What is Urban Sustainable Living?
Most simply put Urban Sustainable Gardening is about using the land that you have available to grow enough food to supplement your meals, while maximizing the amount you can grow and integrating it into your Urban Lifestyle.
Whether you have a thousand square foot back garden or a small back porch, you can produce a stunning amount of food in a surprisingly small amount of space. When I began this project I wanted to design it for Urbanites and Suburbanites, people that wanted fresh food but couldn't just jump up and move to the country. My garden is in an area of about 700 square feet. I designed the demonstration farmette to work in the average urban back yard. For many people the "back yard" is essentially a fallow pasture that simply grows grass and mostly underutilized. Why not take that land and give nature an opportunity to do what it wants to do anyway- grow and make it a truly inviting place for people and for the plants and animals. My mission is to help people take back the garbage strewn, unused spaces and turn it into truly productive and beautiful spaces that can be appreciated season after season. The demonstration farmette that I have built uses a sustainable model that can be upsized or downsized to fit almost any size space. I have combined many proven and improved agriculture methods to.
The Pluses of Urban Sustainable Gardening
Urban Sustainable Gardening has given me a sense of freedom. By growing a portion of my own food I can do something that has a real effect, not only on my family but also on the rest of the world. Who knows how much fuel it saves now that most of my food comes from the ground behind my house. Urban Sustainable Gardening isn't supposed to take over your life; it is designed to enrich your life. I can't tell you happy it makes me when the family has dinner outside in the garden. I have to say that one of the coolest things about incorporating an Urban Sustainable Garden has been involving my child, her friends & cousins and my neighbor"s children. My daughter gets to have a sense of responsibility for raising our livestock; she is the first in when it comes to starting seedlings. Getting her away from the cartoon channel and teaching her how to harvest wool, tomatoes, and green beans has been an enriching experience. Not to mention the whole foods she has learned to snack on. Many times I have seen her sneak of to the berry bush or the beanstalk and start munching on the produce right out of the garden. My friends, especially those with kids, love to come over, hang out and play in the garden. Kids love to dig in the dirt. I've seen toddlers dig for potatoes. The garden has got all of us, from the oldest to the youngest, outside and into nature, it has brought my family and friends closer together and even made us closer to our neighbors.
Although I firmly believe that anyone can do it, producing your own organic food does take lots of patience and trial and error. I hope that you can learn from my mistakes, and that this book will help make the process easier and thus more rewarding. Never be afraid to make a mistake, and be prepared to have setbacks. Your first year will be you hardest year by far, and your actual output of food will be small relative to what you will ultimately be able to produce. Nature works on her own schedule, not ours. Natural processes on the whole are never quick, and when we try to overly insert our human time schedules into nature, we invariable are disappointed with the results. For several years I began to think of myself as a plant killer. Every spring, I would happily go and buy plants at the local nursery and put them in the ground and expect blossoms like on Martha Stewart Living. I would happily wander thru my garden and within weeks, sometimes even days, I"d see all of my plants wilted or dead or dying. Each seemed to look at me accusing me of killing it, in that silent way plants can make you feel guilty. What was I doing wrong? Quite a bit. But thru trial and error and a lot of reading, I"ve come to understand what is required of me to be successful in the garden.
Garden vs. Yard
I had always grown up to believe that gardening was hard work. In fact it had to be hard work or it wouldn't be worth it. The last thing anyone wants to do is come home so that they can do extra work. It is possible now with my system of raised bed gardening to create outdoor spaces that are gardens not yards. People relax in gardens, and work in yards. Yes there is work involved. But instead of a back yard, front yard, and side yard we need to begin thinking of our space as a rear garden, entry garden, and side garden. Even better still, is to think of them as distinct and important separate spaces, for example a back garden could be a kitchen garden, the side yard could be thought of as a mini-orchard, and of course the herbarium, as the place where the flavorful and medicinal plants are grown. I love when the family and I hang out in the Orchard (we leave off the mini part, sounds better that way). Sitting with a cup of coffee in the herbarium, as the lemon thyme hits the morning air can be a priceless treasure to the Urbanite. Fresh picked mint in iced or hot tea is the magic carpet that we all need sometimes. Those precious moments that you only think you can experience on a Sunday in the country.
When I think about the word yard I find myself taken to the Junk Yard, Construction yard, truck yard, railroad yard, and prison yard. The very word "yard" conotates a mess and hard work. It also connects to the word "work" very easily. Yard work is mundane. It's boring and not very fulfilling yet probably every homeowner in the country devotes hours of time to it. Gardening is fun, even sounds fun doesn't it? A garden makes me think of a lovely and enriching place, one where I can give to and receive from the land. Places of peaceful and quite reflection. Adam and Eve were thrown out of a garden. Germans have beer gardens, not beer yards. The Japanese have taken the meditative garden to whole new levels of beauty. The Arab word "Paradise" means walled water garden. Humanity had it right until only the last century. Human's had perfected the walled, fenced or hedgerow gardens where they could grow significant amounts of food, and had wonderful places to pray and meditate hundreds of years ago.