Growing a Greener World

- Growing a Greener World is made possible in part by... - The Subaru Crosstrek.

Designed with adventure in mind.

Built in a zero-landfill plant.

So you can roam the earth with a lighter footprint.

Subaru, proud sponsor of Growing a Greener World.

- And the following Rain Bird.

Corona tools.

And Milorganite.

(soft music) - I'm Joe Lamp'l.

When I created Growing a Greener World, I had one goal, to tell stories of everyday people, innovators, entrepreneurs, forward-thinking leaders who are all in ways both big and small, dedicated to organic gardening and farming, lightening our footprint, conserving vital resources, protecting natural habitats, making a tangible difference for us all.

They're real.

They're passionate.

They're all around us.

They're the game changers who are literally growing a greener world, and inspiring the rest of us to do the same.

Growing a Greener World.

It's more than a movement.

It's our mission.

Over the last few years is the interest in growing backyard food was taking off.

There was a new trend that kept playing itself out.

People wanted to grow their own food and they even had the space; but they lacked the knowledge to get started or the time to keep it going.

And didn't tell recently, there wasn't even an industry to meet that demand or keep up with the challenges.

But that's all changing.

A new group is emerging across the country to answer the call.

They're known as Urban Farmers and in the Pacific Northwest, Colin McCrate and his business partner, Brad Halm are keeping busy cultivating backyards and rooftops all around Seattle.

In fact, their Seattle Urban Farm Company has grown from home farm and garden consultation to designing and installing rooftop and restaurant gardens, and so much more.

- [Colin] I got interested in agriculture when I was in college.

I think as just an environmentalist, I was looking for something tangible I could actually do.

And once I started growing food, I just really got addicted to it.

So, it was sort of the first thing that ever actually made sense to me that I was trying to learn about.

It was easy to remember things, and I actually enjoyed doing it.

That was kind of new.

I think I kind of went through years of sort of accidentally accruing skills that would help me do this.

I worked on family farms, like 20 acre farms, five acre farm.

Did some environmental education in a garden; sort of teaching classes to kids, and kind of started thinking about, you know, home vegetable gardening.

And it wasn't that I knew there was going to be an opportunity to do a lot of work.

It was just that it was what I wanted to do.

I wanted to live in Seattle and I wanted to grow food.

And I wanted to sort of try to find an opportunity to do that.

So we just sort of started putting word out there saying, you know, we can help you in your garden at home and hoping there'll be people out there that will take us up on it and there were.

And we've been getting busier ever since.

So all of our work takes place in the city.

We go to visit someone's home and help them set up a vegetable garden.

Or maybe we add in some fruit trees or a chicken coop to that.

And any of those projects, that's Urban Farming.

People come into home vegetable gardening for a lot of different reasons.

Some people want their kids to find out where food comes from.

Some people want to just change and improve their diet.

Some people see it as a way to meet their neighbors, and build the community in their neighborhood.

Some people just think fresh food tastes better.

And what's really amazing about it is that people end up benefiting from all those things.

Regardless why they got started, they end up, you know, cooking more, eating more vegetables at home.

Their kids are usually more open to eating vegetables year round, even when it comes from the store or the farmer's market.

They usually meet their neighbors because they have extra produce to give to people.

And so it's really great just to watch people sort of, you know, all those great things come into their lives through gardening.

We try to offer a wide range of services.

Some people want help just sort of walking through their property and talking about where a garden could go.

What the process might be like.

And so we just go there one time and sort of just sort of, you know, give them some pep talk and give them some good ideas, try to give them resources.

Other people, we do a garden design for them, and then they implement it on their own.

Some people we help them come up with a garden design, and then we actually build the garden for them.

We set up an irrigation system.

And then other clients, we also go out, build the whole garden and plant it.

And we come back through the season and help them learn how to take care of it or just take care of it for them when they go out and just harvest the produce.

So it's kind of all over the map.

People have different needs, you know, based on their budget or based on their experience or the time they have available.

So we try to just sort of make it open to as many different people as we can.

