The first decade of the new millennium brought McMansions, reality TV mania, celebrity international adoptions, and then the social networking craze. To my delight, this year's zeitgeist (no, not twitter) seems to be the modern Victory Garden. Even
Michelle Obama has one.
Like Hummers and McMansions, large expanses of water loving grass lawns are coming to seem passe, and even vaguely irresponsible. Americans are starting to eye those lush lawns and see the possibility of home grown tomatoes and fresh herbs.
Thank you Kyn Pokorny, of the Oregonian, for photo
Alice Waters, of Chez Panise fame, has been an advocate of urban kitchen gardens for years. She was the catalyst for the Berkeley school district's "Edible Schoolyard" project, which turned an abandoned plot of land next door to Martin Luther King Middle School into a carrot growing, chicken raising, urban garden. You can see a
video of the garden on the project's website.
Urban gardens have a history of popularity during times of war. "Victory Gardens" graced the front of many propaganda posters from both World Wars. Even if the motivations have changed, many of the messages from old war posters are making a comeback today: conserve gasoline, reduce waste, grow your own food. The message, "use it up, wear it out, make it do" was the prelude to the, "reduce, reuse, recycle" slogan of today.
Originally, kitchen gardens were promoted by the government as a way to conserve the food grown by farmers, so that farmed food could be shipped to the soldiers oversees. Some estimate that up to 40% of produce consumed by Americans in 1943 was grown in urban gardens. Today, urban gardening is gaining favor for different reasons. Concern about "food miles," pesticides, genetically modified food, and rising food cost are fueling today's kitchen garden popularity. Today, Eco is Chic.
The National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service, a government agency, is "funded under a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture's Rural Business-Cooperative Service. It provides information..to those involved in sustainable agriculture in the United States." They say that the average grocery item in the United States travels from 1300 to 2000 miles to reach the consumer's table, and that, "The vast majority of energy used in the U.S. food system (around 80 percent) goes to processing, packaging, transporting, storing, and preparing food."
The Pacific Northwest, in typical green-loving fashion, is not hurting for local resources to promote home food production. Have sunny yard space, but don't know what to do with it? The
Go-Go Green Gardener can help you plan, plant, and harvest your very own vegetable garden. Have a green heart/green thumb but no land to call your own? Try
Urban Garden Share, where "Black Thumb" land owners have sunny soil for you to use in exchange for either some of your bounty or your expertise and garden companionship.
As many of you know already, I rent my garden space. I have some half whiskey barrels on my patio with herbs, peas and raspberries. But, most of my gardening is done away from home. For three years, I had the joy of gardening at work, where I built an 8 by 16 foot raised bed and gardened with my clients. This year, I no longer work there and had to find an alternative. I found a church, about a mile away, that has garden plots for rent. For $35 per year, I get a 10 foot by 30 foot garden space all to myself. The only downside was that the ground had not been gardened in before, and needed tilling and a delivery of compost to rake in. However, I plan on renting the same plot next year, so my work this year will roll over to the next crop.
The climate of the Pacific Northwest supports a wide variety of crops. Our mild winters allow over-wintering of some hardy vegetables. However, we are not quite warm enough for some favorites to thrive. Corn, melons, tomatoes, and peppers have to be coaxed and coddled and prayed for in our cool summers. Even so, many urban gardeners, in most climates, could produce at least half of the produce that they eat each year. Jules Dervaes, founder of the "Little Homestead in the City," produces all of the produce his family of 4 eats in a year (60% of his crop), enough to feed his goat and chickens (10%), and enough to sell (30%) for profit - all on 1/10th of an acre - producing about 6,000 pounds of produce a year. His tenth of an acre is equal to about 4000 square feet, or about the size of an (empty) average Seattle residential lot. To learn more about his Pasadena garden, you can
browse his website and view an interesting video detailing his methods.
John Jeavons, author of "How to Grow More Vegetables" advocates a biointensive gardening method, planting seeds much closer together than seed packets advise. He says that you need about 100 square feet per person to feed you during the warm growing season, plus an additional 100 square feet if you want to preserve food and feed yourself year round. John Jeavons' method of biointensive gardening is the opposite of Steve Solomon's spacious garden method. I mentioned Solomon and his book "Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades" last week... he is the guy who grows vegetables, "when it really matters." I garden somewhere in the middle of the two methods. Jeavons believes that you can get much more produce than usually thought, from a small plot of land. Solomon believes that the double digging and intense watering only produces marginally better and wastes water.
Either way, Solomon, Jeavons and Dervaes all show that you can feed yourself using a lot less land than the 1.2 acres of mega-agriculture farmland that it takes to feed the average American.
