As more and more individuals and groups set out to re-introduce gardens to urban areas — often citing WWII’s “Victory Gardens” as proof that a large percentage of our food can come from our back yards and vacant lots — the Detroit-headquartered Urban Farming wants to push edible plants into new spaces — like walls.

The Urban Farming Food Chain is a “vertical farming” project that retrofits the sides of buildings with irrigated panels capable of growing all sorts of produce. Intent on making this food useful instead of a mere eco-novelty, the group has put its first four installations in Los Angeles locations where fresh, healthy food can be scarce: places like Skid Row, for instance.

“These are in protected/courtyard locations,” program developer Joyce Lapinsky clarifies.

Though the group first targeted purely public spaces, she says, “once we realized that the vegetable/fruit plants would grow out approximately one foot/foot and a half from the wall panels, it was clear to us that we wouldn’t likely find appropriate locations in the environments that we wanted. It would have required us to have unrealistic and inconsiderate expectations of the people we wanted to serve.” Lapinsky explains that, in areas with large homeless populations, you can’t really ask people “Please don’t lean on the wall,” or “Please don’t sit on the sidewalk.”

What you can ask is that those who benefit from a project like this learn how to keep it going. So while “anyone can in fact go up and pull a fruit/vegetable off of the wall” in these four test sites, local residents are expected to take organizers’ expertise (and the pre-grown plant panels, which are organically cultivated at Cal Poly’s Sustainable Agriculture Resource Consortium) and learn how to implement it as a group.

As a story in the Los Angeles Times pointed out in August, formerly homeless people on Skid Row had seen mixed results with their own earlier attempts at farming; but Lapinsky says that these walls of food “have fared very well.”

People from around the country have contacted Urban Farming about the project, she adds, “and we’re hopeful that with our efforts to highlight vertical farming that people will do this in their communities, whether as an Urban Farming partner and ‘link’ in the Urban Farming Food Chain, or on their own.”

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