A business like ours could work just about anywhere.

And actually businesses are starting up all over the country, helping people start growing food at home.

I think it's just an extension of the fresh local food idea that people are really getting interested in, and what better way to have fresh local food than growing it right in your own yard.

(soft upbeat music) - People who pay attention to where their food comes from, and commit to eating locally referred to as Locavores.

But the good news is it's not an all or nothing decision because any step that you've taken can make a difference from protecting the health of your family, to that of the environment, to even supporting the small farmers in your area.

So how do you get started?

Step one, decide what local means to you because there really aren't any hard and fast rules.

But a common place to begin, try to source and eat all of your food within a hundred mile radius and then spread out from there either by state or region.

But the important thing is by setting a boundary, no matter how large, you become a lot more conscious of the source of your food, and that's really important.

And the term locavore it's being used a lot more these days.

In 2007, it was the word of the year in the Oxford American dictionary.

And you know, it's really on the map when you can say, "Yep, there's an app for that."

Gotcha.

More and more restaurants are embracing the locavore movement by sourcing a lot of their fresh produce from local farmers.

But some restaurants they're taking it even a step further by growing their own fresh herbs, fruits and vegetables, and a garden they maintain right on site.

- [Jenny] How the garden got started was about five or six years ago.

I was meeting with my entire staff.

Once a year, we have a summit where we all come together and talk about where we've been, where we're growing.

And I really wanted to start something on a daily basis where we were giving and involved in the community.

- That led restaurant owner, Jenny Levison, to start a tiny farm on a one acre, gravel lot next to her popular Atlanta lunch spot, Souper Jenny.

Some of what they grow goes into their soups, salads and sandwiches.

Some get sold as produce, and all of it serves a higher purpose.

- And so really our farm started as a piece of an educational piece to the business as we wanted to grow as much food as we could for ourselves, but also start teaching our community, and people that you know, needed food in our community.

How easy you could grow on your back step of your house or your apartment, so that's how it all began.

I think it's our responsibility as restaurant owners, or chefs to engage the community , in what we're doing.

So I just, that's what fuels me.

I'm interested in that conversation.

I'm interested in people coming to the restaurant, and knowing we run out of food.

We, we're not McDonald's, you're not going to just get, you know, an unlimited supply of things that you don't need.

So we have our fresh food that we made for the day and this is it.

And if it's gone at two o'clock come back tomorrow for the next round of freshness.

- [Joe] But overseeing five restaurant locations around town, handling head chef duties, and managing multiple wait staffs, didn't leave a lot of time for also running a working urban farm.

Souper Jenny needed a sidekick.

Farmer Jeff, here we are downtown Atlanta on about an acre garden.

You've got your work cut out for you.

We are in August in Atlanta - And it's hot.

- It's humid.

- Yeah.

- It's rainy.

And it's par for the course here, you know, gardens are been very productive up to this point, as yours has.

- This garden, this was a parking lot.

A gravel parking lot for a bus Depot, and it's been converted into a garden.

Look around.

It's all green, - Yep.

- Even though there's gravel below us, we're still able to grow on eight inches and raised beds.

We don't tell our turn here.

These beds are as they are.

And we just grow into them by covering, cutting the cover crop, planting into that.

And then using a, a system I put together of wood chips and coffee grounds, where we collect coffee grounds in the neighborhood and then add that to the wood chips as a constant.

What we're doing is constant composting in the bed basically.

- Making it soil healthier, and taking things out of the waste stream and re-purposing them back into the garden and growing all this food.

And so Jenny's got what five restaurants - Yep - and this serves the one right here, at least probably - Yes.

- To some level.

Yeah.

- Yeah, absolutely.

It serves.

We do it as a, we sell some of the product at the front of the store as people come in.

And then, and then the rest will then be sold out as soup.

We'll go through the store for soup or whatever, whatever they use.

- [Joe] It's an approach that has caught on with Jenny's customers, but it's one, she hopes also spreads far beyond her own doors.

- I feel the connection between seeing how your food is grown and then having this restaurant right next door, where it's being incorporated or seeing food grown, and it's going into food, that's feeding the community.

Or even, you know, we take our vegetables here and sell them in the store.

It just links people.

And it starts a great conversation.

I think it's a whole new wave of the customer of actually caring about where our food comes from as opposed to how much is on your plate.

So, I'm hoping that that is the beginning of that movement of, of asking questions every time you go out to eat.

It means something when they tell you where your food is from, or if you're wondering why the cost of something might be higher where it's sourced.

But I would just invite people to get curious, and ask questions.

So one of my favorite things is that Farmer Jeff is out here every day.

So I personally have witnessed customers coming off their lunch and coming out and asking about the tomatoes they just had in their salad.

"Or how can I grow this?"

"I, I have a 800 square foot apartment.

What are my options?"

And, it's just started a wider conversation.

- [Joe] And here you are out here.

I just envisioned this, Jeff you're out here working, trying to get your job done, and get the harvest done, and get the weeds out of the way.

And I bet you're getting hit with a million questions.

- Lots of people come out, right?

Lots of people want to, "How come I can't do this?"

"So how come this?

So what is this?"

And one of the things is why we grow right here.

We have our, of our peppers.

We grow 20 different varieties of peppers.

It's about expanding consciousness to the unlimited possibilities of what you can do on a flat gravel lot.

(soft music) - The locavore movement has created a lot of opportunities across the country.

Especially in dense urban cities.

With that perceive lack of green space; like right here in New York city, there are over 800,000 private backyards.

Now that's a lot of growing space and a lot of opportunity for Stacey Murphy.

She's the founder of BK Farmyards, a Brooklyn-based farming network that grows fresh and healthy, affordable food for area residents.

Now, Stacy in her apprentices farms in these small backyards while making that trip from farm to table a whole lot shorter.

- [Stacey] I have a background in mechanical engineering and architecture.

I was working in the city, working on high-end residential buildings and going through the farmer's market every day on the way to work.

And I got really enthralled with food again.

I grew up growing food with my mom when I was a kid, and I was excited about how fresh everything tasted again; and how beautiful everything was, and the connection to the farmer.

And it was something that I had lost touch with.

And so little by little, I, I stopped going to work on time and I kept staying at the farmer's market more and more.

Talking to the farmers about their days.

And one day I just stopped and I stayed at the farmer's market all day long.

And I thought about what a new profession might look like.

And it took a while to think through what that might be.

I decided that I wanted to become an urban farmer.

So I, I thought about an idea that it would be a decentralized urban farming network.

So what that means in layman's term is that we would have a lot of farms spread across the city.

Lots of different farmers provide lots of opportunities, and increase the amount of fresh food that people could have access to in the city.

It would be a whole new distribution network in the city.

So the tagline for BK Farmyards is "You have the land, We grow the produce."

And so essentially that's how we started the business is going around asking people, "Hey, do you have, do you have the yard?

Do you have some land?

Can we farm it?"

And that's essentially how we started to find land.

In fact, that's how we found this property.

I was standing at a farmer's market.

That's a couple blocks from here.

It's a very small farmer's market.

And I figured the people at farmer's markets are going to be interested in fresh food.

So I was standing on the corner with a flyer about my business and I was yelling at people, "Hey, do you have a yard?"

And the looks on people's faces was pretty funny.

They didn't know where I was going with it.

And then when I followed with, "Can I farm it?"

They were a little taken aback, "Like what, what do you mean?"

And so it drew a lot of attention to what I was doing.

People wanted to know how to be, how they could be a part of it and what it would mean to from their backyard.

And so there was a woman who took one of the flyers, and posted it on the community blog.

She's one of the community leaders in the neighborhood.

And so, I started getting phone calls all over the neighborhood from people saying, "I have a yard, do you want to farm it?"

And one of them was this yard.

And she actually called me when I was walking close to her street looking at a separate yard, and she was at work, but I just came right into our backyard when she, when everybody was gone and it was a gorgeous yard filled with weeds up to my forehead, which meant that it got a lot of sun and was perfect for growing.

