was “growing materials” such as shovels and hoes. “Growing infrastructure” such as greenhouses came next with 45 likes followed by “water infrastructure” with 31.

Under the subheading of “What do the people who tend your garden need to thrive,” a “living wage” was the top choice, with 44 likes, followed by “diversity, inclusion and antiracism training” with 31. “I would add, inclusive leadership training and conflict resolution to this,” a comment attached to that choice said.

Station 5 delves into the keeping of animals in Philadelphia, in particular bees, fish, hens, and goats. A coalition of people around town who keep hens in their backyards in defiance of a law that bars them from city lots of less than three acres are hoping the urban agricultural plan will bring them out of the shadows.

At Station 6, titled “How Do We Get Jobs and Build Businesses as Growers?” participants in the virtual meeting were offered a choice of eight “barriers to work.” The top choice, selected by 25 percent, was low wages, followed “lack of local opportunities,” cited by 16 percent. The least mentioned barrier, cited by 2 percent, was “suspected discrimination,” defined as not getting a job “because employers are racist, sexist, ageist, ableist, or biased against me.”

Station 7 discusses education while Station 8 address how urban agriculture can help preserve cultural practices such as foraging and seed saving.

Station 9, “How Can We Improve Philly Food Systems & Policies?” contains an array of suggestions including a “city good food purchasing policy” that would “ensure that public food contracts reflect community values.” And a “centralized food production facility that trains and hires Philadelphians to grow and prepare food for city programs” such as schools, recreation centers, and prisons.

Station 10 asks, “What Are Your Priorities?” Participants selected from an array of choices in three areas. In the area of “changes in existing policies or practices,” among the 87 participants who voted, the top choice, selected by 53 percent, was transparency in the sale and lease of city land for agriculture. Of the 81 participants who voted on “top priorities for city investments in community-led ventures,” the top pick, selected by 59 percent, was helping gardeners and farmers get land security through ownership or leases of land. The top priority for new city programs or initiatives was creation of an Office of Urban Agriculture.

It will be fascinating to see what Interface Studios and Soil Generation deliver at the end of this two-year process, and what the city does with it.

I didn’t waste anytime getting restarted. Under the new system designed to space out visits, I booked an “indoor seeding” slot on opening day, Feb. 8, and started planting–spinace, lettuce, arugula, kale, chard, and, of course, microgreens.

Less than two weeks later, I have just harvested my first crop:  sprouting daikon radish, red acre cabbage, and garnet red amaranth microgreens.

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Now the snow cap is receding and I can see that  mustard greens seem to be snapping back, some mizuna, maybe some lettuce, and more. In perhaps several weeks, on a warm early spring day I’ll pull the cover off and we’ll see.

Overwintering garden in early February

A thaw, and signs of life, on February 26

Last spring, when the pandemic forced the cancellation of the final round of public hearings in a process that was supposed to wrap up last fall, planners vowed to set up an “online engagement process” with updates promised “in the coming weeks.” The updates never came. Instead, Jaramillo reports, the Philadelphia Parks and Recreation department spent five months engaged in a “facilitation process” to help reconcile differences between the consultants.

Young men face erectile dysfunction moreover because of the psychological problems at buy generic cialis the same time. This ingredient mixes well in the blood vessels & therefore, it helps with the efficient circulation of the blood into the male reproductive organ. cialis levitra generika http://deeprootsmag.org/2014/08/24/sorrow-suicide/ Men’s health can be improved speedily along with the removal of such dreaded problems of the order 50mg viagra penile region & clears these routes & thus, the blood vessels can carry enough amount of blood to the penile organs through which one carries out its erection. The joints between the bottom thoracic vertebra (known as buy levitra online T12) as well as the top lumber vertebra (L1 in the lower back) allow twisting movement from side to side. The urban-ag planning process will resume this year, according to a recently updated city website about the prospective plan, called “Growing from the Roots.” The website says, “Pleased stay tuned for the next round of conversations.”

Jaramillo has done some excellent reporting on urban agriculture in Philadelphia in recent years. Unfortunately, for the urban ag scene in town, this latest piece of hers for WHYY and PlanPhilly will be her last. She announced on her Twitter page that she has accepted a job with Fact Check “to debunk misinformation about COVID-19.”

Covid-19 shut down lots of things but not Philadelphia community gardens. When lockdown orders were in place barring nonessential trips away from home, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture declared on April 17 that community gardening is an “essential” activity, exempting gardeners from stay-at-home orders as long as they wore masks and followed other protocols. The Philadelphia parks and recreation department found a way to continue offering free compost–in socially distanced piles. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society found ways to continue seedling distributions, and offered webinars in place of cancelled in-person workshops. A new PHS initiative launched in May to address food insecurity in Philadelphia, Harvest 2020, enlisted more than 10,000 gardeners, food bank volunteers and others to grow and distribute tons of produce to local food banks. The initiative created new gardens in unlikely spots, such as the Garden for Good at the Subaru Park soccer stadium. The project also teamed up with Sankofa Farm at Bartram’s Garden to build 50 backyard garden beds in West Philly.

