City Farming: A How-to Guide to Growing Crops and Raising Livestock in Urban Spaces

Kari Spencer

• Publisher: 5m Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781912178667
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Horticulture
• Index: Biological Sciences

Farming in cities and small spaces is becoming increasingly popular, but it has its challenges. City Farming addresses the problems the urban farmer might face and turns them into creative solutions. It assists the new grower to gain expert understanding of how to create a production urban farm, as well as helping established farmers to troubleshoot and discover new ways to bring their space into greater harmony and production. From the perspective of a holistic gardener, growing plants and raising livestock are covered as well as integrated approaches, which bring together the whole farming system in a small space to produce high yields with minimal energy and effort.The content is organised by themes of importance to urban farmers – sun and heat, water usage, seasonal production, spatial planning, soil quality and usage, propagation and breeding, pests and diseases, farming under time constraints, sustainability and community initiatives. These are all discussed within the context of urban farming and include common issues and strategies like microclimates in built-up areas, natural and organic approaches, water harvesting, toxic land, roof gardening, converting ornamental gardens to productive edible gardens, municipal regulations, vertical gardening, aquaponics, composting methods, livestock suitability in limited space, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) schemes, permaculture in small spaces, community gardens and trade & barter schemes.Each chapter unfolds a piece the story of The Micro Farm Project that provides an overview of the theme, and then discusses the crop and livestock considerations relating to the theme of the chapter in the form of the challenges they present and practical solutions to the problems such as lack of space, high population density, poor soil quality, planning restrictions etc. Case studies giving examples of different methods used within urban farming from different regions throughout the world are included.City Farming is a beautifully illustrated source that can be valuable to both beginners and more experienced urban farmers.

Chapter 1
Easy Peas–Y!

Creating Real Convenience and True Abundance

Making a getaway in the minivan, I nibbled uneasily at my hamburger and considered that things had not gone exactly as planned at the convenience store. The day had started as usual, haphazardly, three small nightgowns strewn on the floor in exchange for jeans and boots, quick gathering of milking supplies and out the door to the farm. We had slept late, relishing the last few days of winter break, and the animals were annoyed, impatiently awaiting their breakfast. I knew the neighbors would be annoyed, too. I prodded the girls to hurry up with the feed to halt the hungry complaints, the cacophony of clucking, bleating, gobbling and periodic clanging as Oliver the ram expressed his displeasure at our tardiness by colliding with the metal fence head-on.

The girls scattered to their tasks as I settled into ritualized goat milking, my mind free to wander as the creamy liquid whooshed rhythmically into a pail. Gazing on the makeshift pens scattered slapdash across our small property, I recognized that we had all of the symptoms of urban farming fever. We were collecting animals with something akin to the fervor of Noah, not to save ourselves from impending doom, but from a slow death at the hands of the conventional food system.

There had been simpler times when the yard had just been a patch of dirt, back when I was blissfully unaware, happily living on convenience foods and congratulating myself on how cheaply I was able to feed our family of six on a narrow budget. Life was comfortable, but change was brewing. Between 2006 and 2010, our oldest daughter went away to attend university and my husband was deployed twice by the United States Navy Reserve. I was left alone with three young children and a serious need for diversion from the lonely stretches of time that stagnated like mud in a dry river bed.

The idea began to grow in my mind to transform our dirt backyard into a garden. This budding desire was based on nostalgic remembrances of my grandfather’s garden and how much I had loved searching out ripened peas, pulling carrot tops to reveal a bouquet of sweetly crisp roots, or slyly plucking raspberries to savor in solitude. I broke ground with the hope of ushering the simple joy of my childhood memories into our present reality.

And so, what would eventually become our farm began with a spontaneous hobby garden, intended purely for pleasure. But as I rubbed shoulders with other growers and farmers, my eyes were opened to a whole world of troubling facts that I couldn’t ignore.

I began to recognize that the conventional food system was not focused, as I was, on the joy of growing superior, delicious food, but almost exclusively on increasing efficiency. The concept of efficiency had never held for me a negative connotation; that is, until I connected it with food production and discovered that the goal of this efficiency was not to create tastier, healthier foods, but with a dual aim to lower consumer costs and maximize overall production. In other words, cheap, abundant food was paramount, generally at the expense of flavor, nutrition and any hint of artfulness.

