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Mid-Atlantic Urban Agriculture Summit 2021
The 2021 Mid-Atlantic Urban Agriculture Summit gave urban gardeners and farmers advice, information, and encouragement. The virtual event, organized by Virginia Cooperative Extension, lasted three days in mid-October. The event had a solid turnout, with plenty of people on the Zoom call for each keynote speaker, Q&A session, and breakout room.
Growing Medicine
Tuesday, October 12, the first day of the conference, featured herbs, soils, and the expenses of growing versus purchasing food. The second day of the conference, Wednesday, October 13, had events on combating garden diseases, growing Egyptian Spinach, and mulch application. That Thursday, the conference’s final day, featured a gardening and farmers’ market community organization, virtual farm tour, and final evaluation for the summit. “A Box or Two with Medicine,” the Mid-Atlantic Urban Agriculture Summit session led by Henriette den Ouden, explored the subtleties of community herb gardening. Often, the central passion for growing a garden is the fresh taste: ”Taste is really such an individual thing,” den Ouden said. “You can have the most interesting conversations with people, and it’s just about ‘Is it bitter? Is it sweet?’ . . . They are in the now. They are tasting. They become very aware of what they’re doing. It’s fun to hear one teenager say that elderberry tastes like ketchup and the other thinks that the elderberry are tasting kind of bitter.” DC-area gardeners cultivate and grow in the haze of our complex local political backdrop, and den Ouden articulated how working with herbs in a place of mindfulness and presence re-centers a ragged psyche. “Pick a flower, put it in water for 24 hours. Bam! There you have your flower essence,” she said. “It’s a really nice way of connecting with nature. Connecting with flowers. And it’s a nice way of feeling stillness in your garden—no matter where your garden is.” Urban gardens can have debilitating industrial hangovers, and den Ouden reminded us of the limits of these sites, saying, “If there’s been a lot of environmental pollution, you don’t want to have your herbs in there because they take up whatever is in the ground. If there are heavy metals in the soil, don’t even think about growing medicine in it!” Do authors of northerly herbals just not understand the Mid-Atlantic’s climatological temperament? “Herbals are often written far up north . . . so even if the herbal says put them in full sun, put them in a little bit of shade,” said den Ouden. Like people, herbs need “personal space” and “constant airflow.” “It’s important that they look healthy and that they are healthy, which also means keeping a little distance between them.” Timely advice. A little space; a little coolness; and rich, clean soil is a must for both herbs and shared healing and connection in the garden.
Starting with Soils
To be a gardener means to be “All About the Soil,” but to many of us, despite our interest, the scientific aspects of soils may be a bit occult, obscure, and hard to understand. “Soil science can be complicated . . . soil maintenance doesn’t need to be,” Kirsten Conrad said in her contribution to the Urban Agriculture Summit. Garden enthusiasts can better understand soils by comparing “abstract, unseeable concepts to known objects and functions [to] make them as ‘seeable’ as possible,” said Conrad. “So, if the sand particle is the size of a basketball, what’s the size of a silt particle? Maybe a golf ball?” Handling the soil is understanding the soil, and is “where you start, when you start to improve soil,” she said. Conrad advocates for educators and gardeners alike to try traditional, tactile, handsin-the-dirt techniques like ribbon tests, sediment jars, and balls of soil. Make a mud ball and play with it to detect what Conrad calls tilth: a “good old-fashioned word meaning ‘workability.’” We can’t over-emphasize the importance of soil microorganisms and feeding them with organic matter to grow and remediate the soil “peds.” [Peds are small clumps or aggregates held together by the electrical charges on the surfaces of the minerals.] But it’s also our job as urban gardeners to restore washed-out, salted-up nutrients, and organic matter. Conrad’s case study featured a highly doable method of soil rebuilding—years and years of layering airy drifts of highnitrogen wood chips and little else. “Healthy soil is a loose soil. . . you should be able to push your arm down into the soil up to the elbow,” Conrad said. Compacted soil “pans,” and/or poorly draining clay soils are a challenge no doubt familiar to many local gardeners. Urban and suburban soils can be miserably imporous, impermeable, and compacted. It doesn’t help that poor drainage is a native characteristic of our Beltway-adjacent high-clay soils. Conrad’s case-study site also had drainage issues—impermeable clay with low “kettles” that filled with runoff regularly. It also had wood chips—about 18 inches of chips applied to the site yearly. After six years, the soil was loosened enough to broad-fork. Plants took off in the restored, fluffy soil formed from degraded wood chips. “We need plants and organic matter to help build soil and temper the extremes of flood-drought cycles,” she said. Truly essential wisdom for our ever-more sun-baked, washed-out, and flooded gardens.
Myth of the $100 Salad
Is it really more expensive to eat healthy? Does our beloved homegrown produce actually cost us more? Don’t bring that up in polite company, or you may find yourself banished to the garden next time. In his economic exegesis on indoor solutions to food-supply resilience, Tyler Baras crunched the numbers for us, and the answer is: (fanfare) It depends.
