Grow Your Own
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Grow Your Own is a definitive ‘how to’ guide, giving gardeners confidence and control by leading them through every step of the urban-farming process from the ground up. Sections include:
INTRODUCTION TO
URBAN FARMING
Introduction from Angus and Simon
What Do We Mean by Urban Farming?
The History of Urban Farming
The Benefits of Urban Farming
Where Can We Do Urban Farming?
A PRACTICAL GUIDE
TO URBAN FARMING
The Environment for Urban Farming
Choosing the Right Crops
The Needs of Plants
Soils and Soil Fertility
Constructing Beds and Plots
Propagating and Cultivating Plants
Fertilisers
Composting and Mulching
Water and Drainage
INSECTS AND ANIMALS
ON THE URBAN FARM
Pest and Disease Management
Integrated Urban Farming
THE FUTURE OF
URBAN FARMING
Angus Stewart is an agricultural scientist whose regular appearances on radio and TV (Gardening Australia) have educated generations of Australian gardeners on the various aspects of growing your own produce. He is the author of several books including the award-winning bestseller Creating an Australian Garden (Allen and Unwin, 2010) and, with co-author A.B. Bishop, The Australian Native Garden (Murdoch Books, 2015).
Simon Leake is the founder of SESL Australia, a consulting laboratory offering soil science and horticultural testing and advice. While working across all soil-science related industries, Simon’s particular interest is in urban soil science and diagnosis of the whole range of growing problems. A major part of his work is designing constructed soils for large landscaping projects such as Sydney Olympic Park, Barangaroo and the One Central Park green roof project. A career-long interest has been land-based recycling of organic waste. He is the co-author of Soils for Landscape Development (CSIRO Publishing, 2014). Simon is a frequent lecturer and communicator in soil and horticultural sciences. In 2016, the Australian Institute of Horticulture recognised him as Horticulturist of the Year.
Become one of the world’s 200 million (and counting) urban farmers with this definitive ‘how to’ guide to growing food in the city.
If reducing your carbon footprint, having fresh ingredients on your doorstep and saving money appeal to you, look no further. This accessible and inspiring book is full of clever solutions to help you maximise even the tiniest urban growing space, sustainably.
Angus Stewart and Simon Leake, leading experts in horticulture and soil science, share skills and practical advice for getting the best from your edible garden.
Whether you’re growing herbs in a window box or harvesting carrots from a community garden, this book will teach you how to identify suitable crops and the nutrients they require to thrive; set up healthy soil; and create many styles of productive garden beds. Propagation, drainage and composting are well covered, as are tackling pests and diseases, establishing worm farms, and keeping chickens and bees.
No matter the space, there‘s room to grow.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION TO URBAN FARMING
Introduction from Angus and Simon
What Do We Mean by Urban Farming?
The History of Urban Farming
The Benefits of Urban Farming
Where Can We Do Urban Farming?
A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO URBAN FARMING
The Environment for Urban Farming
Choosing the Right Crops
The Needs of Plants
Soils and Soil Fertility
Constructing Beds and Plots
Propagating and Cultivating Plants
Fertilisers
composting and mulching
Water and Drainage
INSECTS AND ANIMALS ON THE URBAN FARM
Pest and Disease Management
Integrated Urban Farming
CONCLUSION: THE FUTURE OF URBAN FARMING
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Copyright
INTRODUCTION TO URBAN FARMING
Simon Leake (left) and Angus Stewart are both well-regarded horticulturists who know how to grow healthy edible plants in city environments.
INTRODUCTION FROM ANGUS AND SIMON
Mechanisation is gradually changing the way we live and work, freeing up our busy lives for more productive pursuits. Urban dwellers now have a fabulous opportunity to spend more time growing a proportion of their own fresh produce, while also significantly reducing their carbon footprint and organic-waste stream. As well as allowing us the satisfaction of eating homegrown food, urban farming enables us to reconnect with the agricultural world and teaches our kids where food comes from.
Grow Your Own: How to be an Urban Farmer is an insightful guide to cultivating nutritious food crops in city environments. As trained horticulturists and communicators with plenty of experience in growing our own food, we have a lot of wisdom that we are keen to share with you. We explain how soils and other growing media work, the needs of plants and how urban environments differ from traditional farms. We reveal how to improve and maintain soils in a sustainable way as well as the principles of using composts, fertilisers and mulches in the urban environment. In addition, we also show you how to manage weeds, pests and diseases with little to no use of artificial chemicals.
As the world’s human population increases, and cities continue to get bigger and bigger, it is imperative that we explore more economical and environmentally friendly ways to feed those living in high-density situations. Grow Your Own: How to be an Urban Farmer examines the importance of producing a diverse supply of fresh food that has not travelled for thousands of miles, and utilising small spaces and innovative ideas to make the most of every urban surface.
