I’m taking awhile to get through my next official “Book List” book because I’ve taken some time this month to read Mel Bartholomew’s All New Square Foot Gardening and also Mary Apelhof’s Worms Eat my Garbage. You can read a bit more about our adventures in urban vermicomposting over on the kids blog but the short version is that we keep a big bin of worms in our house and feed them all our compostable kitchen scraps. We did this more or less successfully a couple of years ago but we never had a garden that could benefit from the castings. This year: we have big plans.
Last spring my husband was the big garden enthusiast in in the family. I think I was still in the post-partum fog which was severely compounded by buying a house and moving. I was still in survival mode while Eric sang rapturous odes to home-grown lettuce. I was okay with the home grown lettuce idea, in theory. One of the happiest periods of our courtship was the summer Eric house sat at a place with a huge garden and we went and picked a big salad for ourselves each evening. But I didn’t want to be the one actually growing the lettuce. Eric gamely threw together a planter box, scattered seed much too late, scratched his head when shoots would come up and then disappear, found the slugs that were munching our crop, and then hand picked the slugs from our lettuce each night and killed them. After the Slug Danger Window had passed we enjoyed delicious lettuce for the rest of the summer though we all wished there had been more. A lot more. We managed to successfully grow basil, parsley and mint as well although there was not nearly enough basil for our purposes.
So with that amazing early gardening experience under our belt, we ordered the All New Square Foot Gardening on the advice of several friends. When it came in the mail I surprised myself by having an inordinate amount of enthusiasm for the project. I can’t recommend the book or the method until the fall (I hope) but after I had sketched our plans for a 47-square foot garden I called our tenants (and friends) who live upstairs from us and asked that we consult out on the back patio to divvy up the garden space. My neighbor really just wants to get a few tomato and green bean plants in pots so it was a simple matter to show her where she could put those. But she chatted with me for awhile as I outlined my ambitions and wondered aloud why we don’t move out to the country since so many of our interests in sustainable living and quality food seem, to her, incompatible with city living.
There are, I think, many, many reasons why living in the city is better for the planet but let’s just talk about food for now. It stands to reason that city dwellers would have just as much desire for good, responsibly raised food as people who live elsewhere and, from what I’ve seen, getting that food is actually a little easier in the city.
For one thing, while it is true that urbanites don’t usually have big yards, we are often less attached to the yards we do have. When we were house hunting we assumed we would have no yard. You don’t choose a dense urban neighborhood for the wide green lawns. The two are completely incompatible. So, any outdoor space we have is a complete bonus as far as we’re concerned. We ended up with a 100% concrete patio that is about 400 sq. feet. Almost 25% of that space is now consumed by a wheelchair ramp. It’s not like the space is huge “run around outside” area for my kids. It’s more like an outdoor room. Putting vegetables and plants out there will only make it a nicer outdoor room. Though, that said, my 47-square foot garden isn’t going to take up a lot of that space in part because . . .
City dwellers can garden on their roofs. The bigger your building, the more likely it is that you’ll have a flat roof. Only a section of our 2.5-story house is flat and we aren’t gardening up there–at least not this year. But we are gardening on the flat roof of the storage shed that sits in one corner of our tiny patio. And the rest of the garden is going to get tucked into spots that aren’t all that useful for other purposes. City dwellers who have small living spaces inside are accustomed to making the most of every square inch on the outside as well.
But, what if you really, really don’t have any outdoor space? The density in a city allows for co-ops to flourish. You do need a critical mass of people who want the same kind of food and, frankly, we don’t have that where we live now. But when we lived in Washington, D.C. we helped start three different neighborhood co-ops and eventually were purchasing about 90% of our food on that model. It just made sense for a small farmer to partner with us and send a truckload of stuff where there was a high concentration of customers all within walking distance of each other.
My one disappointment with our current situation is that we can’t have chickens. It’s actually allowed, at least unofficially, where we live now and we had neighbors who did it when we first moved to this neighborhood. But that 100% concrete yard isn’t going to get me good eggs. I can buy eggs at the grocery store from chickens raised on concrete and not have the hassle of getting a chicken sitter when we go on vacation.
But, livestock aside, urban living has not meant sacrifices for us when it comes to obtaining quality food.
Yay for urban gardening! And yay for DC co-ops!
Last year, Denver changing their zoning to allow 6 hens and 2 goats without a permit- most exciting for me (even more exciting once we actually find a job there). Have you guys thought about bees?
We have thought about bees. We need to do a little more research but we’re considering a hive on our roof. They’re probably the best “animal” for us to keep since I gather they are fairly low maintenance except for harvest time. We’re going to stick with just the garden this year and then expand incrementally. Our typical pattern is to bite off more than we can chew, fail miserably, and give up in despair. So we’re trying to fight that.
Yay Denver! I would really think hard about chickens if we had any grass at all. Our last, horrible rental did have that going for it.
We did move out to the country (kind of, wooded suburbia at least with a yard bordering parkland), but your situation reminds me of how European cities offer “allotments” for citizens wanting to grow their own food. I loved this story told in an old Russel Kirk lecture “Roepke told me once, apropos such alternative means of subsistence in industrial society, of an amusing exchange between himself and Ludwig von Mises – who, though agreeing with Roepke in a good many matters, was a disciple of Jeremy Bentham in his utilitarianism. During the Second World War, the city of Geneva had made available to its citizens plots of ground along the ring around the city where the ancient walls had stood. On these allotments, in time of scarcity of food, the people of Geneva, particularly the laboring folk, could cultivate vegetables for themselves. These allotments turned out to be so popular, both as recreation and as a source of supplementary food, that the city continued to make this land available to applicants after the war was over.
Now Mises, who had been professor years before at the Geneva Institute of International Affairs, came to visit Roepke in Geneva, about 1947. Happy at the success of these garden allotments, Roepke took his guest to see Genevan working people digging and hoeing in their gardens. But Mises shook his head sadly: “A very inefficient way of producing foodstuffs!” he lamented. “Perhaps so,” Roepke replied. “But perhaps a very efficient way of producing human happiness.” ” http://www.imaginativeconservative.org/2012/01/humane-economy-of-wilhelm-roepke.html
I love that. Efficiency is not always the highest good. Though I would argue (not against you, just in general) that cities are, themselves, efficient, and can support farmers more successfully than more diffuse populations. In Washington our one neighborhood co-op completely supported one farmer so rather than him having to waste time schlepping his goods from market to market and potentially losing money to middlemen he just loaded up a truck each week for us.
Lacking that in our current situation, I am hopeful that my homegrown broccoli will provide me with a little extra human happiness this summer.