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Increasing Our Gardening Resilience

November 8, 2021

Thoughts on increasing our gardening resilience

It feels like the world is moving faster and faster in directions I never would have thought possible just a couple of years ago. We knew resilience was important, but now it has become essential, critical to our well being and perhaps even survival. I am going to share some thoughts about pushing a garden to be more productive in ways within the capabilities and finances of most of us. My solutions reflect my agricultural zone (8b) and microclimate, but it is surprising what can be accomplished with very little.

Three resources I lean heavily upon, and will reference here, are: the books written by Eliot Coleman (Maine), Lynn Gillespie’s courses and information found at thelivingfarm.org (Colorado) and the interviews with Singing Frogs Farm (California) found on this website. All three provide a wealth of ideas and processes that those of us growing in residential areas can adopt on a “micro-sized” basis to be quite successful.

It takes knowledge and experience to be successful growing food on a small lot in a residential area, year-round, but it can be done! We can get a general idea of what we need to do through resources like those mentioned and seed company charts, but only dedication, season after season, brings us the knowledge and feeling that we need.

In the garden with the mini greenhouses with peppers and an A frame trellis for tomatoes behind

My garden is about 2000 square feet of actual growing area. It is divided into 40 beds, most of them raised. In this area over the course of a year 140 varieties of 40 vegetables and at least 20 different herbs are grown. Scattered around the rest of the property (a total of about 2 acres) we grow 15 different berries, 10 varieties of grapes, and trees for plums, peaches, pears, apples, cherries, hazelnuts and almonds….

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How to Start an Urban Farm

July 21, 2018

HOW TO START AN URBAN FARM

Like any new venture, starting an urban farm is a daunting and difficult task. Not only do you have to find land to farm, but that land also must be suitable for growing food. Not only do you have to know how to grow food, but you also have to know what to do with your bounty when harvest time comes around. What has often been referred to as “the simple life” is actually extremely complex and intensive.

And yet many people around the world are choosing to start urban farming ventures of their own to strengthen the bonds of communities and teach people that real food comes from the ground — not from supermarkets. It sounds like an obvious statement, but our food system makes it quite easy to hide all the sweat, work, and dirt that goes into food production and only focus on the finished, packaged products that line the grocery store shelves.

Why Start an Urban Farm?

It’s an unfortunate but true fact that threats to public health are everywhere in today’s modern world. Our food system, one that contributes to the greater problem of climate change, is a huge part of this issue.

How often do we visit the grocery store and buy fruits and vegetables with stickers that mark them as world travelers without ever thinking of how long their journey to our plate might have been? This is even easier to do when the food we buy is so processed that it doesn’t look like real food at all.

In a world where 36 percent of American adults are obese, the state of the food system in the U.S. is a crisis we must address. And what better way to take action against it than to start an urban farm to better feed yourself, your friends and family, and your community?

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Fruit Walls: Urban Farming in the 1600s

January 6, 2016

Fruit Walls: Urban Farming in the 1600s

We are being told to eat local and seasonal food, either because other crops have been tranported over long distances, or because they are grown in energy-intensive greenhouses. But it wasn’t always like that. From the sixteenth to the twentieth century, urban farmers grew Mediterranean fruits and vegetables as far north as England and the Netherlands, using only renewable energy.

These crops were grown surrounded by massive “fruit walls”, which stored the heat from the sun and released it at night, creating a microclimate that could increase the temperature by more than 10°C (18°F).

Later, greenhouses built against the fruit walls further improved yields from solar energy alone. It was only at the very end of the nineteenth century that the greenhouse turned into a fully glazed and artificially heated building where heat is lost almost instantaneously — the complete opposite of the technology it evolved from.Montreuil peaches

Picture: fruit walls in Montreuil, a suburb of Paris.

The modern glass greenhouse, often located in temperate climates where winters can be cold, requires massive inputs of energy, mainly for heating but also for artificial lighting and humidity control.

According to the FAO, crops grown in heated greenhouses have energy intensity demands around 10 to 20 times those of the same crops grown in open fields. A heated greenhouse requires around 40 megajoule of energy to grow one kilogram of fresh produce, such as tomatoes and peppers. [source – page 15] This makes greenhouse-grown crops as energy-intensive as pork meat (40-45 MJ/kg in the USA). [source]

Dutch style all glass greenhouse

Dutch-style all-glass greenhouses. Picture: Wikipedia Commons.

In the Netherlands, which is the world’s largest producer of glasshouse grown crops, some 10,500 hectares of greenhouses used 120 petajoules (PJ) of natural gas in 2013 — that’s about half the amount of fossil fuels used by all Dutch passenger cars. [source: 1/2]

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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