02371 How to grow some of your food in the city

Fertility

All food growing is rooted (literally) in fertility. That’s why the discussion of making compost came before this discussion of growing food. First things first! Before you can garden, you must acquire fertility to grow the vegetables.

There is no such thing as a free carrot. Nor a free tomato, cabbage, or turnip. Beautiful plants yielding bountiful harvests do so because they grow in abundant fertility and have their other needs met. Your goal in designing a growing food system is something that works for your own unique and particular situation. Begin with fertility and that means compost. This helps take care of another problem, food scraps and lawn trimmings/waste (if you have a lawn) and dead leaves (if you have one or more trees). This is true whether you garden in the ground, on concrete, or in a container.

Water

The second necessity for growing food is water. Water issues are as dominant as fertility in developing your growing food lifestyle plan. How much rain does your area receive? You need a minimum of 10 years of monthly climate records that show the minimum and maximum temperatures for each month and the amount and type of precipitation. Going back further is better. Indeed, you should be able to find some kind of a 100-year rain and drought record if you dig around at the climate and weather departments of your state colleges. How long is the longest dry period? The amount and sources of water you have available will determine the place and form of your growing food plans.

Place

Gardening is a territorial thing. It happens in real space.

Outside, the space may be the ground — a prepared garden bed. Or it can be a series of containers on pavement.

Any surface that gets six hours or so of sun every day can become a garden. You can grow all of the common garden vegetables in six to eight inches of potting soil and six hours of light. With a little preparation, concrete is a great place to grow vegetables.

Inside, the space is any container that holds fertility and the area that container occupies. Or “containers,” as the case may be.

How much place do you need? If you are new to gardening, it is always best to start small. We start small, or we don’t start at all. By small I mean as small as nine or sixteen square feet. Nine square feet fits into a 3' x 3' miniature garden bed. Sixteen square feet is a 4' x 4 bed.

For an indoor, sidewalk, or balcony garden, you could think about nine pots to get you started.

Master the concepts with a small patch. Learn the skills. Do well with your first attempt and you will come back for more and better next year. Each year add something and over time, you create a bountiful and productive growing system that is appropriate to the place where you live and the scope of your lifestyle.

You may only have room for one 9-feet square patch. That’s fine. You can grow an amazing amount of veggies in only nine square feet. Do what you can, with what you have, where you are, and always be on the lookout for ways to do better.

Where should this be? In a city, your choices may be limited. You don't want your garden in an out-of-the-way place where you never go. The ideal place is just outside of the door to your house that is closest to your kitchen. It should be a place where you regularly go anyway. That way you will not ignore your garden but will be engaged by it because you will walk through it several times a day going and coming from your dwelling.

If you live in a building with no land for gardening, besides the usual container garden windows and balconies and sidewalks, you could look for a place in a community garden. The best location for the community garden would be somewhere along a route that you already travel most days. Give bonus points for the design if the community garden is within easy walking distance of your dwelling.

Form

A place for gardening has form.

For outside gardening, I recommend the Square Foot Gardening method. This is raised bed gardening, which means that the form of the garden is a bed of growing soil raised six to eight inches above the surrounding level. Raised beds warm up faster in the spring and drain better after rains. They can be built on top of poor soil and the soil doesn’t get compacted.

Generally, SFG uses forms that are 4 ft on each side. They could be 3 feet by 3 feet, or 2 feet by 2 feet, or 2 feet by 8 feet, or any size that fits whatever room you got. There is no law that says that it has to be a square form. It could be round, a triangle, or a long rectangle, whatever fits the place and the gardener’s purposes.

For balcony, indoor, patio, sidewalk, and driveway gardens, the form of a Square Foot Garden could be a series of pots. Look for pots that are about one foot in diameter to match the Square Foot Garden plant spacing information. You could use larger tubs or make growing boxes out of untreated plywood coated with vegetable oil. Put the larger containers on wheels or casters so they can be moved around. Square containers have the advantage of fitting together without any wasted space. Make something similar to the compost box described in the previous chapter on Composting, except it only needs to be eight inches deep, and should be in multiples of 12 inches long and wide in order to accommodate the spacing guidelines of the Square Foot Gardening movement. You could make a 3' x 3' or 4' x 4' plywood box and put it on concrete.

However, here is an important caveat about raised bed gardens. They are appropriate as long as the climate is such that rain is reasonably plentiful. Arid areas with limited rainfall, or during times of drought in other areas may require a different form for the garden, if you garden in the ground.

If you garden on concrete or some other form of container gardening, your form is the same whether you are in dry lands or more temperate climates..

The indigenous peoples of arid dryland areas almost always grew their food in various kinds of pit gardens — the reverse of the raised bed garden. The purpose of a pit garden is to conserve water. If there isn’t much rain, soggy garden areas will not be a big worry. The greater concern is to have enough water to grow anything in the first place.

Gardening is always, in every situation, without any exception, site-specific. In permaculture, context is everything!