Growing a diverse range of vegetables and fruits on your urban farm is one of the best ways to reduce your environmental footprint.
LOOKING TO THE PAST
Not so long ago, most householders had some kind of productive garden. I (Simon) remember going to Britain to see my grandparents when I was about six years old. We arrived in winter, and it was very cold. Grandad took me out into the frosty garden to pick brussels sprouts. I can still hear the ‘plonk-plonk-plonk’ as he snapped off the hard, white sprouts and dropped them into the metal bucket I held. To this day, I still love brussels sprouts covered with warm butter, salt and pepper.
My mother always had a few things in the garden – at an absolute minimum there was parsley and mint, essential for a Sunday roast. Our neighbour, who had a very big garden with fruit trees and vegetables, would give us chokos when they were in season. He also kept Sussex chooks, and we didn’t mind about the roosters crowing – you had to get up anyway. Most houses in the street had a vegetable garden, and many people swapped and traded produce with each other.
For me (Angus), my childhood often took me to my grandparents’ vegetable gardens. My paternal grandfather, Roy Stewart, was a magistrate who had fought in the First World War, and his weekends were all about growing ‘Grosse Lisse’ tomatoes in homemade compost that had been carefully sieved. I enjoyed helping him make liquid fertiliser using the ready supply of chicken manure from the family chook run.
Angus recalls: ‘My maternal grandparents were farmers in Victoria, so at their place there was always a ready supply of fresh dairy products and homegrown vegetables. As a child gardener, I could never see the point of growing flowers when the space could be used to cultivate an edible crop. That view has softened somewhat over the years, but I still delight in growing anything edible. In recent times, I have taken to exploring
the diversity of Australian bush foods.’
Traditional Australian ‘quarter-acre block’ gardens of the twentieth century almost always featured an extensive backyard vegetable patch complete with at least one citrus tree.
HEADING TOWARDS THE FUTURE
In the 1960s, it was reasonably common for Aussie families – especially postwar immigrants from Europe – to have a vegie patch. By the 1980s, however, it was increasingly rare. The rise in materialism and the convenience of driving to a supermarket to buy food overwhelmed any desire to obtain food by performing backbreaking agricultural labour. There are still some big fruit and vegie gardens in suburbs with large immigrant populations, but they are few and far between.
Recently in the Western world, there has been a revival in interest in how food is produced and an eagerness to return to the simplicity of our pastoral past. An extension of this ethos has been the birth and development of permaculture, which espouses a much more ecological approach to food farming than the extraordinary crop monocultures of industrial-scale agriculture. In most of the rest of the world, particularly the developing world, urban farming is a basic necessity and has not been forgotten or discarded.
Today, around 20 per cent of the world’s food production occurs in urban environments. Our aim with this book is to make sure this proportion rises, as the number of people living in urban environments irrevocably increases. We emphasise the ease with which you can grow a multitude of crops in the tiniest of urban areas, using everything from vertical gardens to clever containers. Even on a small balcony, you can turn your kitchen scraps into fertiliser that will help you grow a lifetime’s supply of fresh herbs and salad greens.
PHENOMENAL PERMACULTURE
A philosophy for a more sustainable way of life for humanity, permaculture is well suited to urban farming at any scale. It is all about observing the principles of natural ecosystems that have evolved over countless aeons, and then applying them to various aspects of human society and environment. It is a broad philosophy that not only relates to food production, but also to things such as energy and water usage. The concept was first developed in Tasmania by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, who were concerned with the unsustainable nature of modern industrial agriculture and its detrimental effects on the environment – in particular, on biodiversity. The concept has since become a worldwide phenomenon.
Permaculture design principles can be used to create eminently sustainable urban farms that produce as wide a variety of crops and animal products as possible in a given environment. Grow Your Own: How to be an Urban Farmer highlights the scientific principles that underpin organic farming, and will help you create permaculture systems on your urban farm. By using methods such as worm farming and composting to recycle nutrients and organic matter back into the soil, and other growing media, we can devise systems that readily mimic the nutrient cycling and soil building that happens in the natural world.
Our chapter entitled Choosing the Right Crops is designed to get you thinking about food plants from a much broader perspective, so that you are aware of why particular species first came to be food crops and how their wild relatives fit into their natural ecosystems (for example, potatoes and other root crops function as water and nutrient storage, and legumes add extra nitrogen to the soil via their symbiotic relationship with bacteria in their roots). Using this information, you can choose a biodiverse range of crops that will provide a seasonal range of fresh produce – this is totally compatible with general permaculture principles.
