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Growing Your Own
Growing your own food can be a rewarding experience, both for you and the environment. However, it usually requires a precious commodity: land. Envision an expansive plot with rich, fertile soil, amended with homemade compost, rows of heirloom tomatoes, squash, rosemary and basil soaking up the sun ... sounds nice, but let's return to reality. If you're like many people, you live in an apartment or rent a house where the owner wouldn't appreciate you rototilling the front yard. How can you grow your own food when you don't have any space to plant a garden? Thankfully, there are some great alternatives to the traditional home garden. These alternatives fall into two main categories: keeping a garden somewhere other than your own home, which I'll call "remote gardening", and container gardening. What remote gardening lacks in convenience it makes up for in land and sense of community. Community gardening, which simply means you rent one of a group of plots in a local garden area, incorporates the enjoyment of growing your own food with service and giving to those in need. Growing Gardens, a nonprofit, manages the community garden program in Boulder County. There are five sites around Boulder, each having anywhere from a handful to hundreds of garden plots. Plot rental consists of a small yearly fee, four hours of garden-related service work, and donation of at least 10% of your harvest to the Community Food Share or other designated organization. Growing Gardens also coordinates programs for local youth and underserved populations, which provide ample volunteer opportunities. While tending your plot, you'll meet and chat with other neighboring gardeners, and many people are happy to lend a hand when you need it. Just being in the gardens is a peaceful and fulfilling experience. I highly recommend taking a stroll through the Hawthorn gardens (Hawthorn and 16th) in the evening, when people are out watering, talking, biking, and walking. Feel free to say "hi" to me at plot 106. A second version of remote gardening is to team up with a friend to plant a garden at his or her house. A friend may have a great garden space but lack the interest or time to prepare and tend it. With your ambition, the two (or more) of you can turn a neglected, weed-covered corner into a thriving vegetable garden. I did this several years ago, and it was great fun to weed, seed and just hang out in the great summer weather with my backyard-rich friends. At harvest time, we celebrated with a dinner using our home-grown produce. The main drawback to this option can be your lack of access to the garden. You can't start weeding in someone's backyard at 6 am; friendship has its limits. However, with some agreements in place at the start, having a garden at a friend's house can be a productive and enjoyable arrangement for everyone involved. For either remote gardening option, I recommend installing an automatic drip irrigation system. Automatic drip systems have two main advantages: your garden will be watered consistently, whether you are there to water it or not, and the soaker hose helps use water efficiently by delivering it directly to the soil, with less lost to evaporation. A simple drip system, which is all you need, is relatively easy to install. The system consists of an outdoor faucet, a garden hose, an automatic timer, a screen filter, a blackflow preventer, a pressure regulator, a soaker hose (look for the ones made out of recycled tires), and stakes to secure the hose next to the plants. Screw each part into the next in the order listed here. You will need Teflon tape and washers to stop the leaking. A thorough discussion of the various options and details of installation/usage is a bit too lengthy to include in this article, but you can find many explanations online; just remember it can be as simple as what I've outlined above. If you have a sunny spot at home such as a balcony or patio, container gardening may be your most convenient alternative to the traditional garden. Your chosen spot will need to receive at least five hours of full sun a day to grow healthy, productive plants. Given enough sunlight, almost all vegetables grow well in containers. I have had success with beans, various tomatoes, summer squash such as zucchini and yellow straightneck, eggplant and peppers, but your options are virtually limitless. Quick-maturing varieties of lettuce, beets and carrots may enable you to get several crops of these vegetables from one container! Leafy greens and herbs do well outside or in a sunny window (south or west facing windows will be the sunniest). Large winter squash are the only vegetables I'd hesitate to grow in a limited space, because their vines can grow to be over twenty feet long. After identifying a good container garden area, your next step concerns pots and potting soil. Choose pots with drainage holes and wide openings so that you can get the rootball out if you need to replant. Plan for most mature fruiting plants, such as tomatoes, to need a two-gallon or larger container; while at first you may be able to pack more plants into a space using small pots, those small pots will soon restrict root growth and require frequent watering, stressing the plants and limiting their growth and productivity. Unglazed clay pots are more aesthetically pleasing, but they lose moisture faster than do plastic pots. Even with large, plastic pots, plan on watering your container garden thoroughly once a day. For soil choice, most potting mixes available at your local garden store will work fine. I've had the best luck avoiding the very cheapest brand but found it unnecessary to buy the most expensive kinds. A great way to optimize your growing space is to think vertical. Pole beans or vining cucumbers and squash in a container will need a tomato cage or trellis to wind up and around. Tomatoes, if grown in a pot on the ground, will need a tomato cage to contain them upwards. In addition, tomatoes and strawberries can be grown from hanging containers. My personal favorite is the upside-down tomato hanger: the tomato stem comes out a small hole in the bottom of the planter, allowing the plant and fruit to hang freely. There are several varieties of upside-down hangers sold, but you can easily make your own by cutting a hole in the bottom of a bag that has handles. Community gardening, helping garden at a friend's house, and container gardening offer great alternatives when a traditional garden isn't feasible. With a little creativity and effort, the rewards of producing your own food can be reaped by everyone, regardless of housing situation.
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