DUG is an urban farmer’s group that began as a program at Garden Station. We encourage urban residents to grow sustainably produced, chemical-free fruits and vegetables in the city for sale to restaurants, farmer’s markets and through CSA’s.
We do this by sharing equipment such as seeders, a scale, and refrigerators; sharing interns; as well as putting in seed, plant, supply and equipment orders together through our affiliate retail shop, Dayton Urban Green at wholesale; all in an effort to increase urban agriculture in Dayton and create a more resilient community.
With the eviction of Garden Station, our long term plan of establishing an incubator/training farm got pushed up as we needed a place to take the hoop houses. We found our own land through the Land Bank and broke ground September 10, 2016.
Our incubator farm will provide a shared wash/pack shed and walk in cooler for our members and will be available for course graduates to farm while they are getting their own sites set up.
Farming and our food supply are in crisis with the depletion of soils due to industrial agriculture, increasing farmer debt, the aging of farmers and fewer youth in farming.
Our year-long training farm program draws from proven models in an intensive, high rotation, year-round, no till system of vegetable production that also helps the environment and blends them with permaculture design principles on a scale that is manageable by a few workers.
We are still all volunteers and have no paid staff. We do this to make our community more resilient, healthy and a better place to live!
Please call 937-610-3845 or write to [email protected] to schedule a time for your group to volunteer or tour the farm!
Lisa Helm is the founder of Garden Station art park and community garden, which reflected her interest in permaculture, green construction and outsider art. Garden Station involved over 300 community organizations and businesses and over 3000 volunteers in its creation between 2008 and 2016, when the city government chose to evict Garden Station to make way for future development in spite of 4000 signatures on a petition to keep it.
Since 2008 Lisa has helped form a Dayton Urban Farmer’s group, “Dayton Urban Grown”; organized local Parking Day events, a Sustainable Living Workshop series of over 60 free classes/year, and an Earth Day festival that attracted as many as 5000 attendees. She has also been a speaker for gardening and planning conferences and sustainable living events at the state and national level.
Lisa holds a Master of Music degree from Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and freelanced and taught for over ten years in several colleges and universities as well as art magnet schools. She is Permaculture Design Certified, a Master Organic Gardener, has taken classes in natural building at Blue Rock Station and urban farming with Will Allen, Jean-Martin Fortier, Singing Frogs Farm, Lean Farm and Neversink Farm; and is a graduate of Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance Seed School.
In 2013 Lisa and her partner, George, opened “Dayton Urban Green”, a sustainable living shop at the public market to provide supplies for the workshop series and eco-friendly options for everyday items.
Currently Lisa is completing construction on Dayton Urban Grown Incubator/Training Farm and writing curriculum for training small scale, regenerative year-round vegetable producers.