So the business plan the first year was to create a series of backyard farms to create enough income for a farmer.

Now, you may not think that there's enough backyard space in New York city.

It's pretty dense.

It's the densest city in the, in the United States, but in actuality, there's 820,000 private acres of backyards in New York city.

So we're sitting on 600 square feet right now, which is the first backyard farm.

So the business model is that the homeowner pays for the installation the first year and they get free produce for the life of the project.

So at this point they're getting free produce.

And as many CSA members, Community Supported Agriculture, as many shares as possible for the site, we get families who pay up front.

They get a share of the produce for the whole season.

So every week they come, they pick up produce in the farm.

So what that means is that the setup cost of the site is covered by the homeowner and they get a gorgeous lush backyard year, round, and free produce.

And then the other people are paying the labor for the farmer.

It doesn't take a lot of space to grow a lot of food.

This farm we're sitting on is Fox Trot farm yard.

It's the first backyard farm in our business.

There's about 450 square feet of planting beds.

So even before the height of the season, when our tomatoes came in, our eggplant, our cucumbers, all the really heavy produce.

We were getting 33 pounds of produce every week.

So in the height of the season, you can only imagine that that would be probably double.

It feeds six families over the course of 20 weeks.

(soft upbeat music) So I don't think what I'm doing is all that unique.

I think there's people growing food everywhere.

I've seen people growing out of shoes in school gardens that don't have enough space.

I've seen people growing on rooftops, people growing in basements, growing everywhere.

I think that what's maybe unique about what we do do is that we're trying to connect all of these things that are happening; and provide resources for the farmers to keep ongoing.

Provide resources for the city so that we can continue the work that we're doing, and combine the energies of all these people.

If, if all these people were to work individually, it would just be a series of projects.

But at some point it's got to become a local food system.

That's supportive and is rewarding for all of the people involved, and somehow sustains them financially as well.

My hope for BK farmyards is to create a system where everybody has a role to play as a participant, an active participant in our local food system.

I think that not only are we growing a lot of urban farm, or the skills of urban farmers, and the number of urban farmers, but to get people actively engaged in the choices that they're making in the food system and actively engaged in giving resources to farmers means that we're going to be co-producers of the food system instead of having producers and consumers.

I think that people are starting to become active citizens, which is different than being just a consumer.

It means that you're engaged in the process, and you're supporting things that you believe in.

- So you come upon this garden, and it was nothing but weeds.

What do you think?

How do you set up a garden that's nothing but weeds.

Where do you start?

- The first thing that you have to do, especially in an urban setting is test the soil.

In a lot of urban setting, there's a lot of led from the old led paints that are in the houses.

So you want to make sure you get the soil tested.

And from there, my biggest, my biggest deal is build, build, build compost as much as you can to remediate the soil.

At that point, if you can't remediate the soil, you might want to bring some in.

I don't recommend it because you're using trucks and all the fossil fuels to bring the trucks in.

But if you have to, sometimes you have to.

And from there, you try to figure out where the areas are with the most sun and the areas that have a little shade.

You'll notice that we have a little bit of shade and a little bit of sun; so some crops do well in one area, but they might not do well in another.

- So you put the shade loving or shade tolerant crops over under the tree, and they're doing fine just as these are, but then you have a really bountiful crop of tomatoes over there and a lot going on behind us.

And clearly that's by virtue of all of that sunlight.

- Exactly.

Exactly.

- So now you've built up the soil.

You've brought in this really good soil.

You don't have it contained by any sort of physical barriers or borders, but you have these nice mounded beds.

That's really important, isn't it?

- Yes.

So one of the big things for working beds is you want nice fluffy soil.

We like to call it chocolate cake.

(laughing) So lots of air pockets for the, for the roots to grow in and semi flat so that the irrigation is level among the beds.

And if you raise them, it just makes it easier to not step in the bed to keep it nice, fluffy and light.

- Then you've got drip irrigation all through here.

- Yeah.

To save some water.

