Food Souvenirs

Worms are taking center stage in the fight against food waste.

Worm composting, also known as vermicomposting, is becoming more popular in urban settings where gardeners lack the space for traditional compost heaps. Housed in small bins, red wigglers digest food waste and turn it into rich organic compost. In an effort to promote vermicomposting, a small number of grassroots organizations have launched worm exchange programs.

Worm exchange programs work like old-fashioned swap meets: Enthusiasts gather to trade stories, exchange knowledge and share resources—all with a focus on helping others establish and maintain thriving worm bins.

Colin Anderson started the Toronto Worm Exchange in 2008. The group doesn’t have meetings or membership requirements, and there are no fees; it’s just an informal group of compost enthusiasts who share information—and worms.

“One of the biggest complaints about some environmental initiatives is the expense associated with getting started,” Anderson explains. “We thought a worm exchange was a good option to make worm composting more accessible without huge startup costs.”

According to Anderson, worm composting can be done without spending a red cent on red wigglers. In fact, in an established worm bin, red wigglers can double their numbers after a few months, giving composters an excess of worms to share. In Baltimore, those excess worms can even be traded for fresh veggies.

Students at the Maryland Institute College of Art founded a worm-exchange program in 2009 to help encourage Baltimore residents to compost. In order to meet the demand for free worms, students started offering produce grown through the campus Sustainable Food Project called Buddha Garden in exchange for worms. The program has become so popular that there is a long waiting list for free worms.

The worm exchange program in Fort Collins, Colo., has had similar success. As part of an ongoing effort to help divert food waste from the landfill, Susie Gordon, a senior environmental planner with the Fort Collins Natural Resources Department, was charged with promoting worm composting.

Inspired by the community exchanges happening through websites like Craigslist and Freecycle, Gordon launched an online group through Yahoo to connect residents who were willing to share information about vermicomposting and offer worms to others who wanted to start worm bins.

“We’ve loved seeing the positive reaction to the program,” notes Gordon.

Since its inception in 2005, the Yahoo group has grown to 315 members, but Gordon believes the program has a much broader reach. Anderson echoes the sentiment, noting that the Facebook fan page for Toronto Worm Exchange has just 27 members; he is aware of a much larger number of participants who are taking part in worm exchanges.

“It’s an informal group, and we’re not tracking numbers, but there has been a lot of growth since we got started,” he explains. “It’s one really simple way to connect to the community and change the world without spending a lot of money.”

The United Nations Development Program estimates there are 800 million residents worldwide who participate in urban agriculture. In developing countries, urban farming is an important survival technique that provides families with nutritious food and a source of income. In more developed urban environments, green movements, struggling economies and nutritional concerns have been the main catalysts for the urban farming movement. A common factor within all these motivations for urban dwellers to grow their own food is the security that harvests provide the farmer.

Ryerson University in Toronto is merging the link between food security and urban agriculture with its new Urban Agriculture concentration offered to participants in their Food Security program. The university is also offering an Urban Agriculture concentrated postgraduate-degree certificate in Food Security to those who complete the corresponding Urban Agriculture course series.

“I think it is important to see urban agriculture as part of a series of activities that need to be undertaken to alleviate food insecurity and create healthy local food systems,” says Reg Noble, the academic coordinator of the Food Security program.

The certificate program has been developed in partnership with G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education, Ryerson’s School of Nutrition, and the Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security (RUAF) in the Netherlands, a global leader in urban agriculture research and development. Ryerson’s Center for Studies in Food Security has defined food security through five characteristics: availability (sufficient amounts), accessibility (constant physical and economic access), adequacy (food sources that are nutritious, safe and produced in an environmentally sustainable way), acceptability (available food that is culturally accepted), and agency (policies and processes should promote food security).

To attain a concentration in Urban Agriculture from the Food Security program, students must participate in four elective online courses that encompass the technical aspects of urban agriculture and the governmental policies that influence them. The program stresses the importance of urban agriculture as a means to develop sustainable, food-secure and healthy urban environments.