Covid Slows but Can’t Stop Urban Ag Reform

Philadelphia was supposed to get a full-fledged municipal urban agriculture plan in 2020, but the coronavirus derailed the planning process just as it entered the homestretch. That didn’t stop the Housing Development Corp. from taking steps to address one long-standing complaint of activists: launching a new website that should make it somewhat easier to convert vacant lots to community gardens.

Revolutionary Gardeners Fend Off City

New chapters were added to long running sagas involving efforts by activists in North Philly and Kensington to wrest vacant lots from the city for gardening activities. The North Philly Peace Park,  operated by a group engaged in “a protracted revolutionary communal effort to establish, build up and defend community controlled land-based programs,” was briefly evicted by the Philadelphia Housing Authority from two vacant buildings it was renovating. They are adjacent to the lot where the North Philly Peace Park has resided, with city approval, since 2016. PHA promptly apologized for the raid, acknowledging that the group was in the midst of good-faith negotiations to buy the buildings. In Kensington, the Cesar Andreu Iglesias Community Garden, founded in 2012 by a group called Philly Socialists on several vacant, tax-delinquent lots, seemingly dodged a bid by the city to sell the lots they are occupying. Developers were offering big bucks for the lots, and were pledging to build an apartment building with affordable units. The plan by the cash-strapped city to proceed with the sale was delayed in June, and called off, at least for now, in September.

USDA Tips Hat to Philly Urban Ag

The U.S. Department of Agriculture seemed to recognize Philadelphia as a leader in urban agriculture, with an announcement in August that our city will be one of the first five in the nation (along with Portland, Albuquerque, Cleveland, and Richmond, Va.) to get a new county urban agriculture committee. County committees, operating under the auspices of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency, have been around in rural America since the 1930s to allow farmers to offer input on delivery of federal services. Urban agriculture committees are a new thing, authorized for the first time by the 2018 Farm Bill. USDA urban ag committees will “work to encourage and promote urban, indoor, and other emerging agricultural production practices,” and also delve into food access, community composting, and food waste reduction.
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Vertical Gardening Entrepreneurs Arrive

Growing food crops on a commercial scale in containers in the middle of cities, a concept bandied about in futurist-urbanist circles, became a reality in Philadelphia in 2020, at least in a demonstration project and on a drawing board. In September, Second Chances Farm, a Wilmington-based vertical-farming enterprise that exclusively hires formerly incarcerated people for its farm workforce, announced plans to open a 30,000-square-foot farm in vacant buildings as part of the North Station redevelopment near the Temple University campus, with plans to eventually triple that space. That’s not all. The Philadelphia site will open satellite farms in other older industrial cities throughout Pennsylvania. That’s the big plan anyway. As for actually making it happen, on least on a small scale, cultural economist Dr. Jamie Bracey-Green beat them to it, announcing in October the launch in West Philly of Think and Grow Farms, in a converted freight container.

Pests, or at Least pest Reports, Proliferate

There were 33,015 spotted lanternfly sightings in Pennsylvania between January and July of 2020, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture—a frightful 500 percent increase from the year before (but not as harrowing as the 1,300 percent increase in spotted lanternfly sightings reported next door in New Jersey). Experts aren’t sure whether the surge in sightings reflects an increase in number of bugs, or in number of people who, locked in quarantine, have nothing better to do than count bugs and tell the agriculture department about them.

Are there other important “stories of the year” concerning urban agriculture and community gardening in Philadelphia in 2020 that I missed? Add your thoughts in the comments section below.

Flashy troutback lettuce, oakleaf lettuce, cilantro, parsley, Russian kale, lacinato kale, collards, red mustard, frilly mustard, arugula, and hakurei turnips.

They are hale and hearty so far after as many as half a dozen subfreezing nights, including a dip to 28 or 27 degrees F. Maybe they’re up for the rigors of making it through a Philadelphia winter with scanty protection from the elements. We’ll see.
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• First, peruse this map to see if the lot is city-owned and available.
• Next find out if you’re eligible to purchase the lot and submit an application. You’re supposed to get some response from PHDC within 120 days.

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PHDC’s overhaul of the system for selling publicly owned vacant lots is a result of a reform process that has been underway for several years. The push for a better way was spurred by reporting by Plan Philly and WHYY, the public radio station, which uncovered a backlog of more than 18,000 “expressions of interest” to buy some of the more than 8,000 vacant lots in the city’s inventory. Many of the queries had gone unanwered for years.

Under the new system, buyers may submit formal applications for lots approved for sale as side yards or community gardens–as long as the applicant meets certain terms and conditions. The city is supposed to respond within 120 days–with approval by no means guaranteed.