If you grow outdoors, you survey your situation, observe your climate, and develop your garden forms appropriately. If you are a dryland gardener in an arid area, go with one of the variations of pit gardening. You can do a pit garden just like a raised bed garden except that first you have to excavate the pit and then you add the fertile soil mixture as described in the Square Foot Gardening info.

You use the excavated soil to build berms to help contain and harvest rainwater and direct it to where you want to go so you hang onto as much of it as possible when it does rain.

When growing indoors (or on a balcony, sidewalk, patio, or driveway) . . . you can grow in any container that will hold soil and has some holes in the bottom for drainage. You can use commercial growing containers or you can just adapt other items you may have around, such as buckets, bottles, sinks, whatever you got.

Vertical gardening is an important urban growing option. It increase yields of small spaces. Your goal here is to create a place for gardening that occupies space vertically. So think of things that will hold potting soil but that can also be hung or somehow fixed to something in a vertical position.

While I am not fond of plastic, there is a lot of it around. You could repurpose a 2 liter soda bottle as a garden container. Cut off the bottom and make some holes in the lid for drainage. Nail them to a fence. If you do use plastic, use the food safe plastics — the ones labeled 1 (PET, clear soda bottles), 2 (HDPE, opaque tubs, milk jugs), 4 (LDPE grocery bags and squeeze bottles), and 5 (polypropylene, white wide mouth containers like yogurt cups). Avoid all of the rest, including PVC pipe which periodically shows up as a material on online do-it-yourself garden projects. An alternative to plastic for urban gardening are cans of various sizes. You could nail gallon-size (#10) cans to a fence post, poke holes in the bottom for drainage, fill with potting soil, and plant greens.

People place rows of gutters along fences, fill them with potting soil, and grow lettuces, flowers, herbs, any kind of shallow-rooted items.

You can build a growing column of chicken wire and cardboard that will give you 12 square feet of growing space that occupies only 2.25 square feet. You can garden your windows using traditional containers or you can do a window garden that uses vertical growing techniques.

There are lots of imaginative ideas floating around out there amongst urban gardeners.

Here are some ideas for vertical gardens:

• http://www.instructables.com/id/Vertical-Garden-1/
• http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/vertical-gardening-zm0z10zhun.aspx
• http://lifeonthebalcony.com/how-to-turn-a-pallet-into-a-garden/
• http://www.instructables.com/id/VERTICAL-VEGETABLES-quotGrow-upquot-in-a-smal/

Sprouting and micro-greens qualify as indoor gardening too.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. Creativity is always helpful. As you develop more “permaculture eyes,” you will begin to see design opportunities in places you had never actually noticed before. What’s happening is that as you pack your brain with the concepts and knowledge of permaculture, and begin to develop skills by doing small design projects, you brain learns new ways to process information. At levels below conscious thought, design may happen. It’s not a fast process. It is certain to happen if you work at learning the concepts by practicing them with real life design challenges.

Soil

The form of your garden contains soil. There is an infinite amount of wisdom that can be written and taught about soil. One of the most important things to notice is that entropy will always attempt to dissipate your soil with distressing regularity. This is erosion and the moment one even thinks about “plowing” or “tilling,” erosion begins. One of the more important truths about urban agriculture is Do Not Till.

All tilling damages your soil. It mixes up soil layers. It hurts the micro flora and fauna that live in the soil and chops earthworms into pieces. That kills the worms. Each piece does not grow into a new worm.

Take care of your soil. Don’t till. Design your outdoor garden space to contain and direct water flows so they gently infiltrate and don’t erode. Slow it down and spread it out are the primary design principles when it comes to managing rainwater runoff and your soil.

In the beginning. . . remove the turf (if there is grass) and build your soil up from there, using mulch and materials as suggested in the Square Foot Garden method.

Potting Soil for Containers

Container gardens require a lighter soil mixture than common garden soil. Ordinary garden soil, by itself, not amended with anything, will compact in a container and will not keep a proper balance between moisture and air. Commercial potting soils are a relatively recent development. Historically, gardeners made their own potting mixes.

The problem with buying potting mixes is that they are nearly always made with exotic ingredients — vermiculite, perlite, and peat moss in particular.

Peat moss is not a sustainable material. Local and more sustainable substitutes are leaf mold, rotted sawdust, and compost. Leaf mold is simply leaves that have begun to compost. Dig under a pile of leaves and you will find some. Make a special compost pile or bucket that consists of nothing put shredded leaves. Keep it moist and mix it every week. Your plants will love you.

Vermiculite is industrially mined from a single source in South Carolina. Unless you live in South Carolina, it’s imported. Mining it is an industrial activity. Not much sustainability here.

Perlite comes from the U.S. Southwest. Its job is to lighten the mix and promote drainage. It comes to us courtesy of industrial processes.

Ordinary builder’s sand works just as well as vermiculite and perlite. This is a more coarse sand, the kind that people mix with cement to make concrete. Avoid fine sands.