I remember the day when I gazed at a stack of tomatoes on the store shelf, every one of them perfectly plump and uniformly red. It was suddenly obvious to me that they had been selected for shelf-life and appearance rather than flavor. Estimating that the tomatoes had been picked weeks ago, I wondered how much nutrition had been lost in transport. It dawned on me that the reason the tomatoes at the grocery store did not taste as good as those that were home-grown in my garden was not a fluke or a product of any superior tomato growing skills that I might possess, but the reality that the tomatoes in the store had been cultivated for durability, picked early and ripened in transport. This was a far cry from the tomatoes ripened to maturity on the vine in my garden, selected for flavor and unique coloration, an array of yellows, oranges, reds and purples.

Now that my eyes had been opened, I saw the consequences of society’s collective drive for efficiency everywhere in the market, from vegetables to meats and prepack-aged foods. My intentions for our farm now became twofold: to escape the trappings of the industrialized food system and to embrace the ideal of a natural, artful and simple farm life. Simplicity, however, does not always equate with ease. The rewards of farm life are reaped with the hard work of consistency, planning and the ability to stick to a course of action.

I jumped into urban farming full throttle, as yet unaware that I was overestimating my ability to focus on a course of action, and that I was ignoring basic facts about my personality. Looking back, I am sure that I had romanticized the farm life in my imagination, deluding myself into believing that I could settle easily into the routines, contentedly passing the days in overalls, without interruption, fully focused, living the life pastoral.

Having studied myself over a number of years, I have discovered that consistency is not my strong suit. I think that if my biography was written as a poem, it would be a collection of haikus – each precise, poignant and brief. I can do anything excellently and with great motivation … once. Sometimes my enthusiasm lingers for weeks, even months. But the prospect of doing much of anything over and over again in perpetuity is unfathomable to me. That is, of course, unless I see a clear and powerful reason for it, as in the case of brushing my teeth or going to work, which are rarely ever compromised, even on the most distracting or stressful of days.

And so, I had a sense that I should grow as much food as possible, and what I couldn’t grow myself, I should purchase from organic sources. But these ambitious should(s) did not yet rise to the level of no compromise. I would describe my behavior at the time as desiring to grow and eat healthy foods. Yet, if the day was stressful or other things came up, I was quick to order a pizza. In hindsight, my intentions had been based on academic knowledge of the shortcomings in our food system, and a rueful sense that I should do something to change it. But lacking any urgency or emotional punch, neither of these motivations was compelling enough to overcome my distracted nature, nor to forestall the events that were about to unfold before me that day at the convenience store.

My mind returned to the tasks at hand. Hurriedly washing the milk bucket at the kitchen sink, I checked the time on the oven clock and called for the girls to finish up and pile into the van. Sleeping in had given us a late start, and we were short on time to make it to the junior sheep judging contest at the National Livestock Show. I wanted to check out the sheep breeds and hoped to spark a desire in my kids to join 4-H. We needed gasoline and a quick bite to eat on the way, and I hadn’t budgeted any time for either.

Against my better judgement, I pulled into the convenience store and parked at a pump near the door that gave me a bird’s eye view of the shop’s interior. Handing my twelve-year-old a twenty-dollar bill, I sent the girls inside with instructions for each to get a hot dog or a burger, a bag of chips and a drink. I pumped the gas, watching them as they milled around the store, looking at all of the choices on the shelves. I had hoped that they would have completed their purchases before I finished with the gas, but had no such luck.

I pulled the van into a parking spot and entered the store to round up the kids. In the face of so many choices and limited funds, they were having trouble deciding who would share with whom so that they could each get a full meal and have money left over for sweets. The negotiations started with two requesting to share a hotdog and chips in hopes of also getting ice cream and another pleading to upgrade to a shaved ice instead of a soda. I foolishly granted permission, at which time the debate turned to which brand of chips the two would share, and how it wasn’t fair that the other got a shaved ice when they did not. Walking away from the squabble, I perused the aisles in search of something for myself. Grabbing a foil-wrapped burger from under the heat lamp, I called for the girls and shuttled them to the counter. Resignedly adding another five-dollar bill to the twenty that I had given the kids, we quickly gathered our purchases and jumped into the van.

