Connecting the Dots

The City Farmers Experience

Founded in 1972, this San Diego family-owned nursery specializes in hard-to-find plants and edible gardening.

It’s a magical place located in the heart of San Diego, but somehow tucked away from the urban noise and chaos. City Farmers Nursery was founded by Bill Tall, affectionately called Farmer Bill, in 1972 when he was just 16. Now run by his son Sam, City Farmers specializes in hard-to-find plants and edible gardening on its 1.5 acres of land.

As you enter the space, you find yourself meandering along the paths, surrounded by vegetables and herbs, pollinators and native plants, as well as roses, fruit trees, a bonsai garden, cacti, and succulents all surrounding a koi pond. And I haven’t even mentioned the farm animals. There are the mini donkeys, countless chickens, ducks, and turkeys, the goats that are part of a local milk co-op, rabbits, turtles, and tortoises. Walk inside their garden center and you will find rows of seeds, garden tools, and bee-keeping and chicken-raising supplies. They have it all! Sam says, “Even if you are not able to buy a plant, just walking around the nursery should give you joy.”

Homemade garden signs line the paths, upcycled materials are used for retaining walls or garden beds, and anything that can be reused and recycled is. Throughout the property, countless fruit trees are planted, acting as a test garden — showing visitors what is realistic in an urban setting, how fruit trees can be maintained differently, and what can flourish in our garden zones. 

Every time I have visited or called with questions, I have received such thoughtful and thorough advice. Their dedication to free education is best demonstrated through the monthly classes they host in an outdoor classroom in the back of the property. They have classes on raising chickens, soil health, native plants, fruit trees, seed starting, and more. The list doesn’t seem to stop!

– Laura McLean

Circularity on the Menu

This innovative Toronto brewery and restaurant serves up delicious local fare with a side of conscientious initiatives.

When owner Max Meighan opened Avling in 2019, the concept was centred on circularity. “We tried to think of ways the restaurant and brewery could fit within the broader food system in Southern Ontario,” says Max. And not just in terms of using less, but doing what they could to help improve soil quality and supporting people doing things the right way when it comes to growing practices, he says.

Dishes and beverages feature ingredients grown from their rooftop farm (a certified wildlife habitat sanctuary) that’s upwards of 4,000 square feet or use leftover ingredients to prevent waste. The sticky toffee pudding, for example, is made with a flour made from the spent grain from the brewery (which is also used in the pizza dough and lavash). Chef Laura Maxwell reduces the wort from the brewery to a sweet syrup, which you’ll then find in candied bacon that’s used in some dishes and for a caramel sauce. Throughout most of the year, you can identify items on the menu that use ingredients from the rooftop farm as they’re marked with the letters AV.

The team collects uneaten food and the ashes from the fire grill for the rooftop garden, putting the waste to good use. “This is great for the soil on the rooftop farm,” says Avling’s farmer, Steph Goodyear. For the rooftop space, she focuses on using ecological growing practices, including cover cropping, crop rotation, low tillage, with no pesticide or synthetic fertilizer use. “We only use natural inputs like manure, cricket frass, and our own compost,” she says.

And for any additional compost collection, plus garbage and recycling oil waste, Avling uses Rethink Resource, a waste diversion provider. While this is a more expensive option, Laura says it’s the best way to offset Avling’s carbon footprint, in particular given the volume of spent grain (which Rethink converts to animal feed) produced by the brewery.

– Karen Kwan

Ruminants for Regeneration

Bison are turning barren land in Colorado into healthy and sustainable prairie.

About 50 miles east of Denver, a herd of nearly 300 bison is helping the 7,500-acre West Bijou Ranch revert to the native shortgrass prairieland that once dominated the vast plains here. The ranch is a campus for the Savory Institute, which aims to spread the word on holistic management and regenerative agriculture. 

Byron Shelton, manager of West Bijou Ranch, says that the ecosystem is recovering from the impacts of decades of conventional cattle ranching, which left the land largely barren and the soil dry and hard-packed. 

“We’re seeing more plants and a greater cross-section of species in the plants. We’re seeing the water cycle become more effective,” he says. The bison are crucial to the comeback. “If you manage the bison wrong, they destroy land, just like cattle,” Byron explains. “But if you manage cattle or bison or any land animal right, you bring land back.”

Byron is quick to note that other ruminants — multi-stomach animals — can do the job just as well as the bison. Cattle, sheep, and goats likewise can “provide the year-round moisture, so prairie grass can grow and then return back to the soil and regenerate the soil,” he says. The landscape is largely restored via the ruminant’s waste and soil-disturbing activity. The microorganisms that originate in an animal’s first rumen take hold in the soil and create an environment where prairie grasses can take root and further regenerate the soil through microbial processes in the root structures while also preventing erosion.

The Savory Institute implemented holistic management at West Bijou Ranch in 2017. It has since become one of the institute’s primary global campuses; the other is in Zimbabwe. The campuses are the centers of a network of 50 learning hubs around the world that offer training programs for landowners seeking to implement holistic management.

– Eric Peterson