City Farmer

Adventures in Urban Food Growing

Lorraine Johnson

• Verlag: Greystone Books
• Jahr: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781553656289
• Thema: Ciencias biológicas
• Thema: Horticultura

City Farmer celebrates the new ways that urban dwellers across North America are reimagining cities as places of food production. From homeowners planting their front yards with vegetables to guerilla gardeners scattering seeds in neglected urban corners, gardening guru Lorraine Johnson chronicles the increasing popularity of innovative urban food growing.

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SOWING THE CITY,
REAPING THE BENEFITS

AS A YOUNG child growing up in the small southwestern Ontario city of Galt, I wanted to hide my family’s vegetable garden, pretend it didn’t exist, erase it from the neighborhood. I felt embarrassed by our rows of beans, peas, tomatoes, and strawberries. They were like a banner announcing our less-than-robust financial circumstances to the community. Everyone else seemed to be straining for the upmarket trappings of consumer culture— buying glamorous cars like convertibles while we made do with a Rambler station wagon; eating exotic fare like avocadoes while we had pigs’ tails for dinner. And growing food was a decidedly down-market thing to do. Our garden signaled need, just one more item in the long list of evidence that my family did not fit in. It didn’t help that, one year, during a period of compost experimentation, my father buried food waste directly in the soil between the rows. After a particularly heavy rain, egg shells started poking up through the dirt. Yet another advertisement for our oddness.

I remember the precise moment when my feelings about the garden began to change from embarrassment to engagement. It was after a summer dinner, when I was six. For dessert we’d had watermelon and I’d hoarded the seeds. After dinner, I sprang up from the table with the stash in my hand and a vision in my head: I was going to plant those pips. I was going to have my own little garden, tucked under the shrubs by the side of the house.

I don’t know how long it took for me to realize that nothing was going to come of my plantation, that shade equals watermelon failure, that late summer is not the time to seed an annual crop in southern Ontario. But I can still summon the yearning stretch of my dreamy plan, the way it fired me up with hope for a future that included a small corner of my own tending.

I AM GLAD that I learned early on about the rhythms of food production and connection with the soil. I see so much of my adult self nascent in my childhood excitement and yearning for seasonal progression. Shelling fresh peas was an event I longed for. Hulling strawberries was a labor that made me happy. Cutting beans for the pot felt good. And eating my father’s homegrown tomatoes was best of all: summer meals involved jostling with my younger sisters to be first in line for the big spoonful of seeds my father separated out from the slices. He salted the slices just right, and we couldn’t wait to eat the seedy slurry that he found hard to digest.

I wonder what it’s like to grow up without growing things, without connecting your food to a particular time and place and to your own labor. Perhaps because my family had that tradition, motivated by frugality, I carried it with me into adulthood through a series of apartments and houses. However unlikely the circumstances, I always managed to make room where I lived for even just a few pots of edible plants. Roommates cast dubious glances at the buckets of basil sunning on the roof and were otherwise engaged when it came time for the dangerous and daily acrobatics of rooftop watering. But they lined up when it came time for pesto suppers. I also lugged deep plastic trays (okay, I confess, they were unused cat litter trays) to balcony corners and planted them with radishes. One year, I “borrowed” the backyard of a friend’s rented house and carried shovels and hoes across town on my bike, all in an effort to turn a neglected lawn into a food garden. Another year, I accepted an offer to babysit a friend’s allotment garden. Squatting her plot, I invented a whole new way to grow tomatoes: letting the weeds grow high so they served as no-fuss tomato stakes. Later still, when I owned my own bit of city land and had filled that up with lettuce and bean plants, I continued to colonize any empty backyard space that friends and family would allow me, even going so far as to plant watermelons and blackberry canes 40 miles away, in another city.

In short, I’ve always been on the lookout for productive space— anywhere, anybody’s—to enlist in the adventure of growing at least some of my food. (Luckily, most of my adventures have turned out better than my watermelon plantation did.)

