Denver News Blog

Will Allen of Growing Power.

​As noted in Westword's summer-long "Urbavore's Dilemma" series, Denver's in the midst of an urban-gardening renaissance, with city dwellers tending chickens and turning their yards into Green Acres. While the growing season might be over, the seeds for future urban farming are already being sewn. Case in point: Will Allen, the celebrated Godfather of the urban homesteading, will be coming to town this weekend.

Allen, a MacArthur Genius Fellow who's received national attention and even plaudits from President Bill Clinton for his ambitious Growing Power farming project based in downtown Milwaukee, will be helping Feed Denver, a new urban-greenhouse program, build a pilot farm and regional farming training center at the Urban Farm at Stapleton. To spread Allen's message and raise money for the project, Feed Denver will be holding "A Feed Denver Evening with Will Allen" this Saturday, November 14, at 7 p.m. at FUEL Cafe at Taxi, 3455 Ringsby Court. An RSVP and $35 donation not only gets you front-and-center with the man who's literally turning our cities green, but also goodies from local faves FUEL Cafe, Infinite Money Theorem winery and New Belgium Brewery.

So what are you waiting for? Spring is just around the corner.

Photo by Brian Kraft Photography

​Urbavore's Dilemma is an ongoing web series detailing city dwellers' commitment to urban homesteading. From May through September, Westword writer Joel Warner will get his hands dirty, covering everything from backyard chickens to front-lawn gardens, from greenhouses to co-ops and food-sharing. Check out the full series here.

I've spent all summer exploring Denver's urban homesteading scene, from ad-hoc veggie gardens sprouting up in vacant lots to a luxurious green oasis blooming in the heart of downtown. I've checked out several types of chicken coops worthy of a spread in Architectural Digest, a mystical space garden that has to be seen to be believed and an ambitious plan to launch subdivisions built around urban farming. But like every growing season, Urbavore's Dilemma is coming to an end. So now it's time to eat.

I gather for dinner with the local-food advocates who met with me back in May when I started the project. We arrange to eat at the home of Sundari Kraft, the owner of Heirloom Gardens, a new community-supported farm in which the produce is grown in six northwest Denver yards. Along with me, there's James Bertini, founder of the recently-launched Denver Urban Homesteading school and Lisa Rogers, creator of Feed Denver, an effort to launch downtown greenhouses, fronted by farmers markets, all over town. Our fourth original member, John Beauparlant, can't make it, which is unfortunate because I was hoping to hear about Annie, Marguerite, Charlotte, Rosie, Dolly and Mrs. Merriweather, the four feathered ladies who rule the roost at La Ferme de Beau à Manger, Beauparlant's cushy backyard farm.

Joel Warner

GreenFingers workers tend to their garden

​Urbavore's Dilemma is an ongoing web series detailing city dwellers' commitment to urban homesteading. From May through September, Westword writer Joel Warner will get his hands dirty, covering everything from backyard chickens to front-lawn gardens, from greenhouses to co-ops and food-sharing. Check out the full series here.

They come from transitional housing, from homeless shelters and from the street. "How are you, stranger?" they say to one another when they arrive at the nondescript, one-story building on Larimer. Before they dig into breakfast, a spread of healthy and locally-grown food, they file into the garden out back. When they return, their arms are filled with fresh vegetables and repurposed clear plastic supermarket containers filled with tiny hand-picked flowers, like boxes of colorful jewels.

Joel Warner

Holly Arnold Kinney and neighbor Matt Slater in Kinney's greenhouse

​Urbavore's Dilemma is an ongoing web series detailing city dwellers' commitment to urban homesteading. From May through September, Westword writer Joel Warner will get his hands dirty, covering everything from backyard chickens to front-lawn gardens, from greenhouses to co-ops and food-sharing. Check out the full series here.

Holly Arnold Kinney is as close to Colorado culinary royalty as you can get. She was literally born into local haute cuisine, having grown up on the upstairs floor of the Fort, the celebrated adobe-style fine-dining restaurant her father built as a dream house for her mother amid the hills of Morrison in 1963. Now owner of the Fort herself, Kinney's known to have amassed a treasure trove of gastronomic wonders, from original 18th century cookbooks used by New World missionaries to a built-in Wolf steamer installed in her home kitchen.

So when I heard Kinney had begun dabbling in urban gardening at her south Denver home, I knew I had to check it out. I needed to see what, exactly, a backyard garden looked like under the tutelage of Denver's first lady of food.

Joel Warner

The Breaking Ground team

​Urbavore's Dilemma is an ongoing web series detailing city dwellers' commitment to urban homesteading. From May through September, Westword writer Joel Warner will get his hands dirty, covering everything from backyard chickens to front-lawn gardens, from greenhouses to co-ops and food-sharing. Check out the full series here.

