urban gardening
Here’s a link that a friend pointed me to today: Path to Freedom: The Urban Homestead. The site details the steps taken by a household in Pasadena, California, to turn their suburban yard into an almost-self-sufficient growing space. Their site has all sorts of articles and tips on how to get started.
Their objective is to live as sustainably and self-sufficiently as possible in an urban environment in harmony with nature and each other, while also inspiring others to “think globally, act locally.” Their homestead supports four adults, who live and work full time on a 66’ x 132’ city lot (1/5 acre). The yard has over 350 varieties of edible and useful plants. The homestead’s productive 1/10 acre organic garden now grows over 6,000 pounds (3 tons) of produce annually.
I’d really like to start doing something like this, but not just individually. I want to learn how to do it myself, and how to spread it far and wide as a movement. I think we really need a self-sufficiency movement within our cities in order to prevent environmental catastrophe, become independent from fossil fuels, and become politically independent on a local scale in order to accomplish those tasks.
Ride hard, ride free
December 13th, 2007 at 22:06 pm
I don’t know if this would be classified as ‘urban gardening’ or not, but we thought for our wedding, we would give out baby trees to all of our guests for them to plant. Obviously this will represent our love growing and lasting forever… but it will also be good for the environment in the future. I think from where i’m from, trees are being cut down left and right… we need those to breathe… so it would be nice to start planting as much as you can. I figure, you give a gift to the guest anyways, why not have a little bit more meaning then a piece of cake they’ll eat once… or mints they’ll toss out of their purse when they get home… i don’t know really. We were just thinking of the idea. I wonder i should research to see if anyone has done this before. I’m sure there has, it seems like a good idea. I would just hope everyone would plant the tree. Does anyone have any suggestions?
December 18th, 2007 at 05:15 am
One way to get going in a cooperative yet informal manner is to get together a small group of folks who want to garden this year and then swap work, seeds, tools, etc. We did that back in Michigan once, just six women (two couples and a set of roommates), going to each of our yards in turn in the spring to do the heavy digging and early prep work as a group and then sharing tools, seeds, seedlings, labor etc. all season long. Having that help early in the season helps to get you over the hardest hump. And then, as the season progresses, you learn not only from your own gardening experiments but from those going on in the other gardens you’re helping to maintain. It helps if at least one participant has some gardening experience but you could also share a reference book.