HOWEVER SMALL MY tentative gestures might have been, they participate in a much larger story—a story that is chipping away at convention and inverting notions we’ve held dear for decades. Food comes from farms, we’re told, farms that exist in the countryside, separated from cities not just by physical distance but by an attitudinal divide that is much harder to breach. The countryside is “clean” and pure, close to nature. Cities are “dirty,” far from nature, essentially nature corrupted. Urban soils and air are contaminated; vandals lurk around every corner . . . And even if we could overcome these dangers, there’s simply not enough room in North American cities to “waste” space doing something that properly belongs in the country. So the old story goes, anyway.

But when we dig in the dirt and cultivate food, what we’re also doing—beyond growing the basil—is staking out territory for an expanded notion of what our cities might be. We’re making room for productivity in a place defined for too long as incapable of meeting, even partially, one of our most basic needs.

Maybe this explains, to some degree at least, the giddy high that comes from unearthing an urban potato. Yes, it’s most definitely just a potato, and that is reason enough for deep satisfaction (for those of us who love the lowly spud). But it’s also a possibility— of a different way of living in cities.

Given the heightened interest in urban food production, one could be forgiven for thinking that to live a virtuous life now requires that we garden 24/7. If we’re not hoeing, seeding, weeding, watering, harvesting, canning, and otherwise preserving the mountains of food necessary to sustain us through a year of eating, are we not shirking duty? No, we’re living our lives and making choices that are dictated by a whole host of complex circumstances. So, let’s dispense with the should’s and imagine, instead, the could’s. Could I plant a few pots of cucumbers, herbs, and tomatoes on my balcony? Could I do with a bit less lawn and a few more veggies? Could I plant an edible fruit tree on the boulevard? Could I grow beans up my apartment building’s wall? In our answers to these questions, some of us might find a small sliver of do-ability. Others might find an obsessional pursuit that keeps us busy for the whole growing season. There’s a lot of room in between.

The benefits accrue, whatever the scale. First and foremost, of course, is flavor. Ask any gardener why they’re growing their own veggies and chances are that superior taste will be at or near the top of their list. Ask an industrial agronomist, on the other hand, why they’ve chosen a particular variety of tomato, for example, to grow by the acre-ful, and flavor rarely rates a mention. Thomas Pawlick tried this experiment. In his book The End of Food, he recounts his conversations with tomato-breeding experts and industry spokespeople, discussions in which he asked them what characteristics were most important in the top fifteen tomato varieties in their markets. The experts mentioned yield, size, firmness, resistance to disease, heat tolerance, uniformity of shape, and uniformity in time of ripening. Pawlick gave them a chance to add the obvious, but no one bit. As he writes, “No one mentioned the two characteristics that any ordinary consumer would likely put at the top of his or her list, namely: flavor and nutritional content. They were simply not there, not important, not even worth mentioning.”

Industrial agriculture cares not one bit for our taste buds. And it would hardly matter if flavor were a top priority of the agricultural giants, because every aspect of the industrial food system works against it. From harvesting machines that demand uniform unripeness to storage methods that do ripening work best left to the sun, to the final indignity of time spent in transport trucks, flavor is diminished every step of the way.

Try this: bite into a ripe tomato just picked from the vine. Let the juice run . . . Freshness—taste’s twin—is what we’re guaranteed when we eat food straight from the plant. Even if it’s not the best green pepper ever (though how often have you heard a gardener say that what they’ve grown is not delicious?), it is certainly the freshest ever. There are no other food-chain shortcuts we can take (even buying directly from farms or shopping at farmers’ markets, for example, valuable as those are) that reduce the harvest-to-dinner distance, in time, to mere minutes. (Some gardeners take this to extremes. I have a friend who will only eat corn that is picked just as the pot on the stove hits the boil.)

