If you haven’t visited Chicago’s Downtown Farmstand, you should put it on your lists of places to check out. We recently visited the farmstand, which is run by the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs, and briefly met with the Department’s Director of Culinary Arts, Judith Hines, before sitting down and talking shop with the Farmstand’s Assistant Manager, Abby Halperin-Robinson and one of the creators, Nina Winston. Together, they turned what used to be an under-utilized city owned space into a year round farmers market offering sustainably grown fresh fruits, vegetables and herbs in season (including many organic items) as well as a wide range of dairy products, condiments, seasonings, preserves, breakfast favorites, baked goods, and other local items.
Back in November Chuck and I visited Ken Dunn at City Farm. The garden was definitely not in it’s prime at that time of year, but there was still plenty to see. This is a temporary site at the corner of Clybourn and Division. Its a city owned piece that is cover in 4″ of clay with 18″ of compost top soil on it that can be moved to another location when the city decides they want the land back.
I recently visited Myles Harston of Aqua Ranch (www.aquaranch.com) in central Illinois. He has built a facility to handle 1000 of lbs of vegetable and fish. He focuses on Tilapia and as you can see from these videos was in the middle of a season change of the vegi’s. Myles has consulted with a couple of schools in Chicago and is working with Alderman Shiller who is working on getting Uptown Farms off the ground in the old Salvation Army building at 4459 N. Clark in Chicago. It is a 3 story building with a basement in which they would like to build an urban farm.
I spent the day with Andre DeRosa of GSY Energy installing wind monitors on the tops of four buildings to see what the energy possibilities were for vertical axes wind turbines might be. They will run all winter long with a laptop hooked up to them so that in the spring they will know how much energy can be produced given the average and max wind speeds, as well as the size of the roof. They said they have about 80 such monitors through out the City of Chicago.
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If you haven’t visited Chicago’s Downtown Farmstand, you should put it on your lists of places to check out. We recently visited the farmstand, which is run by the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs, and briefly met with the Department’s Director of Culinary Arts, Judith Hines, before sitting down and talking shop with the Farmstand’s Assistant Manager, Abby Halperin-Robinson and one of the creators, Nina Winston. Together, they turned what used to be an under-utilized city owned space into a year round farmers market offering sustainably grown fresh fruits, vegetables and herbs in season (including many organic items) as well as a wide range of dairy products, condiments, seasonings, preserves, breakfast favorites, baked goods, and other local items.
Themocracy