We're doing irrigation on the site.

- Yeah, very smart.

I love walking through any organic garden, especially when it's in town.

You know, that's really important, no matter where it is, but here, everything looks so healthy.

I see a little bit of cosmetic damage, but no big deal, right?

- Yeah.

So we were, we believe that if there's some holes in the plants, then it's safe for the pests to eat, then it must be safe for us to eat.

Right.

And are, are the people who come to buy the food are appreciative of that.

- They get it.

- They know that it's safe for their kids.

So our methods here are really simple.

Basically we, if there's pests on the plant we'll pull them off and kill them.

Or if they're something that needs to be killed, we'll squash it with our hands, throw it away.

- Yeah, but being proactive is probably the most important thing, catching it early.

- Yes, Yes.

- Getting ahead of the problem before it becomes big.

- So we're super densely packed, which means that past can really multiply quickly on a site like this.

- Right.

- So we make sure we look every day for pests.

- Yeah.

Well, that's really important.

The other nice thing about an organic garden is that you can sort of graze as you go on pest control.

Right?

- Exactly (laughs) - That's good.

- So growing your own food or having a done for you, it's just one of many ways that you can make a difference.

But if you like the idea of the locavore lifestyle, there are other things you can do as well.

Find a local CSA like BK farms and sign up through a community supported agriculture program.

You invest in and support the farm in exchange for a weekly box of assorted vegetables and other farm products.

Can and preserve the CSA extras, or the bounty from your own garden through the winter.

And when you eat out, find out what restaurants in your area support local farmers.

These days, restaurants that do so are proud of that fact and make it known.

But when is doubt, it never hurts to ask and you'll get their attention to.

Or ask your favorite farmers what restaurant accounts they have and then support the businesses that support your farmers.

Like shop at a farmer's market, or a farm stand like this.

Everything here was grown right out there on those 15 acres.

And from a retail standpoint, it doesn't get any more local than that.

And when you shop at a place like this, you avoid the middleman.

So, all of the revenue is going to help the farmer.

So your support is really helping to keep that farmer in business.

And demand, local and organic at the grocery store.

Ask the manager where the meat and the dairy and the produce comes from.

Because if you're asking that question, chances are a lot of other people want to know the same thing and they know that.

So let them know what's important to you, but by showing interest well, that's the first step in any store implementing changes in their purchasing practices.

Or rather than try to source everything locally, all at once, just start with three or five of the items you most commonly use around the house or in the kitchen.

Apples are great places to start because they grow throughout most of the US.

And then root crops like these: beets and lettuce, and leaf crops, and flat leaf parsley.

Herbs are a great way to go.

And don't forget about dairy, like milk and cheese, and of course, eggs and meat.

All grown, harvested, or produced close to home.

And you don't have to worry about remembering all of this either because it's all on the website.

So just remember that.

And the address is the same as our name, www.growingagreenerworld.com.

These days, there are more ways than ever to eat local.

From paying attention to the farmer's market or the grocery store to frequenting those restaurants that you know support local farmers for maybe they grow it on site.

Perhaps it's carving out a section of your own yard to create a productive mini farm to feed your family and maybe others.

But the local four movement is here to stay.

And it's a big part in helping today's gardeners and growing a greener world.

Thanks for watching everybody.

I'm Joe Lamp'l and we'll see you back here next time for more Growing a Greener World.

- Growing a greener world is made possible in part by.

- The Subaru Crosstrek.

Designed with adventure in mind.

Built in a zero-landfill plant.

So you can roam the earth with a lighter footprint.

Subaru proud sponsor of Growing a Greener World.

- And the following Rain Bird Corona tools.

And Milorganite.

(whimsical music) - Continue the garden learning from Growing a Greener World, Joe Lamp'l's online gardening academy offers classes designed to teach gardeners of all levels from the fundamentals to master skills.

You can take each class on your own schedule from anywhere.

Plus opportunities to ask Joe questions about your specific garden in real time.

Courses are available online to enroll go to www.growingagreenerworld.com/le.

(techno music)