Unwrapping my burger with one hand and steering into traffic with the other, I left the unfortunate scene behind, wondering how much sticky, melted ice cream, grease and brightly pigmented liquids were being smeared around the back of my van. Good grief, how would the dirtied upholstery smell in a couple of days? The thought grew even more disturbing as I considered that these disgusting items were going into my children’s bodies; that I was feeding them something that was not quite food and likely somewhat toxic. Furthermore, I had wasted twenty precious minutes and paid $25 for the privilege.

Righteous anger rose up inside of me, and regret. My stomach twisted as I thought of the purple lettuce waiting in the garden to be picked, but ignored. How easy it would have been to pack salads for the road. Had we made sandwiches, even with pricey organic bread and cheese, it would have cost less, tasted better and certainly been more nutritious than what we just ingested. Instead, those healthy items languished at home while we squandered our time, money and health on convenience foods.

What on earth was convenient about that? My hands gripped the wheel as tightly as my mind gripped on to resolve. I was angry. I had been tricked, not just today at the convenience store, but over and over again. Somewhere along the way, I had allowed so-called convenience foods to be elevated from occasional options to be used in a pinch to the predominant food source for our family. From restaurant meals to frozen entrees and prepackaged goods, images of my culinary habits rose up and swirled like a cyclone in my mind. How many minutes had I spent waiting in drive-through lines longer than it would have taken to put a fresh meal together at home? How many times had I run to the store for an onion when I could have planted hundreds of them in just a few hours? How often had I paid four or five dollars for an ounce of fresh herbs when I could have grown rows and rows of them in my yard for less money? How many hours had I spent wheeling up and down the aisles for canned vegetables and frozen fruits when I could have preserved home-grown produce in my own kitchen in a day and have it at my disposal all year long?

I suppose that the combination of marketing and my own fly-by-night lifestyle had made me a willing dupe for the industrial food system in spite of the superior food that was being produced in my own backyard. I couldn’t change the system, but I could change my response to it. No longer viewing it as a friend, I had an urgency to not only grow food, but to grow the most food and the best food possible.

And then, as obvious as it might sound, to actually eat that food and not let any of it go to waste.

Knowing my own shortcomings and the potential for me to lose focus in my gardening efforts, I had to figure out how to make home-grown foods as convenient as possible – more convenient than convenience foods – so convenient that it would be a hassle not to eat from our own food stores.

1.1

Over the years, I have grown more proficient at using the harvest to its full potential. And I am moving closer to becoming a Growitarian. Figure 1.1 describes the Growitarian style of eating that I am striving to adopt. The process starts before the first seed is sown, with planning and a good bit of dreaming about what will soon become a reality in my garden. During the planning stage, I decide what to grow and how much. Then I calculate when those items should be coming into their peak of ripeness and formulate a plan of attack to use every bit of the produce.

This chapter will focus on the planning, dreaming and preparation that will create extreme abundance and simple convenience on our pantry shelves. It will help us to develop a clear plan for how we will use the harvest when it arrives, so that none of it may go to waste. Though the rest of this book will highlight techniques to make growing food as easy and successful as possible, this chapter skips ahead to ensure that we will make use of the incredible harvest as it ensues.

Why Grow and Raise Food?

When I have taught this topic in live classes, I have always saved it for the last week of instruction. But as I thought about the logical layout of this book, it occurred to me that this information ought to come first. One of the most discouragin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• How To Use This Book
• Preface
• 1 EASY PEAS-Y! Creating Real Convenience and True Abundance
• 2 SUNNY SIDE UP! Optimizing Sunlight and Temperature On Your Farm
• 3 SOAK IT UP! Watering to Promote Vigorous Plants, Healthy Animals and a Flourishing Environment
• 4 A TIME FOR EVERYTHING Gardening Through the Changing Seasons
• 5 MAKE ROOM FOR ABUNDANCE Utilizing Urban Spaces Efficiently to Grow and Do More
• 6 SOIL The Gardener’s Most Valuable Resource, Right Under Our Feet
• 7 IN WITH THE NEW Propagating Plants and Breeding Livestock
• 8 TWO STEPS BACK How to Overcome Setbacks from Pests, Diseases and Toxic Chemicals
• 9 TAKING THE LONG VIEW Going Beyond Sustainability on the Farm
• 10 THE TIES THAT BIND Growing Community While You Grow Your Farm
• 11 WE END AT THE BEGINNING
• Afterword
• References
• Index