Urban gardens are valuable assets to communities. They provide green spaces to grow sustainable food, build community cohesion（凝聚力）, make new friends, connect with the earth, and much more. So, let's check out our list of 4 inspiring urban gardens in the US.

Where: New York Chicago

What: Gotham Greens first started in Brooklyn and now has four locations in New York City and Chicago. Their flagship farm in Brooklyn produces over 100, 000 pounds of greens per year. But it doesn't just produce healthy local vegetables. It is using high-tech greenhouses with solar panels to make sure the food grown is healthy and sustainable.

Where: Baltimore, Maryland

What: The Baltimore Urban Gardening with Students （BUGS）program encourages students to get their hands dirty and plant vegetables through their after-school and summer programs. Many of these kids don't have access to green spaces, and have never had the opportunity to grow food.

Where: Boston, Massachusetts

What: ReVision Urban Farm in Boston works in partnership with the ReVision Family Home—a shelter for 22 homeless parents and their kids. The farm provides these families with information on healthy eating, and access to the farm's fresh vegetables. The organization also provides job training to help families escape the cycle of poverty.

Where: New York

What: Swale, a floating food forest located on a large boat, is an innovative project meant to inspire citizens to rethink the relationship between our cities and our food. This urban garden serves as both a living art exhibit and an educational farm. Food forests are sustainable gardens that include vegetables, fruit, nut trees, bushes, herbs, and vines-each one complementing the other in a symbiotic（共生的）relationship.

Like many other five-year-olds, Jeanie Low of Houston, Texas, would use a stool (凳子) to help her reach the bathroom sink. However, the plastic step-stool she had at home was unstable and cluttered up the small bathroom shared by her whole family. After learning of an invention contest held by her school that year, Jeanie resolved to enter the contest by creating a stool that would be a permanent fixture in the bathroom, and yet could be kept out of the way when not in use.

Jeanie decided to make a stool attached to the bathroom cabinet door under the sink. She cut a board of wood into two pieces, each about two feet wide and one foot long. Using metal hinges (铰链) Jeanie attached one piece of the wood to the front of the cabinet door, and the second piece to the first. The first piece was set just high enough so that when it swung out horizontally from the cabinet door, the second piece would swing down from the first, just touching the ground, and so serving as a support for the first piece of the wood. This created a convenient, strong platform for any person too short to reach the sink. When not in use, the hinges allowed the two pieces of wood to fold back up tightly against the cabinet, where they were held in place by magnets. Jeanie called her invention the “Kiddie Stool”.

Jeanie’s Kiddie Stool won first place in her school’s contest. Two years later, it was awarded first prize again at Houston’s first annual Invention Fair. As a result, Jeanie was invited to make a number of public appearances with her Kiddie Stool, and was featured on local TV as well as in newspapers. Many people found the story of the Kiddie Stool inspiring because it showed that with imagination, anyone can be an inventor.

You’ve most likely heard the news by now: A car-commuting, desk-bound, TV-watching lifestyle can be harmful to our health. All the time that we spend rooted in the chair is linked to increased risks of so many deadly diseases that experts have named this modern-day health epidemic the “sitting disease”.

Sitting for too long slows down the body’s metabolism (新陈代谢) and the way enzymes (酶) break down our fat reserves, raising both blood sugar levels and blood pressure. Small amounts of regular activity, even just standing and moving around, throughout the day is enough to bring the increased levels back down. And those small amounts of activity add up — 30 minutes of light activity in two or three-minute bursts can be just as effective as a half-hour block of exercise. But without that activity, blood sugar levels and blood pressure keep creeping up, steadily damaging the inside of the arteries and increasing the risk of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and other serious diseases. In essence, fundamental changes in biology occur if you sit for too long.

But wait, you’re a runner. You needn’t worry about the harm of a sedentary lifestyle because you exercise regularly, right? Well, not so fast. Recent studies show that people spend an average of 64 hours a week sitting, whether or not they exercise 150 minutes a week as recommended by World Health Organization (WHO). Regular exercisers, furthermore, are found to be about 30 percent less active on days when they exercise. Overall, most people simply aren’t exercising or moving around enough to counteract all the harm that can result from sitting nine hours or more a day.

Scared straight out of your chair? Good. The remedy is as simple as standing up and taking activity breaks.