June 1998
Gardens Offer Solutions for Urban Problems
Some of Northern California's best examples of market and school gardens will be center stage at a meeting of social scientists looking at solutions to economic and community development issues. A gardening program for prisoners, a city farm that employs low-income youth, a middle school's organic garden project, and a multi-use urban garden that trains at-risk youth are on the tour for participants in the annual meetings of the Association for the Study of Food and Society and the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society June 4 (Thursday) in the San Francisco Bay Area. Sponsored by the UC Davis-based Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (SAREP), the tour will introduce researchers to successful projects tailored to the needs of specific communities, including The Garden Project, the brainchild of Catherine Sneed, who has taught prisoners French-intensive gardening for many years. Vegetables from the project are sold to restaurants like Alice Water's Chez Panisse in Berkeley, says Gail Feenstra, SAREP's food systems coordinator. "Our second tour stop is The San Francisco League of Urban Gardener's Alemany Youth Farm and its Urban Herbals unit, one of the premier community food security projects in the nation," Feenstra says. Urban Herbals is the name of the vinegars, jams and salsa produced by the young people. The attraction at The Edible School Yard project at Berkeley's Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School is the fact that it integrates its garden into the school curriculum and lunch program, Feenstra says. The tour concludes at Berkeley Youth Alternatives' Community Garden Patch project, which includes a job-training program for at-risk young people.
Media Contacts:
Lyra Halprin, (530) 752-8664, lhalprin@ucdavis.edu