The vacant lot on West Caithness Place in northwest Denver had long been a drag on the neighborhood. Just around the corner from the hopping intersection of 32nd and Zuni and across the street from North High School's playing fields, the weedy and rock-strewn stretch of ground always seemed to attract abandoned cars and late-night drug dealers. So it seemed a good thing this past May when word spread that a garden was going to go up there -- except for maybe the fact that the gardeners would be from Independence House Pecos, a local halfway house.

Joel Warner

Ashara Ekundayo and Maurice Ka at the Eastside Growers Collective garden

​Urbavore's Dilemma is an ongoing web series detailing city dwellers' commitment to urban homesteading. From May through September, Westword writer Joel Warner will get his hands dirty, covering everything from backyard chickens to front-lawn gardens, from greenhouses to co-ops and food-sharing. Check out the full series here.

In a grassy lot in north Park Hill, not too far away from where the Holly Shopping Center burned down last year in an alleged gang-related fire bombing, corn is growing tall. Here, in the backyard of the Zion Baptist Church and Ministries' senior center and health clinic and the Liggins Tower assisted living facility, yellow, black and other corn varieties reach into the sky. And that's not all -- cabbage, okra, grape vines, squash, melons, collard greens and numerous other fruits and vegetables flourish across 1.75 acres of tidy rectangular garden plots.

"Poets, MCs and DJs are out here gardening," says Ashara Ekundayo, founder and artistic director of the Pan African Arts Society, and one of a handful of artist-activists and community group members, all people of color from ages sixteen to sixty, who've come together this summer at this hitherto poorly utilized community garden and started the Eastside Growers Collective. Eventually they hope to put a greenhouse on the site and start a regular farmers market. They call themselves the "OGs" -- short for "organic gardeners."

Joel Warner

Kenzie Davison and James Bertini

​Urbavore's Dilemma is an ongoing web series detailing city dwellers' commitment to urban homesteading. From May through September, Westword writer Joel Warner will get his hands dirty, covering everything from backyard chickens to front-lawn gardens, from greenhouses to co-ops and food-sharing. Check out the full series here.

While Denver's urban homesteading community has of late been growing by leaps and bounds, with tomato vines reaching up garage walls and hens taking over dog runs, there hasn't been much in the way of a central hub. Aside from online forums and educational workshops put on by local organizations or meet-up groups, folks have mostly been left up to their own devices to learn about how to navigate city chicken laws, where to go for raw milk and what to do with that unruly squash plant now that they finally got that sucker to grow.

That, however, will soon change -- courtesy of the Denver Urban Homesteading Local Market and Reskilling Center, a facility set to open later this month at 200 Santa Fe Drive that will feature farming classes, a super-local farmers market, an agricultural swap meet and other urban farming-focused activities.

Kristen Hatgi, Z Cuisine and À Côté

​As we wrote about in a recent Urbavore's Dilemma story ("Separating the natives from the non-natives at local farmer's markets"), it's often impossible to tell if that shiny tomato or succulent melon you're eying at the local farmers market comes from a Colorado farm or an operation in California or Mexico. That will be different next year at all the events run by Colorado Fresh Markets, the big farmers-market player in town that operates the popular Cherry Creek farmers market on Wednesdays and Saturdays as well as several other Denver farmers markets.

Colorado Fresh Markets President Christopher Burke broke the news last week after Sundari Kraft -- owner of a Denver-based multi-plot urban farm that sells local produce at several non-Fresh Markets events -- sent the operation an e-mail requesting they identify their produce's provenance and encouraged others to do likewise. Burke responded to Kraft that they will more closely monitor the labeling of produce at their events and, starting with next year's markets, will require all produce vendors to include origin labels.

Joel Warner

Mike Haynes, right, and Andrew Johnsen show off one of their composting contraptions.

Urbavore's Dilemma is an ongoing web series detailing city dwellers' commitment to urban homesteading. From May through September, Westword writer Joel Warner will get his hands dirty, covering everything from backyard chickens to front-lawn gardens, from greenhouses to co-ops and food-sharing. Check out the full series here.

The ads are all over the Denver and Boulder Craigslists. They sport different titles -- "New Composter," "Patio Garden Composter," "Garden Composter Rotating Type" -- but it's clear after a quick perusal that all the many composters for sale in the ads come from the same person in Louisville. "No odor, space saver, really does the job fast," read the posts, which include photos of myriad homemade rotating composters made from upright plastic drums attached to wooden legs. There are several sizes and prices: Fifteen gallon-models go for $115 before tax, fifty-gallon jumbos sell for $145 and a nifty duel-barrel model -- so you can have two batches of compost "cooking" at once -- logs in a $198. All of them bear an uncanny resemblance to R2D2.

