Ice cream trucks, so why not carrots?

The Permaculture Activist,  the 30 year old permaculture journal, has a new Kickstarter campaign to raise their online profile. If you are moved to contribute, check out their page.

-New York's Department of Environmental Protection announced their 2015 green infrastructure winners, over $3 million dollars will be disbursed. What do the winners have in common? Very ambitious (and big) projects, which will be atop everything from parking garages to auto-body shops turned halal slaughterhouses.   

-“It’s kind of strange - we’ll let ice cream trucks roll down the street and sell all kinds of sugary things, but you can’t sell a carrot.” This kind of quote, one would guess, would be attributed to a local, urban agriculture activist. But this is actually Dallas' sustainability coordinator talking and you can bet the Big D is up for some changes.
Hmmm...but what if you combined those two...carrot ice cream? Would everyone be happy???

-Patented in Lebanon and debuted in Cairo, have a gander at this very artistic green wall, inside Cairo’s Galleria mall. That's two big GILA projects for Cairo, in the last 3 months!

Catching up

The first week of January has brought a ton of news and stories.

-On the local education front, in Detroit a high school will offers kids a chance to learn about urban agriculture via their new training center, complete with solar hoop house, photovoltaic labs and more.
In Edmonton high schoolers can now learn about raising fish and veggies and serving them to their classmates in the cafeteria. And a Vancouver university is rolling out a four year degree in small scale, sustainable agriculture!!!

-On the city level, Cleveland announced funding for several green projects, look for more community gardens and other projects designed to mitigate stormwater and flooding.
Ottawa was considering a green roof bylaw and now they are not so sure. Thanks to freedom of information requests, intrepid reporters dug up earlier drafts which reiterated mayor Jim Watson's support of green roofs and then, for some reason, mention of the bylaw didn't make the final speech. We'll see what happens in the spring!

-Let's go bigger, country big. Qatar is developing a food sufficiency plan. Makes sense when 90% of your food is imported. Or does it???
And lastly, check out Lebanon's first green wall.

Living architecture world of the week: horticultural foodscapes

Alternatively called "wildcrafting" and horticultural foodscapes by the author, I favor the latter because it is just a touch less vague although both could be employed depending on the situation. Using any old pine needles carefully arranged on the table = wild crafting, eating those pine needles carefully arranged on the table = horticultural foodscapes.

Two questions...
-Did you know that contest to create an urban farm in Atlanta was partially funded by Walmart?. They are operating at all levels from the mainstream to grassroots.

-Also, did anyone know that the USDA gives out approximately $5 million dollars per year as part of the Farmers Market Promotion Program? AS far as I can tell, this money is open to urban agriculture operations as well.

-Lastly for today comes a tidbit from Lebanon. ANERA, the American University of Beirut and the Ein El Helweh Women’s Program Center have joined forces to improve the lives of 26 women and they hope eventually, 70,000 refugees. Using vertical plantings, rooftop rain water collection systems and other urban agriculture technologies, they hope to green a landscape dominated by cement.