As to what effect industrial growing methods have on nutrition, Thomas Pawlick also presents some disturbing data based on his investigations into the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) “food tables,” which measure the nutritional content of various foods. Comparing recent measures of nutritional value with figures from roughly fifty years ago, Pawlick itemizes one staggering loss of nutritional goodness after another: 30.7 percent less vitamin A in today’s fresh tomatoes compared with those of 1963; a 57 percent decrease in vitamin C in potatoes; 45 percent less vitamin C in broccoli. His conclusion: “for the past 50 years the nutrients have been leaching out of nearly everything we eat . . .”

If homegrown food provides us with an instant wake-up call in flavor and freshness, and takes us outside of an industrial system that is depleting our food’s nutritional value, it likewise increases our chances of conscious consumption. There are deeply political dimensions to this issue, and I’ll turn to those later, but the awareness I’m referring to here is of a much more personal nature. It seems to me that one of the most meaningful gifts we receive from the food we grow ourselves is the gift of story. What we consume with each bite are the narratives embedded in the fruits of our labor. These stories emerge from the struggles (the squirrels or the mysterious fungus or the munching insect or whatever); the successes (the tricks to increase yield, the weeding that works); the surprises (the plant that survives neglect, the eggplant flowers that are as beautiful as any prized ornamental), and the triumphs (the cabbages bigger than the biggest of human heads). The food we grow ourselves is invested with dozens of daily dramas that give it a flavor and a meaning more enriching than anything we can buy. Our gardens are narrative forms of self expression that reveal our tastes and desires, our particular histories, who we are and how we want to create a place for ourselves in the world.

Of course, these stories, while deeply personal, are also the same stories that people have been telling for millennia. Try saying the words to reap and to sow with a straight face, and not at church. It’s hard, isn’t it? But these ancient words, and these ancient acts, connect our stories across time. That may sound like a heavy historical weight for a little plot of salad greens to carry, but as you pick the slugs off the lettuce and later tell the story of the slippery guck they left on your fingers, you can be sure that the trail oozes back a very long time.

It was a melon that brought this historical and narrative dimension home, most powerfully, for me. A dear friend is involved with the Cantaloupe Garden, a collective garden in Montreal. I’d always found the name charming and evocative, but didn’t give it much thought until I found out that growing in the Cantaloupe Garden is a particular melon variety called the Montreal Melon that dates back to the French settlers of the seventeenth century. This is truly a melon with a capital-H History, and stories galore. Grown on the island of Montreal since the late 1600s, this enormous melon—it can reach 20 pounds or more—was once so popular (the melon’s green flesh carries a hint of nutmeg) that by the late 1800s it was one of the three main exports from the city. According to a publication on the melon’s history (yes, this fruit rates a booklet), compiled by Lee Taylor and Adrian Gould, a package of the fruit was sent overseas to King Edward VII; thereafter, melons shipped to hotels in Boston, Chicago, and New York were stamped with the royal name and commanded top dollar. Taylor and Gould characterize this time as a period of “Montreal melon madness,” a mania fed by fashion and flavor.

The fruit’s fortunes started to change in the 1920s, when melons that were easier to grow and transport began to dominate the market. The city’s melon farms were plowed under for suburban homes, and the Montreal Melon virtually disappeared in just a few decades. But not completely. In the mid-1990s Montreal writer Mark Abley tracked down a packet of seeds from an Iowa seed bank and passed some along to a local grower, Ken Taylor of Windmill Point Farm. The melon was suddenly back in cultivation and it has since caught on. Festivals have celebrated this unusually spicy musk melon; growers have held competitions to try to tip the scales with giants. And everyone who plants it is growing its story, cultivating its history.

STORIES ARE A very particular kind of knowledge—information multiplied and transformed through the creative and generative urge to share—but homegrown food also offers us a much more basic, and reassuring, form of knowledge. Quite simply, when we’re the ones doing the planting and the growing, we know exactly where our food comes from. It is a rare commercial transaction where we can say this with much confidence. But for the food we produce ourselves, there’s little doubt. In the language of agricultural production, we control the inputs.

