I’m very excited to announce that our new Urban Farm Guides app was released for iPad and iPhone today.  The app gives users access to useful tips and easy-to-use guidelines for learning about urban farming and sustainability.  Our current guides include:  Basic Seed Saving, Fowl Play: Your Guide to Keeping Chickens in the City, and Grow Wherever You Go!.  Each guide contains just the right amount of how-to information, pictures, graphics and instructions so that you can actually go out and take your first steps in creating your own Urban Farm.

I have been urban farming in my front and backyard in Phoenix, AZ, for more than three decades and have experienced growing in all kinds of urban places, from a spacious suburban backyard to a tiny townhouse.  My attitude has always been that if I am going to plant, nurture, fertilize and grow a plant, it had better be edible!  Hey food grows for free�"we all need to learn how to grow it pesticide-free and give it away.

My intention with our Guides was to begin packaging everything I have learned over the past 35 years to share it with you, and it has quickly turned into a few friends and I working together.  My good friend and Native Seeds/SEARCH Director Bill McDorman, who is a worldwide expert in seed saving, wrote the Basic Seed Saving Guide.  He also wrote and taught Seed School which I attended in June of 2011.  Plus local artist and writer Rachel Bess shares her vast experience on keeping urban chickens in her Guide, Fowl Play.

I imagine Urban Farm Guides being the modern-day Foxfire series teaching ‘how to’ do everything urban farming from A to Z.  In Foxfire, we get an inside view of what it takes to live a more sustainable farm life. Urban Farm Guides aims to develop more in our series of how-to’s including very innovative Guides on Composting, VermiComposting, Edible Flowers, and Farming on Leased Land, all of which we currently have in-the-making with the help of some very creative people. Hey, if you have a topic you would like to write a guide about shoot me an email.

Becoming an urban farmer is easy.  First grow food, and then share it with someone -- your family, neighbors, community. Finally, name your farm and begin creating a farming identity in your community.  Our Guides are designed to help you along the way.

Growing one’s own food can seem like a challenging endeavor, but the Urban Farm Guides provide an easy-to-read source for quickly learning the ease and joy of growing food at your own home. Currently, the app has four how-to guides that include:

·    My Ordinary, Extraordinary Yard comes free with the download of the app and shares the story of how I transformed my own front and back yard into a thriving edible paradise. It also touches on how I incorporated solar panels, grey water and rainwater into my landscape.

·    Fowl Play: Your Guide to Keeping Chickens in the City, by Rachel Bess, explains, in detail, how to keep chickens in an urban yard and shares the many reasons why they make a great addition to any household.

·    Basic Seed Saving by Bill McDorman, executive director of Native Seeds/SEARCH, offers step-by-step instructions for saving seeds from 18 different vegetables and 29 wildflowers, including everything from the beginner’s basics to plants for advanced gardeners.