To ring in the New Year we are proud to announce that four amazing volunteers have joined the Cultivate Toronto team!

Linda has come on board as our Online Engagement Specialist. In this role, Linda will be posting to our Facebook page, tweeting from our Twitter account, keeping our LinkedIn profile relevant, and helping us grow our network of supporters online.

Iris will be teaming up with Tahlia to coordinate Cultivate TO’s newsletter in 2013. Together they will bring you garden updates, interesting articles, seasonal recipes, and much more. Iris will also be our Photo & Video Specialist this year.

Jane has joined the team in the role of Marketing & Communication Manager, which entails developing and implementing Cultivate TO’s marketing, public relations, and branding strategies. Jane will be the linchpin of our Marketing Team!

Finally, Evan will bring his digital marketing skills to the Web Developer position to create our website strategy – look out for exciting changes to our site’s design and content in the coming months.

Please join us in welcoming Linda, Iris, Jane, and Evan to the Cultivate Toronto family, and check back soon for their profiles on our team page.

See the listing from their site below:

We’re on the hunt for 6 fantastic new council members for the 2012-2013 calendar year!

Available Positions:

TYFPC Vice Chair

IT & Social Media Guru

Operations Lead

Network Committee Member

Advocacy Committee Leads (x2)

Interested candidates should read the above job description(s) the email the Application for Council Membership along with a resume and cover letter to tyouthfpc@gmail.com by midnight on June 21st.

The Toronto Youth Food Policy Council seeks to engage and mobilize youth to create a local, just, and sustainable food system for all.  We do this by community building, raising awareness, and advocating for policy change.

We’re also known for throwing great parties! Wanna help build a local, just, and sustainable food system in Ontario? Join us!

Still have questions? Contact them on their website, or join the conversation @tyfpc on Twitter.

On April 23rd, the Cultivate Toronto team met with Susan Hay og Global News at one of our Wychwood gardens to chat about urban agriculture, our coming season and re-connecting communities with locally grown and organic produce.

Watch Chris and Elaine as they talk to Ms. Hay about growing with Cultivate Toronto.

Click here for a full listing of events and find out what’s happening near you.

Starting with today! Happy Earth Day to all.

Check out community environment events around you

Young Urban Farmers CSA is Changing Our Name! We’re Now Cultivating Toronto One Garden at a Time

Today marks the dawning of a new age…well, that might be a little dramatic, but, the Young Urban Farmers Community Shared Agriculture (YUF CSA) did make a big announcement today. We are changing our name!

We are making the change from YUF CSA to Cultivate Toronto because we feel it better represents our growing organization and vision. Cultivate Toronto (or, CultivateTO, as we have already affectionately abbreviated it), is the same team of passionate farmers, strategists, and business people – just with a further refined mandate for an organization that is growing as fast as our fresh fare. At our foundation, CultivateTO is still a CSA, transforming backyards in the Wychwood, Riverdale and Dovercourt areas into vegetable gardens. We are still helping neighbourhoods come together and learn more about sustainable urban farming and local, organic produce.

And so, our group that began as YUF CSA, recognized that our organization has out grown its youthful role as a CSA. Now heading into our third growing season, “CultivateTO” is also fostering a better understanding and appreciation of the benefits of growing urban gardens through workshops and tutorials on topics like canning and sustainable growing. The plan is to do more than just morph yards into fruitful gardens, but to transform the general thinking about how we grow, shop, and eat produce in an urban setting.

Of course, our original passion for healthy living, local organic produce and sustainable growing is still our primary mandate. But, under the new title of CultivateTO, we are driven to ignite a new renaissance in responsible urban living by bringing neighbours together to participate in giving a little, and getting a lot.

Cultivate Toronto looks forward to a successful year of continuing to “cultivating the way we approach healthy living.”

Spring is in the air and we’re getting ready to head up to our greenhouse tomorrow to start some of the first seeds of the season. Leeks, peppers, eggplants, green onions, and more will all be started so that they’ll be ready for the spring planting season.

This will be the first of several trips this season.

Our greenhouse is located in Mount Albert. Check out some pictures from our greenhouse trips in 2010 and 2011 on our facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/YUFCSA

If you’d like to get involved with starting seeds, taking a fun field trip out of the city, sign up for our volunteer mailing list here: http://yufcsa.com/connectwithus/volunteer/

Greenhouse trips are typically a full day affair. We provide lunch and transportation (leaving from Finch subway station) in the morning and generally get back to Toronto in the late afternoon.

For Kenya, one of the interesting things that we saw the number of farmers who are looking outside of seasonal constraints in growing different vegetables.  We also learned about moist bed gardening, to cope with the dry season when there is very little if any rainfall. Essentially, moist bed gardening uses a large bed that is enclosed using polyethylene plastic. Rocks or other space filling materials are placed in the bottom of the bed to help provide aeration to the roots and to give some space between the roots and any water that may accumulate at the bottom of the bed. The remaining space is filled with good quality soil and plants like arrowroot (taro) is planted inside the bed.

We also had the chance to construct a sack garden the same way it would be constructed in Kenya. Using the help of a small fire and a metal rod, holes were poked into a water tube to be placed in the middle of the sack. We learned that it is important to have many holes throughout the tube as this allows water to percolate throughout all levels of the sack (aka multi-storey garden). The sacks are very affordable to purchase compared to things like plastic buckets which we use in Canada. We discovered that buckets in Kenya relatively expensive to purchase, compared to Canada where we find them commonly discarded at the side of the road.

Learning about value added products was another workshop that garnered much enthusiasm and interest from all the participants. We had a chance to get hands-on training in transforming milk into yogurt, turning peanuts (also called ground nuts) into peanut butter, and fresh mangoes into mango jam. We realized the value added products we were producing in Canada (such as dehydrating and fermenting) were more geared towards preserving the harvest, whereas the Kenyans practiced value addition, not only to prolong the shelf life of the products, but more so to add value to a raw commodity in order to sell at a higher price.

Other interesting things we learnt about, included water harvesting, bio gas production, and small scale livestock production. With water harvesting, this allows the farmers to think outside of the traditional planting times as dictated by the annual rainfall. With bio gas, we saw a farmer using cattle manure in order to reduce his need to purchase charcoal or electricity to cook his dinner. And with the small scale livestock production, we learned how some farmers are doing this to supplement their income and their diets with nutritious and wholesome food.

In addition to the things we learned, we also had an opportunity to share a number of farming techniques we use in Canada with the African youth. These included things on composting, how to build a solar dehydrator, how to make your own self-watering container using buckets, developing entrepreneurship skills such as sales and marketing, and a training on food security.

As we return to Canada and move into the preparation for our upcoming 2012 season, there are several things we hope to take back and implement in our gardens in Toronto. These include putting a more concerted effort into composting and building our soil, incorporating more vertical gardening into our gardens, and sharing the things we learn with our broader community at large.

Overall, this has been a great exchange and valuable opportunity for us to share and learn. Now it’s up to the youth (including us) to get back to work on our projects back home. Maybe this will be the start of a series of exchanges, but right now it’s too early to tell.

fltr: Andrea, Chris, Tahlia, Madeline, Geron, Kate, Stella

At the ClimateSpark Venture Challenge Gala, last night at the Toronto Reference Library, Young Urban Farmers CSA was thrilled to take home an award for Toronto Community Foundation Green Innovation. Hurrah!

We are so pleased that all of our hard work has been recognized by such an esteemed and excellent award. We truly enjoyed and benefited from the whole ClimateSpark awards process, which required a great deal of time and devotion from participants and the ClimateSpark committee alike (shout out to Kate, Chris, and Stella from YUF CSA who worked so hard to make this happen!).

The ClimateSpark Launch Gala was a huge success, with representatives from all of the ClimateSpark finalists showing up to cheer each other on.

As a winner of the Toronto Community Foundation’s Green Innovation Awards, we look forward to continuing to grow our organization, and our commitment to a greener, better way of putting food on the tables in communities across the GTA.

Thanks again to everyone involved!

The goal of the program is for the youth (broadly defined as under 35) to share their ideas and experiences from each of our respective cities on urban agriculture and food security issues. The program began with an introduction from Mazingira Institute, the host organization for the exchange. Introductions were made, an overview of the purpose and context of the trip was made and the rest of the day was spent with introductory presentations by the majority of the participants.

The main programming got started on the second day with a visit to Ndoso Farm, a peri-urban farm run by an enthusiastic and passionate Ndungi Ngogi. At his farm, he grows a variety of vegetables in greenhouses including some of the best peppers I’ve ever tasted. He also grows other fruit, vegetables, and raises fish on his property as well.

Elaine and I gave a presentation on making compost tea, as well as using worm castings to build the soil. Ndungi does a great job of composting using a variety of methods and that is one of his secrets to the success of his garden. He also gave a presentation on another method of composting using grubs, specifically the grubs/larvae of the black soldier fly.

In the afternoon, we went to another of Ndungi’s farms – this one a livestock farm that raises chickens and pigs. It was incredible to see how healthy the animals were, especially with Ndungi using organic methods for all of his activities.

The third day was spent primarily at Mr Rabbit’s Farm. While that isn’t his actual name, it is a nickname he likes to carry around with him. Before arriving at the farm though, we made two detours. The first was to H-Garden which is located in the second largest slum area in Nairobi. At this location, one of the youth leaders Humphrey “grabbed the land” and setup a garden to work with the youth in this area. The local authorities turned a blind eye because they see his project as benefitting the community, even though they don’t have official papers for the land. It was incredible to see a number of sack gardens, as well as rabbits and pigeons being kept on a tiny piece of land.

We also had a short visit and interview with KOCH FM, a local radio station run by youth and broadcasting to just a small area in another ghetto area of Nairobi. The entire operation is run out of an repurposed shipping container, complete with an office and sound-proof studio for their broadcasting. To see this local project in action, essentially using just a computer and a microphone was a humbling experience to see how much can be done with so little.

When we finally got to Mr Rabbit’s farm, we had a tour around his property. We had a chance to see how they make their own compost, how they utilize a farming methodology called moist bed gardening, how to butcher a rabbit, enjoy sucking on fresh sugar cane, and see a larger scale rabbit operation.

Sunday, day 4, was a rest day, and a bunch of us spent some the afternoon at a local swimming pool for some much needed R&R.

On Monday, we continued our farm excursions to two local places. The focus was on value-added products and we first stopped at a local place that manufactured toys using recycled plastic. Using just two small buildings, they sort, melt, and mold recycled plastic into some really nice toys. It looked like they also had a bunch of corn growing in a back lot as well. We finished the day at Esther’s farm which is another peri-urban farm in a new suburb of Nairobi. Here, we had a chance to have a few hands-on demonstrations of how to make yogurt, how to make peanut butter (using either dry roasted peanuts or fried peanuts), and how to make mango jam. The peanut butter and mango jam were some of the best I’ve ever had! Esther has what we would consider to be a cottage industry that takes.

That’s all for this update. Look for more pictures and posts as the exchange continues.