Urban Farming — Stories

Ellia Guy has always been most comfortable outdoors. That is possibly a legacy of spending most of her childhood playing outside climbing trees, exploring the myriad of creeks around where she grew up and in the garden. After studying environmental science and working in Europe for a couple of years, Ellia became homesick for Australian landscapes. The bush, the wide open sky, spaces, beaches and the birdsong brought her home. Back in Australia and working in the built environment field, she started to realise how almost all landscapes designed and planted in Australia do little to consider ecological function, habitat or biodiversity (and certainly not food production). Thus Future Wild was born, a business that envisions our cities transformed into a verdant mosaic of native habitat patches and edible gardens. 

After spending several years studying and working in the Netherlands in incorporating sustainability into product innovation, Charity Teoh Buldt returned to Melbourne to start a family. With the busyness of juggling work and family commitments, sustainability can be hard to implement. A good start has been to expose her kids to edible gardens as early as possible, hence she chose to use Glowpear Urban Gardens.

Our Glowpearian this quarter is Madison based Steven Knurr. Steven is in marketing at a Wisconsin technology consulting firm focusing on  healthcare, retail, and manufacturing sectors.

Using his creative talents Steven developed an impressive urban greenhouse that is technology driven. It blends seamlessly with his 'up and coming' neighbourhood, where 'pour over' coffee, fixed geared bikes, and backyard chicken coups are the norm. 

Chicago native, Sara Gasbarra, is the founder of Verdura, a full service culinary garden design company working with hotels, restaurants, cafes and businesses all over the US.

Jon Kingston describes himself as a 'free range urban horticulturalist'.

He spends his time designing, installing and maintaining balcony and roof top garden spaces around Sydney, Australia.

Carrie Forrest is California-based blogger sharing inspiration for healthy, balanced living. 

Her professional background is in non-profit healthcare fundraising and masters degrees in business administration and in public health (nutrition).

Paul and Angela are New Yorkers, who have been married now for 15 years.

Whilst Angela works in the medical field, Paul spends most of his time in broadcasting, and performing hip-hop around the US as UncommonNasa.

When the couple were able to buy their own home, they didn't want the traditional house with a picket fence and yard.

People often ask Ryan Young what makes him different to other landscape designers, and what is a ‘Sustainable Landscape’?

"The core to ensuring a landscape design is sustainable, is to have a holistic approach built around ‘energy spent to energy gained’." Young explains.