LOCAL FOOD News Roundup

Hunts Point Market Extends Lease with NYC

The Hunts Point Terminal Market, the world’s largest wholesale produce market, is not leaving New York City, at least not yet.  It extended its lease with the city for an additional three years.

The three-year extension was signed just as the market’s lease was about to expire on May 31.  As part of the lease negotiations, the market vendors agreed to stop talking to officials from New Jersey, who had been trying to persuade the vendors to relocate.  The vendors will negotiate exclusively with the city for a term of nine months.

According to Crain’s New York Business, the biggest issue revolves around how the cost of renovating the market – projected at $320 million – will be divided among the vendors, the city and the state.

Portugal Update: Rhythm of Farm Felt Miles Away

© Photo by Margarida Correia. See caption at bottom of post.

This is one in a series of posts on my visit to Portugal and 10-day volunteer work experience at Cimo de Vila, a 30-acre organic farm in northern Portugal.

A Little TLC for City Trees

© Photo by Margarida Correia

Urban street trees tend to die young, but with a little TLC from committed volunteer stewards they can live much longer.  That’s the major finding of a five-year study conducted by Steven Boyce, an urban tree enthusiast in New York City.

“Tree stewardship makes a big difference,” Boyce told a class of aspiring city tree pruners.   “The mortality rate for trees without stewards is more than three times greater than those with stewards.”

The students in the class were participants in the Citizen Pruner program organized by Trees New York, an environmental and urban forestry nonprofit organization based in New York City.  

GreenThumb’s Annual Gardening PowWow to Feature Joan Dye Gussow

GreenThumb, the community gardening program of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, will host its annual GrowTogether conference next Saturday, April 2, at Hostos Community College in the Bronx.  The gardening powwow includes two workshop sessions and will feature gardener extraordinaire and food and nutrition educator Joan Dye Gussow, author of Growing Older:  A Chronicle of Death, Life, and Vegetables, as the keynote speaker.

The GrowTogether will run from 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and is expected to draw community gardeners and greening professionals throughout New York City.

To register for next weekend’s event, click here.

Plant Power

Airport security gardens? Bomb-sniffing tulips in Central Park?  Kirk Johnson of the New York Times reports on promising new research that will add yet one more role to the life-sustaining work of plants:  keeping people safe from terrorists and madmen.

Researchers at Colorado State University have developed plants that will change from green to white when TNT and other explosives are detected.  The plants under development “reacted to levels one one-hundredth of anything a bomb-sniffing dog could muster,” Johnson reported in his piece.

The researchers are working on improving the response time in the plants, which now take hours to turn to the tell-tale white.  For use as a security tool, the plants will need to signal within minutes and more clearly, goals that might be attainable within as early as three years.  Five to seven years is more likely.