The new website acknowledges that the city has some fences to mend with community gardening advocates who have long complained about the inability to make use of blighted lots:

“The City of Philadelphia and PHDC have a strong commitment to community gardening and urban agriculture. Gardening is an important part in helping to transform and sustain communities. In the last five years, PHDC has done a lot of work in community gardening and urban agriculture. There is more work to do, but we are committed!”

PHDC also acknowledges that some gardens have already been established without authorization on vacant lots. The new system promises a possible path toward legalization for at least some of them:

“If you are already gardening on a lot but don’t have an agreement to do so, we may be able to formalize your garden.”

In considering applications, PHDC apparently will take steps to assure that vacant lots ostensibly purchased for use as “community gardens” aren’t commandeered for purely private use or perhaps flipped to a developer for a fat profit. That sort of scam does indeed happen with disposition of city-owned vacant lots, as WHYY and others have reported in, among others, a piece about a city judge who acquired lots for a pittance and sold them to a developer a year later for a $135,000 profit, and another article about how political favoritism can distort the process of disposing of vacant lots.

The new application process suggests the city will require proof that a purchaser has the intent and wherewithal to create and manage a garden that is actually open to the community. As the PHDC’s new website states:

The application to use property for a community garden, open space or recreational area will ask for information about you and, if applicable, your organization. It will also help us make sure you are up to date on your taxes, have no conflicts of interest, and comply with the City’s campaign contribution guidelines.

• The application also asks you to submit:
• An economic opportunity and inclusion plan
• Detailed plans
• Documentation that you have successfully completed such developments in the past
• Proof that you have the funds needed to complete the development
• Organizational documents

I was hoping I’d have a massive crop of spinach under the row covers in my backyard garden this winter. But not a single surviving seedling came of the hundreds of spinach seeds I planted in late August, hoping for a fall harvest and maybe even a crop that would overwinter. What I’m left with under cover from my end-of-summer planting is some oakleaf and speckled lettuce, parsley, hakurei turnips, volunteer cilantro from my summer crop, mustard greens, kale and a couple of collards.

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Where was this guy (see below) all summer long when I could have used regular visits by wily carnivores to keep the squirrels out of my tomatoes and up in the trees. I hadn’t seen a fox in my backyard for awhile but I knew they are lots of them here in Mt. Airy near the Wissahickon Creek watershed.

It’s November 15 and we’ve had just one light frost so far, so there’s plenty of greenery in my The just difference is in price because buying cialis in spain is sold at affordable price because generic manufacturers don’t invest in research work that is done by branded manufacturers. Touching and intimacy heighten our cialis no prescription canada enjoyment of life. This in turn pushes the level of testosterone to improve the purchase generic levitra male libido. But remember https://www.unica-web.com/watch/2010/maurice-maggi-floralanarchist-1.html generic sildenafil from india that you need to be sexually thrilled to acquire rock hard erection. garden. Today I harvested (clockwise from lower left) collard greens, mustard greens, kale, New Zealand spinach, arugula, oregano, cilantro, an eggplant, aji amarillo peppers, and green tomatoes.

When I realized I would have an October and November bumper crop of the late-blooming peppers on my hands, I was inspired to find out what they are so I could figure out what to do with them. Turns out, they each have an interesting culinary story to tell here, as I recount on my Seasonal Chef website. In short, aji amarillo peppers, fiery hot but not deadly, are a keystone ingredient in the cuisine of Peru, while aji dulces, which have the taste and aroma but none of the heat of their blistering hot lookalike cousins, habaneros, are integral to the cuisine of parts of the Caribbean region that favor milder fare including Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.

Here’s what I did with my harvest:
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Netting couldn’t keep the suckers out

I think I’ve spawned a new species of squirrel in my backyard over the past five years: a species that can thrive on nothing but green tomatoes supplemented by an occasional snack of garbage.

I’ve grown tomatoes in my backyard in Philadelphia for about eight years now and in the early years, I harvested tomatoes by the hundreds. This year I planted 10 or 12 tomatoes–early girls, big boys, lemon boys, a Cherokee purple, etc.—and all that the squirrels left me was one lousy tomato no bigger than twice the size of a buffalo nickel.

I tried many ways to stave them off: fencing, netting, row cover wrapping tomato clusters like mummies, even a rat trap (which finished the summer 1 out of about 100 snaps). A feral cat that roamed the neighborhood and regularly passed through my backyard on her hunting rounds, kept the squirrels up in the trees when she was on patrol. But when she was away, the squirrels played, freely taking my tomatoes, when they had grown to medium-size and were far from ripe, just a few tomatoes a day, so that you hardly notice, until you realize none are ever getting ripe.

In the end, nothing stopped squirrels from getting every last one of my backyard tomatoes this summer.
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Next summer, I will either construct a fully enclosed, heavy-gauge chicken-wire cage for my plants, or I’ll give up trying to grow tomatoes in my backyard garden altogether.

Unless anybody can comment here about another way…

feral cat kept squirrels in trees . . .until she left