New Orleans Food & Farm Network, is sponsoring its second Grow Mo’ Betta: Sustainable Vegetable Growing Workshop Series. Our series of sustainable urban agriculture trainings is part of our Farm-Yard Project, dedicated to increasing local production and availability of fresh and affordable food. Our Farm-Yard Trainings teach the urban gardener or farmer sustainable and organic growing practices. Our trainings are created with a variety of urban gardeners and farmers in mind. Novices as well as seasoned growers are all welcome! We look forward to growing with you!

Pre-registration is required.

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Many of you are aware that NOFFN has been working with Mary Queen of Vietnam Community Development Corporation to support their work to make the Viet Village Cooperative Urban Farm Project a reality. Blue Moon Fund provided funding which was used for technical support and technical studies by NOFFN, Tulane City Center and Spackman, Mossop + Michaels.

The proposed Viet Village Urban Farm would be an intensively used productive landscape that would include a major produce market, commercial agriculture,and community gardens. These key functions would be supported by a network of green infrastructure and a range of community facilities that would encourage the use of the site by everyone in the community. We hope you will write in support of this project which builds on a long tradition of productive gardening and farming in the Vietnamese community and combines it with the entrepreneurial spirit and energy of younger generations! The comment period will close on November 9th.

To make public comments on the proposed work, you must reference “MQVN CDC, c/o Lauren Butz”, Permit Application Number: MVN-2009-2069-ETT, then mail to:

United States Army Corps of Engineers
New Orleans District
Attention: Regulatory Branch
Post Office Box 60267
New Orleans, LA 70160-0267
Further information may be found on the Corps of Engineers website http://www.mvn.usace.army.mil/ops/reg...otices.asp

Green Shoots in New Orleans

A frustrating quest for food security has led some residents to grow their own.

Margarine, margarine, ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.’” Poppy Tooker recalls the months of food shortages after Hurricane Katrina ripped the Gulf Coast apart. “I could not believe there was no butter.” According to the New Orleans native, one unfortunate but little-noticed repercussion of the storm was the demise of dairy. As a food activist, she understood the heavily industrial process of butter churning, preservation, shipping and storage. But in light of her city’s rich culinary history—fresh collards, crawfish étouffées and endless okra—the dearth was particularly jarring. After “a concentrated three-day search,” Tooker found her grail—in Baton Rouge, more than an hour’s drive out of the ruined city. From August 2005 until, well, now, thousands of city residents have been living what Pamela Broom, a food-justice advocate also born and raised in New Orleans, calls “the fron tier life.” Richard McCarthy, who reopened one of his farmers’ markets just ten weeks after Katrina, recalls the shortages with a grim look. Privileged shoppers trucked to nearby Jeffer son Parish for essentials, but “there just wasn’t enough anything,” he says. Early returnees picked through food bins alongside National Guardsmen with automatic weaponry.

Read the full story in The Nation →

by Judy Walker, Food editor, The Times-Picayune
Thursday September 10, 2009, 4:05 AM

A healthy lunch is served at Samuel J. Green Charter school.

If there's one thing that parents and students from all walks of life can agree upon, it is this:

Most school lunches leave a lot to be desired.

Saturday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., you can help do something about that. The Edible Schoolyard New Orleans at Samuel J. Green Charter School will host an event that is one of 290 nationwide, all designed to do one thing: Urge Congress to make the national school lunch program better and healthier.

Read the full story on Nola.com→

Of all American cities, present-day New Orleans best exemplifies the concept of resilience int its ongoing struggle to recover its position as the urban centre of the central Gulf Coast region, and as a city of national significance in tourisem, shipping, and biomedicine. Two trips to the city in autumn 2008, more than three years after 80 percent of the city was under water and the entire population had to flee for weeks or months, convince the author (a New Orleans native) that mucha tht was once considered "normal" has returned.

Read the full article in UA Magazine →

This past weekend marked the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and while much still needs to be done to rebuild the devastated region, I’m excited to learn that many New Orleans residents are sowing seeds of hope by turning abandoned lots into small urban farms.

A number of amazing organizations, including New Orleans Farm and Food Network (NOFFN), are helping to revitalize neighborhoods by creating beautiful greenspaces that provide healthy, local and affordable produce where in many cases there are no grocery stores. The gardens also improve property values, encouraging people to rent in areas that have remained otherwise vacant since the storm. Once the NOFFN and other organizations are able to navigate through the obstacles of archaic city ordinances and policies, they also hope to provide more economic opportunities with local farmer’s markets.

Read the full story at takepart.com →

Op-Ed from The New York Times:

IF the hardship of growing vegetables and fruits in the Northeast has made anything clear, it’s that the list of what can go wrong in the field is a very long one.

We wait all year for warmer weather and longer days. Once we get them, it seems new problems for farmers rise to the surface every week: overnight temperatures plunging close to freezing, early disease, aphid attacks. Another day, another problem.

Read the full article at nytimes.com »

"On the east side of New Orleans, three-and-a-half years ago, 90 percent of the homes in the Vietnamese community had gardens, says local activist Peter Nguyen. The green onions, Malabar spinach, daikon, cilantro, mint, Thai basil, and countless Asian vegetables that contribute to Vietnamese home cooking were grown there. Every Saturday at dawn, a few dozen growers gathered to sell their produce at the neighborhood market, and for the elders--many of whom were resettled in New Orleans after the Vietnam War--their gardens were a treasured link to the country they had left behind. But the younger generation wasn't much interested in what they considered to be the hard labor of growing, and the elders wondered how they could involve their children and grandchildren so that the traditions would continue. Then Hurricane Katrina blew through, and three decades of work tending the land was lost."

Read the full story on the Gourmet site »

"Jeanette Bell, who once taught business classes to high school students, sees a money-making opportunity in her second calling. But for the 65-year-old retiree, her motive is more passion than profit.

Bell has built a garden on a once-blighted Central City lot that she bought from the city in 2003. At the time, the Baronne Street property was so overgrown with vegetation, it resembled something out of South America, Bell said.

Now, visitors are greeted at the entrance by a rose garden sorted according to color in the French style. The back of the lot houses Bell's vegetables and herbs, all organically grown, including a large bay tree she describes as "big enough to service all the restaurants in the Uptown area."

Read the full article in CityBusiness »

"The transformed lot, now known as Little Sparrow Farm, is a testament to the faith of its creator, urban farmer and New Orleans Food and Farm Network program director Marilyn Yank, that New Orleans can -- and should -- be riddled with neighborhood gardens. "With its love of food and love of music, it makes sense that we should be a garden city," Yank said on a recent spring morning. She sat back on her heels, midway through uprooting a row of microgreens. "I called it Little Sparrow because I wanted it to be like a sparrow, a little thing that never loses its delight."

"Little" is not a word that many gardeners would apply to Yank's borrowed plot. The property is the standard 100-foot-by-30-foot lot typical of central New Orleans, and it's pretty much planted from end to end."

Read the full article on NewOrleans.com »