In his charmingly named session, “The $100 Salad,” Tyler Baras explained that “crop selection is one of the biggest factors” since “different varieties have wildly different yields.” Brighter indoor lights bring on higher yields, but energy isn’t particularly cheap in the DC area. “It depends what you grow and your techniques,” and if you are able to DIY any part of the process. Futuristic hydroponic salad systems that resemble a sort of Starship Enterprise of salads tend to be expensive— about $200 per square foot of growing space, said Baras. Retail kits often rely on rock wool, an ecologically contentious product known to our readers in nearby West Virginia, where protests against a local rock wool plant have dragged on for years. Even by building your own system, Baras warned that: urban gardeners can expect to pay about $100 per square foot. If you plan to surviving the apocalypse by getting all your San Marzanos from an indoor kit or pre-manufactured hydroponics system, your post-apocalypse marinara sauces may be a little . . . costly. Baras said that “If you’re indoors, you gotta think, if you’re growing a tomato, you’re growing a lot of leaves and stem,” and that’s all stuff that never hits your plate. If you’re working for maximum nutritional value, Baras suggested starting with microgreens, higher-nutrient salad greens, and a couple pots of herbs. Edible flowers are great and with retail prices of at least “25 or 50 cents each,” you can beat the grocery store by growing your own nasturtiums and borage, “but most people are not actually purchasing those for themselves,” Baras laughed.
Combating Diseases
Wednesday was filled with a variety of breakout sessions providing both technical information about plant research and how to profit as a small farm. Zelalem Mersha’s talk, “Potentials, Pitfalls, and Prospects of Biologically Based Approaches to Combat Garden Diseases,” was a research-based presentation that went through the purpose, methods, and results of Mersha’s study. This study looked at how these biological methods of pesticides affected downy mildew pathogens. “When talking about biological controls, I encourage gardeners and small farmers is to establish biological agents in their system in a way that they can nurture the good organisms by applying everything that’s biological, and not spraying toxic chemicals that kill the beneficials,” Mersha said. Mulching and home remedies like baking soda are two biological methods for reducing downy mildew. Mersha said that these types of methods were better for the well-being of plants. In, “Emergence and Yield of Container Grown Egyptian Spinach (Corchorus olitorius L.) in Response to Fabric Covering,” Eric Obeng talked about a study he conducted to try to increase the growing speed of that crop. Obeng said that because of its hard seed coats, Egyptian Spinach has a dormancy before growing. His study looked at how covering the plant could change the growing time. The research showed that the covering did affect growing time, but not substantially.
Marketing Small Farmers
“Farmers and the work that we all do is literally the original form of entrepreneurship, both in this country and across the world,” Oren Falkowitz said in “Planting the Seeds of Revolution,” Small farms have to compete with grocery stores to sell produce. Falkowitz emphasized that the biggest downfall for profit was traveling to different locations to sell produce. The three ways Falkowitz said that small farmers could maximize profits are to reduce the traveling distance to sell products, create stories behind production to get people interested, and have a more diverse set of crops than can always be found in grocery stores. Leonard Githinji’s session, “Assessing the Benefits of Organic Mulch Application at an Urban Farm in Richmond, Virginia,” covered his research into a variety of types of mulch and their impact on weed growth and crop production. Researchers used tomatoes and okra in several plots as they changed the types of mulch. Githinji’s research found that wood mulch was the most effective to lessen weed growth and also the most sustainable. Thursday’s program began with a presentation from Dr. Gail Myers about how history and community impact urban gardening. Myers, an Ecological Farming Association’s 2018 Advocate for Social Justice award-winner, is a cultural anthropologist and Air Force veteran. Myers has worked with Farms to Grow, Inc., a nonprofit organization, founded in 2004 by Myers and Gordon Reed, that works with Black and underserved farmers across the country to help them succeed. In Oakland, California, Farms to Grow, Inc. runs the Freedom Farmers’ Market, where Black farmers can sell their organic produce. Although this is an example from the West Coast, it provides great examples of the connection and community that urban farming can bring, especially to people of color. There was a strong theme of legacy in Myers’ talk. She said that acknowledging the role of Black farmers in our communities and our nation’s history is important. “Though the footprint is very small, the hand that Black farmers have had is very large,” said Myers. Myers also emphasized a commitment to sustainability and innovation. Supporting the local economy, eating within the seasons, and providing and protecting a sustainable ecosystem is essential to this, she said. She also acknowledged that for many African-Americans, there is “lots of trauma” intertwined with their relationship to the agricultural industry. She said that agrarian life promotes selfsufficiency and community involvement. A key to this, she says, is intergenerational connection. “One of the best things about urban agriculture is connecting our elders with young people,” she said. Myers emphasized the community that can be built around growing and sharing food, especially sharing knowledge. She called this a “pipeline to the next generation.” In connecting with young folks, urban agriculture can affect cities, communities, and lives for generations to come. o
Charlotte Benedetto, Charlotte Crook, and Melinda Thompson are interns this fall with Washington Gardener.