Sustainable water use is another key permaculture principle. As we show within our Water and Drainage chapter, harvesting stormwater that might otherwise have gone to waste (or worse, created environmental damage) is a no-brainer. Simply using storage tanks or altering the topography of growing areas to utilise surface run-off keeps perfectly good water resources on your urban farm. While this book is not about permaculture per se, it is all about providing you with the building blocks that allow you to understand how to apply the same natural ecological principles to your urban farm.
Follow permaculture ideals by recycling your kitchen scraps into a well-balanced organic fertiliser that completes the environmental loop on your urban farm.
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY URBAN FARMING?
Lots of people have gardens, but how is urban farming different from gardening? ‘Urban’ usually refers to cities, suburbs or various areas not considered to be strictly rural in nature, while ‘farming’ relates to cultivating the land and, usually, the growing of crop plants (as opposed to gardening, which implies the growing of purely ornamental plants). Put the two words together, however, and they can mean different things to each person.
We believe that the term ‘urban’ can be applied to any populated area. It could describe, for example, a small kitchen garden, a house garden on a large property, a council allotment on the fringe of a small English village or the Chinese market gardens that were once common around many major cities. The word ‘farming’ conjures up images of commercial operations with extensive plantings, their purpose being to sell produce for profit. However, for us, ‘farming’ is an activity that can provide useful and valuable produce on any scale. Private vegetable gardens are much better defined as urban farming because of the considerable tangible and intangible ‘wealth’ created. It is ironic that most economic statistics do not consider the wealth generated by urban farmers who grow crops for their own consumption.
For us, urban farming involves some kind of useful produce being grown in inhabited areas. This is usually vegetables, herbs and fruits, but also sometimes cereal crops such as maize. Cut-flower production or even creating potted plants for sale might also be considered under the umbrella term ‘urban farming’.
ASPECTS OF URBAN FARMING
Urban farming has, of course, been carried out for centuries. However, in a modern context with a globalised society, urban farming is all about reconnecting with the basics of how food is produced. Most urban farmers will not ever be able to grow enough food to completely supply their needs, but what we can do is learn to place a higher value on food production generally. Growing your own food enables you to control its quality, reduce or eliminate the use of pesticides and reduce the ‘food miles’ (in other words, the energy required to ship food from far-flung destinations).
Naturally, you will be satisfying your own needs and wants from your urban farm, but there are many other creative possibilities – such as swapping, bartering or selling your produce at local farmers’ markets. Urban farming is typically practised on either private or public land; the cooperative nature of community and school gardening allows those of us with very limited space to utilise public land, but we certainly won’t exclude those who want the tranquillity of their own private urban farm. Small animal husbandry can be integrated with fruit and vegetable operations if there is sufficient space, with chickens being the most practical option in urban areas. Aquaponics is an increasingly popular form of urban farming that combines raising fish with growing crops.
THE MAGIC OF MICRO-GARDENS
The Vegepod is a micro-garden system based on a self-watering wicking bed that utilises capillary principles to minimise any maintenance.
Micro-gardens make use of small spaces, such as on rooftops or balconies, and can be managed by people both young and old. Studies by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) revealed that a micro-garden of just one square metre could produce any one of the following:
around 200 tomatoes (30 kg) a year
36 heads of lettuce every 60 days
10 cabbages every 90 days
100 onions every 120 days.
AN ENVIRONMENTAL PERSPECTIVE
Urban farming is all about cultivating food crops in built-up, heavily populated areas rather than growing it well outside cities and transporting it long distances to reach the eventual consumer, a complex process that is often costly to both the environment and the individual. It makes a lot of sense, t
herefore, to look at growing as much fresh food as we can in urban areas.
Discarded food and kitchen scraps are often regarded as waste and find their way into rubbish dumps. If we recycle the large quantities of nutrients and organic matter from scraps by using them on the urban farm, then we are not only saving money by not buying commercial composts and fertilisers, but we are also solving a costly municipal waste-disposal problem – one that results in further economic damage through the environmental degradation that it causes. This is clearly an issue where each and every person can contribute in some small (or large) way by utilising the organics they generate each day in an environmentally friendly way.
Food security for the cities of the world is also a concern that has only just received overdue recognition in recent years. While it would require our cities to be seriously reorganised in order to provide the bulk of our food from urban farming, it is certainly a worthwhile objective to dramatically increase the amount we are growing using currently available space. History tells us that in times of crisis it is possible to make a big difference through urban farming. During the Second World War, the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign in England galvanised extraordinary support from the masses to replace the food supplies that had been cut off from mainland Europe and the rural areas of the United Kingdom. Urban farming often becomes much more common during times of distress and poverty – but why wait for the bad times? We should encourage urban farming now, in preparation for any economic and environmental crises that may befall our cities in the future.
The lush Caillebotte Community Garden near Paris demonstrates a perfect way to make major cities more sustainable.
KEY FACTS ABOUT URBAN FARMING
According to the website of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (www.fao.org):