To make your own potting mix, take some ordinary fertile garden soil and mix it with compost and rotted leaf mold with a light dusting of wood ashes for your container plants. If the soil is high in clay content, add sand to lighten the mixture. Natural fertilizers like blood meal can be added to boost fertility. See the ATTRA document included with this iPermie on potting mix for much greater detail on this subject.

A typical homemade potting soil mixture would be:

• 1/3 garden soil
• 1/3 sand
• 1/3 compost and leaf mold

Another recipe:

• 1 part builders’ sand
• 2 parts garden soil
• 1 part leaf mold or compost
• 1/2 part dried cow manure
• 1 5-inch flower pot full of bone meal to each bushel of the mixture (a bushel equals about 1.25 cubic feet)

Mother Earth News Recipe

• 1 part garden soil
• 1 part compost

Leaf mold is simply compost made with only leaves. Because dead leaves are all carbon, this can take as long as a year. You can speed the process by shredding the leaves finely. One way to do this is to run a lawnmower over a pile of leaves a few times. Or put the leaves in a garbage can and insert a weed whacker/trimmer and run that a few times. They can be left in a pile on the ground in a shady spot if you have a yard, or placed in a container for indoor composting. To speed the process along, stir the leaves, mixing them well, every week. Unlike regular compost, which boosts fertility, leaf mold, composed of only one item — leaves — is primarily a soil conditioner, which is its contribution to potting mix. It supports water retention and provides habitat for beneficial soil micro flora and fauna.

More information on making your own potting soil can be found at

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Organic-Gardening/How-To-Make-Your-Own-Potting-Soil.aspx

Seeds

Fertility, water, place and form bring us to seeds. Permaculture favors use of open pollinated heritage varieties of plants. “Open pollinated” means that their seed breeds true. If you save seed from the plant, you will get a plant just like the parent in the succeeding generations, barring the occasional random mutation. “Heritage” means that it is an older species, developed in day of yore when taste was important.

However . . . It is not evil to grow a hybrid plant. Hybridization is a natural method of developing new varieties of plants. Seed companies offer many hybrid varieties. They won’t breed true. You will need to buy new seed each year. If you want to save seed, as part of your growing food lifestyle plan, go with the heritage open pollinated varieties. If don’t mind buying seed every year, hybrid will be fine. If possible, buy your seed from a local business. If this isn’t possible, look for independently owned sources online. Start with places like —

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange http://www.southernexposure.com/

Seed Savers Exchange http://www.seedsavers.org/

Fedco Cooperative http://www.fedcoseeds.com/

Vegetable varieties can be found that are appropriate for various kinds of climates, soils, and the length of your growing season. Some varieties have a natural resistance to plant diseases and some insects. For container gardeners, finding seeds for plants that grow well in smaller areas will be useful.

Light.

The rule of thumb is six hours of full sunlight for food production. Like any rule of thumb, that is a general statement and there is a fudge factor. There are varieties of food producing plants that do better in shade or partial shade. If you live in a particularly hot area, during parts of your summers your plants may prefer dappled shade to full sun. You will learn this by observation and discussion with other gardeners in your area.

Indoor growers can supplement natural light with indoor lighting. The light that plants need is not the light that we get from our standard incandescent and florescent bulbs. You need “grow lights,” which give light in the right colors for growing plants. They are readily available in stores and on the internet, in a number of different forms, including the super-efficient LED lights. When supplementing with artificial light, use mirrors and reflective foil to direct light onto the plants.

The pioneers of indoor growing under lights are the marijuana growers. Law enforcement authorities have found entire houses converted into indoor greenhouses growing hundreds and even thousands of plants. More small scale operations dedicate one room or even a single closet for the purpose of growing marijuana. I'm not recommending marijuana cultivation, only to note that what works for pot works just as easily for tomatoes, salad greens, herbs, and cabbages.

Putting it all together.

There’s a lot to think about when it comes to growing some of your own food. It's true of the whole permaculture project. That’s why we do this one little item at a time while always keeping our eyes on the big picture. We learn design by doing design. At every point we ask questions like —

1. How many beneficial functions can be stacked into this element, activity, or functions?
2. How many functions can support a particular need or function or element?
3. How many beneficial connections can we make, so that the wastes of elements are food/energy for other elements, always keeping in mind the model of the forest or prairie that works without a gardener or farmer?
4. Can we do this with no energy? Can we do this with less energy?
5. Does this reduce or increase work? If it increases work, why do it? Is the work an investment to set something up?

Growing Food Notes

The Square Foot Gardening Method is one of the best choices for gardeners in urban areas with restricted areas outdoors for growing food. It is truly an easy and less work method. Remember the caveats at the beginning about discerning whether you should use a raised bed or a pit bed format. The form does not have to be square, it can be adapted to any shape.

For more information, see The Ten Basics of Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew, at http://www.squarefootgardening.org/whatissfg#!__get-started/vstc61=page-1/vstc30=10-basics