And they're guaranteed to take your trash and turn it into grade-A plant cuisine, says Mike Haynes, the man behind this quirky little home business. "Stick your arms in and it's nice," says Haynes, fondling the mulchy contents of one his contraptions, which has been cooking away in the backyard of his Louisville house and base of operations. "It's fluffy and hot"

Pyatt Studio

An Urban Hens chicken coop

Urbavore's Dilemma is an ongoing web series detailing city dwellers' commitment to urban homesteading. From May through September, Westword writer Joel Warner will get his hands dirty, covering everything from backyard chickens to front-lawn gardens, from greenhouses to co-ops and food-sharing. Check out the full series here.

It's high time for a chicken-coop makeover.

After all, one of the main stumbling blocks for incorporating chicken coops into urban landscape is that they usually don't match the backyard décor. The rusty nails and splintery plywood frames, the dirty wire mesh walls and soiled dirt floor -- none of it goes well with the teak loungers from Pottery Barn and copper birdbath from Smith & Hawken.

Thanks to a little Boulder operation called Urban Hens, that could soon change.

Photo by Brian Kraft Photography

Mitchell Alexander, the Green Fooder, at the Highland MiMa.

Urbavore's Dilemma is an ongoing web series detailing city dwellers' commitment to urban homesteading. From May through September, Westword writer Joel Warner will get his hands dirty, covering everything from backyard chickens to front-lawn gardens, from greenhouses to co-ops and food-sharing. Check out the full series here.

The red-brick house, a tidy Denver square, looks like any other on the comfortable, tree-lined street in Park Hill. But to me it's special -- wondrous even.

I've come here on a mission: To find the origins of some of the best bacon I've ever eaten.

The journey began a week earlier at the Highland MiMa, a super-small, super-local farmers market in Highlands Square. That's where I'd met Mitchell Alexander, owner of the grassroots Green Fooder LLC company, which sells natural and sustainable meats, eggs and cheese from local sources. I'd heard good things about Alexander's products, so I'd purchased a package of bacon from the stand he runs at the MiMa.

The next morning, I learned what all the fuss was about. The bacon was a revelation -- thick and salty and rich, without any hint of the chemical aftertaste associated with the straggly supermarket stuff. In short, it was downright perfect.

Kristen Hatgi, Z Cuisine and À Côté

Urbavore's Dilemma is an ongoing web series detailing city dwellers' commitment to urban homesteading. From May through September, Westword writer Joel Warner will get his hands dirty, covering everything from backyard chickens to front-lawn gardens, from greenhouses to co-ops and food-sharing. Check out the full series here.

Nicole Jarman, president of the Denver company HobNob Events and Festivals, had a bold dream for her Highland Farmers Market, the new northwest Denver market that runs from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on the 1600 block of Boulder Street every Saturday. She wanted to feature only Colorado produce and products -- most of which would hopefully come from within the metro area. "This is... a neighborhood that is incredibly supportive of their local environment -- eating local, buying local, supporting local businesses," she said in a March Westword interview.

That dream, it turns out, might have been a bit ambitious.

Joel Warner

The Great Experimenters (from left): James Quirk, Barnabas Von Scarecrow, Russ Dale and Matt Twardy

Urbavore's Dilemma is an ongoing web series detailing city dwellers' commitment to urban homesteading. From May through September, Westword writer Joel Warner will get his hands dirty, covering everything from backyard chickens to front-lawn gardens, from greenhouses to co-ops and food-sharing. Check out the full series here.

Russ Dale's been sending me cryptic e-mails for a while,

"There is a bigger story here," he wrote me about his garden in April when I first started my Urbavore's Dilemma series. "One complete with mission patches similar to what the astronauts wear on their flight suits. Complete with a garden webcam. Complete with hope and peace."

He elaborated on his backyard operation in a later e-mail. "I'm a farmer," he noted. "It's in my blood. I utilize my small plots of good earth in south Denver to perfection." There's a scarecrow named Barnabas, he promised, as well as something called space basil and other elements he described as some sort of "homage to NASA human spaceflight." This summer, he added, he'll be delving into canning: "My mind is fixed on pickles."

I can't wait any longer. I have to see Dale and his plots of good earth.

Urbavore's Dilemma is an ongoing web series detailing city dwellers' commitment to urban homesteading. From May through September, Westword writer Joel Warner will get his hands dirty, covering everything from backyard chickens to front-lawn gardens, from greenhouses to co-ops and food-sharing. Check out the full series here.

