Welcome to the Urban Agriculture Resource Center, where SCLT will help introduce you to growing food in an urban setting. This site will give you the lessons and tools to get back to basics in growing your own food. Here, you will learn about Soil, Compost, Water, Seeds and Plants and other topics critical to Urban Agriculture.

Urban agriculture is the practice of growing food in an urban environment: it’s a movement of people deciding to have more independence outside the current food system, without leaving the city. People are reclaiming their sense of connectedness to place, to nature, to their bodies and to each other, through the act of food growing within a limited space and with limited means. Being local, environmentally sustainable and urban, this form of agriculture represents three key areas: economy, community and environment. By starting at the core of what makes us function at a basic level – eating food – we can then nourish the way we connect with our environment.

Growing food isn’t just about food growing; it’s being outdoors, playing in the soil, chatting with neighbors and promoting what is super-local. Joining a community garden, or organizing your neighbors to help start one, is the best way to save money, make new friends, and learn more about your relationship to the greater world – by not having to buy your own food, you’re conserving personal resources and improving your health, because you now know where your food is coming from: your hands.

“We currently have a food supply that is in the hands of others who are faceless and far away. We have given technology “savior” status that is expensive and derived of petrochemicals to meet our food needs. By doing so we have made ourselves more dependent and less self-sufficient on a basic human need and right: food. This practice has put us out of life’s natural cycle, which is uncertain, unhealthy, and unstable. Worse, with this system we have put food into the hands of people who for the most part are more interested in the bottom line than they are about meeting people’s nutritional needs.” – Rich Pederson, SCLT newsletter, Spring 2004

By having a backyard garden, a community garden plot, a rooftop garden or even some buckets with holes in the bottom, soil, and seeds, you’re accessing the most basic way to nourish your body, connect with friends, family and community, and improve your environment: the production of immediately usable food.