“Urban farming”—it still sounds a little funny, doesn’t it?

As in community gardens, edible schoolyards, tubs full of fig trees on a roof or patio? Sure. Not to mention basement mushroom caves, indoor sprout trays, high-tech greenhouses, and even newfangled “vertical farms,” which were dismissed as fantasies just a few years ago. Beekeeping is all the buzz from Los Angeles to New York. Chickens outnumber labradoodles in urban communities nationwide by a significant margin. You can now even find goats frolicking in places as diverse as Austin, Charlottesville, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Seattle, or even other livestock—within city limits.

Why all this interest in agriculture, and why now? For many urban farmers in the U.S., the two questions are closely linked: to know the source of one’s meals after a decade of food scandals, to feed oneself amid intractable poverty, to beautify urban spaces blighted by development, to teach today’s youth business skills for tomorrow, to reduce one’s carbon footprint, to connect with a less industrialized past…you name it.

What sets Urban Farming apart from other books on the topic, I think, is that it is both an exploration of the zeitgeist of urban agriculture–Why now? Why here?–and a how-to guide for aspiring urban farmers. And a series of profiles of the motivations and methods behind urban farmers in communities across the country. And a really nice-looking book to keep on your coffee table.

Go on, give it a peek.

“Fortunately, Thomas J. Fox’s Urban Farming…is written for grown-ups. It considers politics and history as well as how-to, and informs me that as late as 1860 there were 50,000 hogs in Manhattan. And Fox actually sounds like an urban sophisticate. Before offering advice on fruit tree diseases, he advises, ‘Get yourself a drink and sit down.’”
— Michele Owens, Kirkus Reviews
“...a new encyclopedic guide to urban food growing. It contains practical lists of how to build urban gardens as well as growing advice.”
— Jennifer Cockrall-King, author of Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution