Community, ecology, science, and art at new landscape design/garden supply shop

“Without us in there, it looks like an art installation,” Jeff Lorenz says to his business partner Annie Scott, motioning toward the open, sunlit shop filled with inventively arranged plants and hand-crafted garden tools as a warm breeze sweeps up a ten-foot living wall of Swiss chard, Italian oregano, upright rosemary, and spearmint.

As co-owners of Tiny Terra Ferma, the new landscape design studio and garden supply shop, which opened on Main Street in Manayunk last week, Lorenz and Scott believe that landscape should be both beautiful and functional.

Click to read more ...

A blossoming vision for South Philly High School

What would it take to bring neighborhood greening, curriculum opportunities and fresh produce to Philadelphia’s crumbling school system? South Philadelphia High School may have an answer. This morning the high school, in partnership with South Philly’s Lower Moyamensing Civic Association (LoMo), launched a crowd funding campaign to raise more than $26,000 for the development of a campus-wide “Greening” Master Plan and to fund a garden educator position. The plan will lay the groundwork for a rooftop farm and greening improvements that aim to convert the school’s 5.5-acre urban campus into a sustainability poster child. 

In August 2012, LoMo president Kim Massare pitched the ambitious greening initiative to Otis Hackney, principal at South Philly High, and Roofmeadow, a Philadelphia-based design and engineering firm. Together with the school’s garden educator Molly Devinney, the team quickly crafted a strategy for turning the lofty vision into reality. The key? Partnering with a new online platform called Projexity, which uses crowd funding to raise money for neighborhood improvement projects. The goal of Projexity is to provide “a new and better way for anyone – from moms to mayors – to initiate and manage neighborhood improvement projects,” explains Marisa Bernstein, Projexity co-founder and a University of Pennsylvania alumnus.

Click to read more ...

Gardening and cooking lessons hit the road in new Farm Explorer

The outside wrap on Greener Partner's Farm Explorer. The mobile gardening and cooking truck launches in early April. | Photo from Greener PartnersA new kind of food truck is rolling into town. One that isn’t just serving meals, but that allows diners to harvest and cook their food too. In April, Greener Partners, a five-county, Greater Philadelphia-based nonprofit that connects communities through food, farms and education, is launching their Farm Explorer – a 24-foot trailer that holds living vegetable beds and a community kitchen all hauled by a biodiesel Ford F-150 truck.

“The raised beds on Farm Explorer will mimic the (seasonally changing) raised beds in the fields of Hillside Farm, creating the most authentic farm experience we can,” says Helen Nadel, education specialist for Greener Partners. “Allowing children to have the experience of pulling food from the dirt and tasting how delicious it is can be a real ‘Aha!’ moment.”

Farm Explorer was inspired by research that found a curriculum combining gardening and nutrition education improves student attitudes and preferences for fruits and vegetables. Greener Partners hopes to connect children and families to their food through physical, sensorial and practical experiences. The end goal is to increase general health, reduce obesity rates and reconnect people with the pleasures of real food.

Click to read more ...

"Watermelon Magic" puts young viewers under a gardening spell

There are few foods that better represent an American summer, youth and sharing than a sweet, crunchy, deep red watermelon. Rich Hoffmann, Philadelphia filmmaker and owner of Spring Garden Pictures, a nonprofit children’s film organization, weaves these themes together in his new film “Watermelon Magic.” Now, he needs your help delivering this film to the public.

A fictional narrative with a documentary style, “Watermelon Magic” chronicles six-year-old, sandy-haired Sylvie (Hoffmann’s daughter) as she grows watermelons from seed to fruit. When harvest time arrives, Sylvie must decide if she will share her precious watermelons with the world.

Click to read more ...

Camden Children's Garden under threat from State of New Jersey

Saint Anthony's Garden, a CCGC garden in Camden. | Photo from CCGC.The city of Camden, N.J. isn’t considered a bastion of local food production. Recognized as one of the top nine food deserts in the country by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, nearly 80,000 residents are served by a single supermarket. But the Camden City Garden Club has been working to change that. Since 1985, the club has been helping residents improve their quality of life, health and community through gardening programs and their multi-acre Children’s Garden in Camden.

Despite CCGC’s long-standing success, their garden is now under serious threat. 

In a notice sent to CCGC this past January, the State of New Jersey announced that on March 31 it would be transferring 90 percent of the 4.5-acre garden to the neighboring Adventure Aquarium, owned by the Herschend Family Entertainment corporation headquartered in Atlanta, Ga.

Click to read more ...