Steve and Sheila's coop

The three Rhode Island Reds and three Barred Plymouth Rocks that reside in Steve and Sheila's Denver Heights backyard don't live like the chickens they are. Their lifestyle is more akin to royal peacocks.

For starters, their outdoor enclosure is sprawling - the Versailles gardens of chicken runs, if you will. But the real bling-bling is in their abode -- a twenty-year-old former playhouse decked out with feeders, heat lamps and even a temperature-controlled exhaust fan. The whole operation set the cluckers' owners back a thousand bucks. Not too shabby for a bunch of barnyard animals.

To learn more about this chateau of chicken coops and other coops around the metro area, check out this Urbavore's Dilemma slideshow highlighting the lifestyles of Denver's cooped and feathered.

Urbavore's Dilemma is an ongoing web series detailing city dwellers' commitment to urban homesteading. From May through September, Westword writer Joel Warner will get his hands dirty, covering everything from backyard chickens to front-lawn gardens, from greenhouses to co-ops and food-sharing. Check out the full series here.

Photo by www.BrianKraft.com

The Grove Street garden

It's hard not to stop and stare when you pass the brick bungalow on Grove Street in northwest Denver.

While neighboring homes feature your typical manicured grass lawns and mulch beds, here at this house the entire side yard, comprised of a steep hill, has been transformed into a 1,500 square-foot terraced farm. Lettuce, spinach, pea and carrot leaves cascade down the slope like a verdant waterfall, with clover-blanketed walkways bisecting the beds.

It's downright amazing, says May Ann Feldman, a neighbor who can't help but pause to admire the greenery during one of her walks around the neighborhood. "People are working on it just about every weekend," she says. "It's pretty exciting to have this in our neighborhood."

In fact, Feldman now has several such operations in and around her neighborhood courtesy of Heirloom Gardens, a new farm encompassing farmland that's nothing more than six northwest Denver yards.

Urbavore's Dilemma is an ongoing web series detailing city dwellers' commitment to urban homesteading. From May through September, Westword writer Joel Warner will get his hands dirty, covering everything from backyard chickens to front-lawn gardens, from greenhouses to co-ops and food-sharing. Check out the full series here.

TSR Group

A potential Agriburbia house lot.

If Quint and Jenny Redmond's Agriburbia concept takes hold, the suburbs are never going to be the same.

Let's say, for example, you were to wake up one morning living in the middle of a hypothetical Agriburbia subdivision here along the Front Range. You look out your window not at a vista of identical single-families stretching as far as the eye can see but instead vineyards and orchards ringing the community, along with small farm plots overflowing with tomatoes and other vegetables. The farm hands are already out, harvesting the produce that will be eaten within the community or sold to nearby restaurants, with proceeds going back to the subdivision.

Urbavore's Dilemma is an ongoing web series detailing city dwellers' commitment to urban homesteading. From May through September, Westword writer Joel Warner will get his hands dirty, covering everything from backyard chickens to front-lawn gardens, from greenhouses to co-ops and food-sharing. Check out the full series here.

Joel Warner

Lisa Rogers

A year after the Holly Shopping Center was gutted by a gang-related fire bombing, something new is sprouting from the abandoned Park Hill strip mall. And it's not the revitalization project being planned by the Urban Land Conservancy, which bought the site last month. That development is likely years away.

What's going in now are peppers, cucumbers and lots of tomatoes.

The nonprofit ULC is dedicating part of the neglected lawn space at the location to a temporary garden, details of which will be announced Wednesday, May 20, at a 9:15 a.m. press conference at the mall.

Urbavore's Dilemma is an ongoing web series detailing city dwellers' commitment to urban homesteading. From May through September, Westword writer Joel Warner will get his hands dirty, covering everything from backyard chickens to front-lawn gardens, from greenhouses to co-ops and food-sharing. Check out the full series here.

Joel Warner

Penelope Thron-Weber appealed to the city to keep her hens.

Penelope Thron-Weber and her husband Bruce anxiously face the five somber-visaged officials who comprise Denver's Board of Adjustment for Zoning Appeals. Penelope may not look like a scofflaw with her schoolmarmish hair bun and quilted vest, but she's a lawbreaker nonetheless. That's why she's here -- to explain her wrongdoing and plead her case.

Her crime? Illicit chickens.

Urbavore's Dilemma is an ongoing web series detailing city dwellers' commitment to urban homesteading. From May through September, Westword writer Joel Warner will get his hands dirty, covering everything from backyard chickens to front-lawn gardens, from greenhouses to co-ops and food-sharing. His first piece appeared in print this week. Check out the full series here.

Joel Warner

Ellen Rosenthal

What's so funny about a little peace, love and hard-core gardening?

That's the attitude of Ellen Rosenthal, who's quickly becoming Denver's unofficial garden czar with her Grow Local Colorado campaign. With a background in resolving conflicts between Israeli and Palestinian youth, Rosenthal recognized several years ago while living in Denver that her peacekeeping work would be for naught if she didn't first make sure people had enough to eat. "I realized that it doesn't matter how much peace we create when there is a water shortage and not enough food," she says. "All the peace agreements would fall by the wayside."

So last year she started the Living Earth Center, a local organization that teaches permaculture concepts -- ecological design methods that work hand in hand with nature. The Living Earth Center has been drawing crowds for its classes on "instant" herb gardens and worm-bin composting, and its success has inspired Rosenthal to think bigger.

Something strange is going on around Denver. Home owners are replacing sod with vegetable beds and building chicken coops by their garages. A power player is turning prime downtown real estate into a miniature farm, and a developer is planning a subdivision based around farmer's markets. Citizens are fighting for their right to raise honey bees, hens, dwarf goats and pot-bellied pigs. The urban homesteading movement is re-imagining, yard by yard and meal by meal what it's like to live in Denver -- not just to save money but to help the environment and enrich the country's food-production system.

Over the next few months, Westword writer Joel Warner will get his own hands dirty with backyard chickens, front lawn gardens, greenhouses, co-ops and food-sharing. In the process he'll look at what the movement says about shifting concepts of urban living, sustainability, self-sufficiency and dinner-table politics. Scroll down to find links to his stories and other urban homesteading resources.

Urbavore's Dilemma: The Map

View Urbavore's Dilemma: in a larger map

This week's story:
-Final harvest, September 1, 2009

Previous stories:
-EarthLinks helps the displaced set down roots, August 25, 2009
-Fort owner Holly Arnold Kinney uses her garden to dig into her past, August 18, 2009
-Breaking Ground is putting down roots in vacant lots, August 11, 2009
-Blue and Yellow Logic hopes to mix up a new form of green, August 4, 2009
-Class is in session at Denver's new urban farming school, July 28, 2009
-Taking a spin with compost king Mike Haynes, July 14, 2009
-Extreme Makeover, chicken coop edition, July 7, 2009
-Where's the beef? At the Green Fooder's house, June 30, 2009
-Separating the natives from the non-natives at local farmer's markets, June 23, 2009
-Growing weird with Russ Dale's mystic space garden, June 17, 2009
-Lifestyles of the cooped and feathered -- a slideshow, June 9, 2009
-Introducing Heirloom Gardens, your friendly neighborhood farm, June 2, 2009
-Agriburbia's putting the herbs back in burbs, May 26, 2009
-Making urban greenhouses as hip as coffee shops, May 19, 2009
-Denver's convoluted livestock laws lead to renegade chickens, May 12, 2009
-Grow Local plans to inspire 2009 new gardens in 2009, May 5, 2009.
-Christie Isenberg aims to till the asphalt jungle, April 29, 2009
-Denver's Urban Gardeners are Digging Their Backyard Farms, April 29, 2009

Related links:
Community
Denver Urban Homesteaders Group
Grow Local Colorado
Denver Backyard Farms
Transition Denver
Slow Food Denver
Home Grown Colorado

Education
Living Earth Center
Denver Urban Gardens
Denver Botanic Gardens
The Urban Farm

Business and development
Feed Denver
Agriburbia

Farms and food
Heirloom Gardens
Sense of Colorado
Produce Denver
Local Harvest
Denver Beekeepers Association
Find a Colorado Farmers' Market

Urbavore's Dilemma is an ongoing web series detailing city dwellers' commitment to urban homesteading. From May through September, Westword writer Joel Warner will get his hands dirty, covering everything from backyard chickens to front-lawn gardens, from greenhouses to co-ops and food-sharing. His first piece appeared in print this week. Stay tuned for more.

Photo by Joel Warner

Dale Deleo, left, and Christy Isenberg at the future Tiri's Garden.

At the corner of 15th and California streets, the busy heart of downtown, an earth mover scrapes away at a newly exposed 8,000-square-foot stretch of dirt bounded by chain-link fencing. Surrounded by the 16th Street Mall, the Denver Pavilions, the Hyatt Regency Denver and the Denver Dry Goods Company Building, this space is one of the hottest pieces of real estate in town. But it isn't being primed for a new high rise or development -- at least not yet.

Instead it's going to be a veggie garden.