To a degree, anyway. While we control what we add to the soil, we don’t necessarily know what’s already there. Many people who are thinking about growing food in cities raise this issue as a major concern. They worry that urban soils are, by definition, contaminated. It’s prudent to wonder. But I’d argue that it’s equally important to ask different questions as well. Do we know what’s in the agricultural soils where the great majority of our food comes from—in China and Latin America, for example? Do we know what chemicals are regularly used to produce the fruits and vegetables grown globally and shipped to North America? Are any of these chemicals banned here but used elsewhere, and do any of these chemicals remain in the imported food we eat? According to the Progressive Policy Institute’s 2007 report Spoiled: Keeping Tainted Food Off America’s Tables, 98.7 percent of imported food is never inspected by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the USDA. What are the health and environmental standards related to the use of sewage sludge on agricultural lands? Ask these questions and the soil in our cities might start to seem like something we can control, something a little less worrisome.

But definitely not altogether worry free. Each of us will find our own comfort level, but for anyone with even a smidgen of doubt about the health of their soil, there are some straightforward steps to take. In my first home, for example, I was worried about growing food beside the fence, which had the suspicious green glow of pressure-treated wood. (This was in the late 1980s, before chromated copper arsenate was a restricted-use product.) I certainly didn’t want to eat any vegetables contaminated by the stuff. So I sent soil samples to the provincial environment ministry. The report came back that yes, there were elevated levels of heavy metals but still within consumption guidelines. I guess my comfort level has a slightly paranoid edge to it—I ditched the root vegetables and stuck with fruiting plants such as tomatoes, which absorb less in the way of metals from the soil. At my current home, however, in an area of Toronto that has no history of industrial activity, I didn’t bother to do a soil test. Most of my vegetables are in pots, anyway. But at the community garden where I grow vegetables directly in the ground, we did have soil tests done. The site had formerly been a fire station, a lumber yard, and who knows what else. Again, the results weren’t worrying, but we replaced the soil and built up the soil level in the beds just to be entirely safe.

Worrying about the health of our urban soils serves an obvious, useful purpose in that it often leads us to soil testing—a good

>City Soil Safety

Just how safe are urban soils for the growing of food? Short of having your soil tested, it’s impossible to know for sure what contaminants might be present.

But there are risk factors you can take into account: exterior paints (on buildings and fences) that may have been applied before lead in paints was regulated; nearby industries or autobody shops that may be releasing or leaking toxic substances; historical industrial uses of your land; heavily traveled roads and highways in close proximity that may have left a legacy of elevated lead levels in soil from the era of leaded gasoline.

If any of these risk factors are present, it would be prudent to have your soil tested. In the U.S., contact the local agricultural extension agent or your city’s public health or environment unit. In Canada, contact your province’s environment ministry or your city’s public health or environment office. If a soil test reveals elevated lead levels, consider taking the following steps to reduce your risk:

> Use raised beds or containers filled with clean topsoil, and place a semi-permeable barrier, such as landscape cloth (available at nurseries or hardware stores), between the existing soil and the newly added soil.

> Maintain alkaline soil conditions (a pH of 7 or higher) through additions of lime, and add compost high in phosphate, which has been shown to reduce the mobility of lead in the soil, making it less likely to be absorbed by plants.

> Avoid inhaling...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION: BRINGING DINNER HOME
• 1 SOWING THE CITY, REAPING THE BENEFITS
• 2 EMBRACING A FOOD-GROWING ETHIC
• 3 PRODUCTIVE POSSIBILITY
• 4 HARVESTING SPACE
• 5 RETHINKING CONVENTION: FINDING SOIL AND SITES
• 6 LESSONS OF CARE: FOOD GARDENS AS NURTURING HUBS
• 7 PEOPLE POWER: GROWING TOGETHER IN COMMUNITY GARDENS
• 8 ROGUES ON A MISSION: GUERRILLA GARDENING AND FORAGING
• 9 WHAT THE CLUCK?: BACKYARD CHICKENS
• 10 THE EDIBLE CITY
• EPILOGUE: ADVENTURES IN POSSIBILITY
• RESOURCES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS