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The Frosty Fish: A vision for the future of urban farming
I’m sitting in a cafe, sipping a cup of tea and enjoying the tastiest crème brulee I’ve ever had. Or maybe I just think it’s the tastiest. It could be the atmosphere, the tropical flowers in bloom,...
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Help Design the Next Grocery Index
Good commercial corridor infill: grocery store in mixed-use building Dear streets.mn loyal readers, Last year, I worked on a grocery index that included local Minneapolis-St. Paul grocery stores and...
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Grocery Wars 2020: Costco Is a “Winner, Winner, $5 Chicken Dinner”
Recently, I asked our readers to fill out a survey about grocery shopping habits, including where you shopped and what was on your most recent receipt. Thank you to the 53 readers who shared their...
View ArticleNational Links: Making the City an Open Air Restaurant
Every day at The Overhead Wire we collect news about cities and send the links to our email list. At the end of the week we take some of the most popular stories and post them to Greater Greater...
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The City That Eats Together: A Climate Committee Tree Planting Event
Editor’s note: Julia wrote this piece prior to the killing of George Floyd and subsequent unrest. The last few days have again revealed the structural inequality that persists in our cities. These gaps...
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Fun Weeds You Can Eat
Why eat weeds? A weed is just a plant in the wrong spot, the saying goes. It might also just be a plant we haven’t sufficiently appreciated yet. Eating weeds fundamentally changes our relationship to...
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Food and Permanence
Photo: Ian Young Since buying a house in 2017, I’ve been planting trees. As of today, I have added 12 trees and about 37 woody shrubs, many of which are fruit- or nut-bearing. In a few years, these...
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Shopping for Food, and Community, at Aldi
A grocery store arose at the corner of Penn and Lowry in the middle of a federally designated food desert some years ago, but it was no mirage. With healthy foods, organic produce and household items,...
View ArticleA Poem for August 27th, 2020
Weep and know Death, Land of Sky Blue Waters. There will be no butter blocks carved of your daughters. Eighteen hundred siblings are already dead. All else holds its breath so The Thing won’t spread....
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Eat Your Greens and Shoots: But Find Them First
As the ground thaws each spring, edible perennial plants wake up and are there for the taking if you know where and how to look. Perennials come up from their roots each year, unlike annuals, which...
View ArticleNational Links: Curb Management Costing Cities Billions
Every day at The Overhead Wire we sort through over 1,500 news items about cities and share the best ones with our email list. At the end of the week, we take some of the most popular stories and...
View ArticleReplacing the Car: Groceries
My mother would do the shopping once a week, filling her cart and car with groceries. We would dutifully unload and put away all the food we may or may not eat over the next week, as this was just how...
View ArticleNational Links: Fast-Food Manager Opposes Drive-Through
Every day at The Overhead Wire, we collect news about cities and send the links to our email list. At the end of the week we take some of the most popular stories and post them to Greater Greater...
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Fast Food and Fast-Casual Restaurants in a Post-Pandemic Era
The latest Omicron wave appears to be subsiding, and soon we will be back to normal (for certain values of normal). In the restaurant industry, the response to COVID has accelerated trends that had...
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Summer 2022 Highway News Roundup
Google Maps Silliness Minnesota has about a hundred legally named highways and bridges, written into law in Minnesota Statute § 161.14. Some of the early ones like the Viking Trail and the Sioux Trail...
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Let’s (St)roll There — Biking for Blueberries
Welcome to the first of what I hope will be a recurring series of posts from any interested authors. These pieces will document a trip you made anywhere in Minnesota by any means other than a private...
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Vegan? Vegan-Curious? Climate-Conscious? This Bike Event Is for You!
My family and I try to do our part to reduce our carbon footprint. My husband bikes to work, my kids walk to school, and we’ve been a one-car family for years. A few years ago, I took it a step...
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How to Simplify a Complicated Holiday
Thanksgiving for our family is about gratitude. While we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in the traditional sense, we usually still gather with family and cook together. Planning and preparing a meal...
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Grocery Delivery 2023: How Grocer Inflation Compares
In February 2021, I wrote about the grocery wars for a second time, this time about prices for grocery delivery as vaccines were just rolling out to the most vulnerable populations. We were nearing...
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All Minnesota’s Affair
For the 12 days before and including Labor Day, Minnesotans reconvene at the State Fair. It is traditional and embedded in the culture. It matters here, unlike the fairs in other states I have lived...
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Down With Lawns: Community Gardening in the Suburbs
The iconic suburban lawn may be losing popularity. Oh, sure. Restrictive covenants still exist, and the guy who uses his leaf blower to vacuum up the lawn mulch wearing nothing but a Speedo at 9 at...
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2012 Best Farmer’s Market: St. Paul Farmer’s Market
The farmer’s market: Among the oldest forms of direct-to-consumer sales, these truly urban agoras bring the rural to the city, and exist all around the world in some form or another. They bridge the...
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All Minnesota’s Affair
This is a reblog from last year, this time, it is all still true. For the 12 days before and including Labor Day, Minnesotans reconvene at the State Fair. It is traditional and embedded in the culture....
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The Attack of the Hipster Tomatoes: Getting Real With Local Foods
Re-designing our cities to support local food production and healthy living has been a very popular topic of late, happening against a backdrop of grassroots efforts to create networks of growing,...
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Chart of the Day: Le Creuset Pots Owned vs. Meals Cooked
While not technically about land use and transportation, this chart does reflect market demand for cast iron. (Via Very Small Array.) The post Chart of the Day: Le Creuset Pots Owned vs. Meals...
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How A Cherry Tree Can Make a Better Street
One of the best things about my neighborhood is how often something “interesting” happens. Bagpipers practice in a parking lot. Tourists try to use a Nice Ride. A couple carries a full-size dining...
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Al’s Dinkytown Diner Downsizing
Due to an increase in demand, Al’s Breakfast is downsizing to a smaller nearby location. It will move from just north of the Espresso Royale, to the gap just south of that same cafe, adjacent to the...
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The Garden at The Rose Grows More than Food
The Garden at The Rose Let’s grow more food in our neighborhoods. Victory Gardens provided about a third of the vegetables grown in the US during WWII and I appreciate the food I get from my yard. I...
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