Urban Farm Day, Saturday, August 28, 2021, 10-3

Welcome to the first year of what we’re calling Urban Farm Day. We hope it becomes an annual habit, visiting area farm gardens, reconnecting with where our food comes from, maybe becoming inspired to create your own garden plot.

We realize that to call something an urban farm might conjure up the idea of a massive undertaking. That’s often true. But it’s also only part of the story. While some urban farms are, indeed, more than an acre in size, there are also sites no bigger than a back yard.

Let’s start with the backyard version. Perhaps too grand a term, but you get the idea. The Bolyard garden on Broad Street in Tonawanda is the entire yard – front and back – turned into a vegetable – with some flowers -garden, experimenting with straw bales to hold moisture and overhead structures to support bean plants. Their first year they harvested 56 pounds of sweet potatoes!

At the opposite end of that spectrum are the large, “let’s sell food to the community” farms, like Groundwork Market Garden on Genesee near Bailey. These two young farmers are serious, using crop rotation, integrated pest management, cover cropping, soil testing, and remediation to make sure they’ve created the very best possible conditions for growing their certified organic produce. As they say on their website, “We know that our food and our ethics will speak for themselves and look forward to feeding you!”

Sometimes an urban farm is more than just an urban farm. Like 5 Loaves Farm that redeems vacant lots on Buffalo's Upper West Side. They produce healthy food, yes, but they also offer educational, economic, & spiritual resources for the neighborhood. Besides that they provide jobs and training for neighborhood youth. Visit one of their farms on West Avenue near West Delavan.

On the East Side, there’s a kind of hybrid urban farm on Landon St. near Jefferson, the Harris Garden. This garden not only fills the backyard, but also the lot next door. This gardener has worked with Cornell Cooperative extension in their Seed to Supper program, is certified to teach food preservation, and grows kiwi in Buffalo, New York!

Also on the East Side, there’s Common Roots Urban Farm on Peckham near Fillmore, a Woman and Native owned business on nearly an acre of land, selling produce, tending bees, and producing flowers for arrangements.

Back to Buffalo’s West side, there’s West Side Tilth on Normal near Vermont, where they’ll sell you a pizza cooked on site from their own produce. And to insure food safety, their produce is grown in 600 yards of imported soil further protected by a geo-textile barrier.

These are but a handful of the urban farms available to visit Saturday, August 28th, from 10 to 3.  You can print out the map for all 16 urban farms, as well as find information about informal talks being offered that day, with the link below.

Come, enjoy.  It’s all free, and everyone is welcome.