“In our food security certificate program, which includes the urban agriculture course series, our objective is to explore how to create economically and ecologically sustainable food systems that provide safe and healthy food and, in particular, systems which are based on social justice and democratic decision-making,” says Noble.

With the majority of the world’s population migrating to urban landscapes, widespread food crises, climate change and vast conglomerations controlling major portions of the world’s food supply, the emphasis on urban agriculture brings many solutions to looming food-security concerns. The instructors have a diverse range of expertise in the realm of food security ranging from human nutrition, developing food systems resilience models, environmental studies, gender studies relating to agriculture and sustainability, biotechnology, international development, and government policy, initiatives and programs.

Because the courses are offered remotely, those outside Toronto and the university can enroll in the coursework. Students who achieve a cumulative GPA of 2.0 or above and complete six online food-security courses, choosing four elective courses pertaining to urban agriculture, receive Food Security certifications with an Urban Agriculture concentration from Ryerson. The university accepts post-graduate applicants (those who hold a bachelor’s degree in any field) who have maintained a minimum 2.0 GPA. Also, non-degree holders with at least five years of relevant work experience can receive admittance to the program upon the approval of an academic advisor at the university.

“It is important to realize that policy and actions taken over many sectors in our societies affect our food systems, either directly or indirectly, and subsequently impacts people’s ability to be food secure and the health of our environment,” Noble says. “Our course is intended to raise awareness of these connections and provide practical skills and knowledge to ensure that society can work toward transforming our currently flawed food systems to ones that will ensure our food security now and for future generations.”

Photo by Rick Gush

I hope to harvest broccoli from 100 plants this year.

It’s finally September, and that means it’s time to change all the beds by ripping out whatever’s left of all the spring crops, preparing the soil and replanting with the winter crops. I’ve grown really tired of the old and ratty spring crops, so this is all big fun for me.

My target for winter planting is to find space for 100 broccoli plants. We eat a lot of broccoli during the cold months, so I’m making that the principal crop for the cold season. I have 47 broccoli plants planted so far and hope to have all 100 planted by the end of next week.

We eat broccoli steamed, in soups, baked into vegetable pies and sometimes raw in salads. I’m particularly fond of the electric-green color of fresh, steamed broccoli. It’s just so vivid that it seems obvious that eating it is good for me. Luckily, I really like the taste, too! I usually put mustard on the steamed broccoli. My wife chides me, because she is suspicious of mustard and is not sure eating it so frequently is good for me. Ha!

Last year we had the “Great Broccoli Disaster,’ when I bought a bunch of broccoli plants at a different nursery than my usual one. What I had assumed would be the standard big-head-producing broccoli turned out to be the chartreuse-colored broccoli Romano. Phooey! That chartreuse stuff is OK, but its taste is more like cauliflower and has the unfortunate habit of not producing much after the main head has been harvested. Regular broccoli, on the other hand, keeps producing new sprouts for many months after the first head has been harvested. 

Photo by Rick Gush

Black kale is a wonderfully versatile plant, which we can harvest from every day.

I think it’s important to get the broccoli up and growing while the days are still relatively long and the weather is warm. The bigger the plants are when the really cold weather hits, the more harvestable broccoli they will produce over the season. When I lived in Las Vegas, I always planted my broccoli in November, and it did just fine, but here, the earlier start pays big dividends.

Broccoli isn’t the only thing we’ll grow this winter. Fava beans will take up one of the big beds and beet greens and cultivated arugula will be given a fair amount of space. I’ll grow a few Brussels sprouts, a few cauliflowers and a handful of celery plants.

We don’t each much cabbage, but we do like black kale, which can be harvested a handful of leaves at a time. Black kale is also versatile, and we eat it steamed, in soups and in vegetable pies. This is an old-fashioned peasant’s plant, and I get big points from my mother-in-law for growing it. In season, she’ll ask for a few leaves almost every day. Keeping my mother-in-law happy is a big part of my recipe for domestic tranquility.

There’s something about this whole replanting process that reminds me of getting a haircut after months without one. The clean feel of the newly replanted garden gets me excited about laboring for hours in the hot sun again.

Read more of Rick’s Favorite Crops »