Call it recession or climate change, toxic food or the new taste for community – we’re getting ourselves back to the garden. From leafy visions of Don Valley farm fields to floating greenhouses, the urban farm imagination is fertile. Where to park your hoe? Start with your own backyard or balcony and then head for the city’s hidden places and wasted spaces. Grow it up, T.O.
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Call me loopy, but I always do a little jig the day I pluck my first piece of lettuce from the ground, walk 10 paces, then plop it in a salad bowl. I do another dance when my first tomato ripens and those kernels of corn start peering through their long grassy husks.
As pretty as flowers can be, a pot full of petunias won’t connect you to the land like a planter full of rainbow chard, which, sauteed with a little garlic, transforms you into the ultimate land-loving locavore.
As long as you have a patch of outdoor space that gets a good hit of sunlight every day (at least three hours for shade-tolerant veggies like spinach, six for tomatoes, peppers and other full-sun lovers), it doesn’t really matter if you have a sprawling yard or an eensy-weensy balcony. Veggies aren’t biased.
I’ve seen watermelons on a 10th-floor terrace. Here are a few ways to make the most of the space you’ve got as you join the legions of urban farmers minimizing their food miles and maximizing their harvest, eco-style of course. So, which plot will you plant?
Who says vegetable planting has to be a secret backyard affair? It’s obsessively groomed lawns we should be ashamed of. After all, they guzzle on average 100,000 litres of water per growing season. And what do lawns really do for you other than scream, “I’m a relic of the 50s” anyway?
It’s time to give reverence to the radish and a bump to broccoli by weaving that produce into your front yard plot (unless, of course, you face a busy thoroughfare with lots of sooty auto emissions).
Now, that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice aesthetics and grow yawn-inducing (and neighbour inflaming) rows of carrot tops. Veggies can be landscaped, too. The French have been doing so for years with what’s called potager gardens (kitchen gardens that look kind of like English-style plots).
Think of planting raspberry and blueberry bushes where you might otherwise put a hedge. Mix herbs, curly lettuce, tomatoes and your favourite veggies in with pretty indigenous flowers. And so your garden looks ravishing long after harvest season, give it good bones with evergreen bushes, maybe a recycled stone pathway, a trellised fence (great for growing vertically), even a little wooden arbour.
Bottom line, be proud of your peas and show the world what a truly sustainable, locally nourished community could look like.
Yards are so totally overrated (unless you love hours of weeding). Besides, balcony gardeners needn’t fret about dodgy ground soil. (See page 20.) You’ll just need containers, and, really, any old ones will do, from vintage wooden crates to tin buckets with holes punched in the bottom.
Of course, the bigger the pot the deeper the roots can roam and the healthier your plants will be, though I’ve seen veggie gardens take root in everything from plastic garbage bags to old plastic water bottles with drainage holes (though I can’t promise that plastic won’t leach).
What grows in a pot? Well, leafy greens like lettuce and spinach and hardy fall greens like kale. Peppers, eggplant, cukes, green beans – hell, even corn will thrive. And in my opinion tomatoes are actually much tastier in a pot regularly laced with molasses water then planted in the garden.
Try to avoid potting soils containing peat moss, since conserving peat bogs (which store 455 billion tons of CO2 worldwide) is, as the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service says, “as important an issue as saving the rainforests.” Seriously.
The Square Foot Gardening (SFG) technique hit it big right about when Hall & Oats were top of the pops, but it’s still perfect for anyone with space limitations, those with crappy and/or polluted soil (over here!) and limited gardening experience (ahem).
To carry out this intensive gardening method, you build raised wooden beds in a 4-by-4-foot (roughly 1.25 metre) grid, lay down cardboard or a plastic-free landscape cloth as a weed barrier, fill the frame with soil, then plant each square foot (marked off with string) with a different veggie seed, like, say, one big tomato or broccoli plant or 16 onion or carrot seeds (there’s a whole breakdown in Mel Bartholomew’s bible Square Foot Gardening (www.squarefootgardening.com).
You’re supposed to fill your box with 6 inches (15 centimetres) of “Mel’s mix” (one-third compost, one-third vermiculite and one-third peat moss), but stay away from the eco mess that is peat harvesting (see above) and try substituting coconut-based coir fibres instead. You can also replace vermiculite with perlite (a volcanic glass).
Proponents swear these compact, veggie-dense eco-systems translate into less watering, less weeding, less space-wasting and zero added fertilizers. Just ignore dodgy SFG suggestions like building your beds out of vinyl sheeting (unless you want to eat lead).
Dreaming of pitchforks and farm life, are ya? Well, you don’t need to move out of the city to live off your veggie-growing habit. If you’ve got a green thumb the size of a cornfield but nowhere to park your imaginary tractor, check out the wonderful world of SPINning, where the “back 40” is measured in feet, not acres. SPIN stands for Small Plot Intensive Agriculture, and those small plots are basically rented ($100/1,000 square feet) or bartered from anyone in your ‘hood who’s open to you ploughing their land in exchange for fresh organic veggies.
Serious SPIN farmers focus on high-value crops like heirloom beets and heirloom tomatoes that can spin out, oh, a good 20 to 30 weeks of income, but you don’t have to be a full-on farmer to put their ideas into practice. Besides, zoning laws would need changing to market these crops.
So how do you incorporate SPIN into your private patch? Forget waiting for May 2-4 to pull out the spade you can plant cooler crops like arugula, chard, green garlic, spinach and more weeks before the frost lifts.
You’ll also want to fan out your planting so you can produce all summer long. Lettuce can be started mid-April, rotated with scallions (your “relay” crop), then planted again in mid-August.
Max your growing space by converting your front yard, fence, hanging baskets, even rooftops and spare rooms (full of pea and sunflower shoots) to brimming harvest zones. For a full breakdown of the Canadian Prairies-born SPIN doctrine, check out spingardening.com.
Okay, urban hen-raising isn’t quite legal here yet, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do it on the down-low. T.O.’s own chicken lady, aka ” Toronto Chickens,” has been quietly raising a handful of hens in her midtown yard without any fuss from neighbours for two years now.
She’s also been amassing signatures on a petition to have chicken-raising decriminalized in the city, a move Vancouver council made last week, following in the footsteps of a slew of progressive towns across North America.
Really, it’s the single most direct way to get fresh, organic, free-range eggs, and you’ll never have to worry again about your brekkie coming from crowded battery cages. The little cluckers will also help you with your gardening by munching on weeds, grubs and all sorts of pesky insects. Plus, their poop makes excellent compost.
You can build your own chicken coop from online instructions or sink a few hundred dollars into an insulated Eglu complete with a fox-proof run, a free-range door, egg boxes, a removable droppings tray and a chicken-keeping guide (omlet.us). For more info on coops, organic feed, winter care tips and, naturally, the free-the-chickens petition, peck around at torontochickens.com
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Got a bumper crop of potatoes or a mountain of carrots even your neighbours are tired of eating? Don’t hog all those fresh veggies for yourself. Donate them! Better yet, plant ahead and grow a row expressly to share with a local food bank, drop-in meal centre or community food program. All crop donations are welcome but root veggies are easiest to store.
toronto.ca/health/plant_a_row.pdf.
