Put in your fall and winter garden now!

Plant your fall and winter garden now. Portland is a great place to grow well into the winter. You can do it with the help of POP Farming.

It’s still not too late to have a great garden this year.  Planting beets, turnips and carrots from seed right now will give you a wonderful late summer harvest.  Planting broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage and cauliflower will bring an abundant harvest come fall and early winter.  Contact POP Farming for help planning and planting your late season crops.  We can help you plant a garden for harvest at Thanksgiving.  How great it would be to offer your family and friends an ultra-local holiday meal.  Contact POP Farming to help get your late season garden in before it’s too late!

On a related note…The COUNTY Crops project is planting all of these crops over the next 2 weeks.  We expect that we’ll be harvesting through early November for the Oregon Food Bank.  Speaking of County CROPS, we are in need of some mid-season donations to keep those veggies moving into the hands of hungry families through the fall and early winter.  Concentrates is accepting donations for us for our fertilizer needs right now.  If you would like to help out with an organic fertilizer donation to the CROPS project please call (503.234.7501) or stop by Concentrates to make a donation now.  They can take a donation over the phone, by check in the mail or by just stopping in to the store.  While you’re there, talk to Naomi about your garden amendment needs.  She’ll let you know how to fertilize and amend to make your garden POP through the end of the season!  Donate just one bag or a few bags of organic fertilizer or lime.  You can be assured that all of your donation will be helping needy families through donations of fresh, ultra-local, organically grown vegetables to the Oregon Food Bank.

Here are the items we are looking to have donated:

• Fish Bone Meal  -  50 lb bag  -  $26  (we need 10 bags)
• Lime – 50 lb bag  -  $10  (we need 30 bags)
• Feather Meal – 50 lb bag  -  $37  (we need 10 bags)

San Francisco Follows Multnomah County’s Urban Farming Efforts

Today San Francisco mayor, Gavin Newsom announced an executive directive to change the way San Francisco thinks about food.  One of the more important pieces of this move is the mandate to have all city departments conduct an audit of all unused and underutilized land in the city.  They have 6 months to evaluate potential land for new urban farming efforts.  This includes “empty lots, rooftops, windowsills and median strips” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Portland, ahead of it’s time…as usual, completed an audit of urban land a number of years ago in a study performed by a group of Portland State University students.  The study was called “The Diggable City” and can be found on the website of Portland’s Office of Planning and Sustainability.  While many sites were identified as potential urban agriculture sites, nearly none of them were available for a variety of reasons…future development plans, parks department space was seen as to be used for “recreation” only and a host of other reasons.

One effort that has moved forward in the local government in Portland is the County DIGS project to:

“promote opportunities for urban agriculture throughout Multnomah County by providing unused or surplus County property to individuals or organizations for use in growing food or agriculture products”.

Full disclosure…POP Farmer Dan Bravin is currently managing one of the County DIGS projects outlined in the previous blog entry.

The Multnomah County board of commissioners is making urban farming a reality in the Portland area with real tangible projects like County CROPS and County DIGS.  Hopefully San Francisco will be able to act on their audit of city land.  Urban farming is a hot topic right now.  If it doesn’t happen now, it is not going to happen.

POP Farming: Making Farming History

This photo from long ago show the exact field where the current County CROPS farm is located. What a wonderful project to use the old poor farm to once again feed the hungry.

Well, more specifically, farming on an historic farming site just on the edge of Portland, OR  in Troutdale…

Dan Bravin of POP Farming has been hired to be the farm manager for Multnomah County’s CROPS program.  This entails farming 2 acres of surplus county land to grow vegetables for distribution through the Oregon Food Bank (OFB).  This groundbreaking project is the brainchild of Marissa Madrigal, Chief of Staff for Multnomah County Commissioner, Jeff Cogan.  Despite the many nay sayers and skeptics, Marissa and Jeff have prevailed in making this incredible pr0ject a reality.   Since early 2009 they have been working to develop the idea and were finally were able to push through a vote on the project at the beginning of June.   While it was a bit of a late start for the gardening season, much progress has been made.  Soon there will be a steady supply of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, summer and winter squash flowing to the Oregon Food Bank.  This is significant for a couple of reasons.  First, Oregon is a state with one of the highest hunger rates.  Hopefully this program will help put a dent in that statistic.  Second, food banks traditionally get lots of non-perishable food, but not much fresh produce that is of decent quality.  They often receive produce that is near spoilage or beyond (i.e. compost).  This program will pick and deliver fresh vegetables to the OFB the same day offering OFB clients the same, high quality, organically grown food you might find at supermarkets like New Seasons.  Third, the project brings together many different parts of the local community to address the  serious issue of hunger.  County government, AmeriCorps volunteers, private businesses, individual community members, social service agencies are all part of making this project a huge success.