While I'm not a professional grower/gardener/homesteader by any stretch of the imagination, I've been growing quite a lot of my own food for the last 6 seasons and have been asked a few times to share my experience in urban gardening. So I'll try to keep this really short and share what has worked best for me. I hope this helps & encourages anyone looking to begin the fun, rewarding and exciting experience of growing their own food.
- Find & Follow YT channels
Whenever I first decided I was going to turn my back yard into a food forest, I sought out urban homesteading videos to see what others were doing & how they were doing it. I literally typed in "urban homesteading in [my city/province] what grows best". If you do this, it will start you down a really great path to see what others are doing and how you can learn from them. You'll learn a lot, so I highly recommend subscribing and following. Doing this will also help you learn what hardiness zone you're in - which essentially means your last & first frost dates of the season and helps you plan your garden overall, based on those *rough* dates.
- Start Small & Learn All the Things
The first year I grew anything I built 2 small tomato boxes and had 6 pots of peppers, and 4 hanging baskets of strawberries. All season long I researched everything I could think of for tomatoes, peppers and strawberries. I watched all the videos & read all the articles. From fertilizer suggestions, soil amendments, composting suggestions, and just about everything in between. I've since learned digging deep like that, you'll learn a lot of basic gardening info, that really applies to all plants.
There's a thing called "lazy composting" and I'm a part of that community even though I agree composting is literally invaluable in home gardening. I have a compost bin I toss all my kitchen scraps & garden waste into. I never turn it like you're supposed to, and I never water it like you're supposed to. I pile it deep and once every year or so, the most amazing, rich, nutrient dense dirt comes out the bottom, that I use to top dress all my garden beds. There are definitely better ways to use it, but this is what works for me. If you're looking for best practices, dig a bit deeper into the topic and you'll find lots of ways to really boost your composting efforts!
- Grow What's Native & 2.What You Eat
While it would be wonderful for folks in Alaska to be able to plant pineapple & have it grow well... that's just not how it works. Two of the most important questions to ask yourself when growing, is what's native & grows well where you are, and what do I/we actually eat & enjoy? The answers to both of those questions will be what gets you really excited about growing. Does your whole family love peppers and do they grow really well where you are? If you can answer an exciting YES to those questions, you've just hit a jackpot in planning your garden.
Every year the list goes out on the top
12 fruits and veggies highly contaminated with the most toxic pesticides. These are the fruits & veggies you're buying from the local grocery store. (There's also a Clean 15 so be sure and google that list as well!) If any of the items on this list are items that you buy often (grocery store strawberries are almost always at the very top of the list!), you may want to consider a way to incorporate these fruits and veggies into your garden planning, so that you and your family can still enjoy them without all the toxic pesticides they come with, from the local grocer.
With limited space these days in a lot of places, vertical gardening is super popular. One of my favorite ways to utilize this method is what are called Galvanized Steel Wire Mesh panels from Home Depot here in Canada. In the states, these same panels are called Cattle Panels and made of the same material. In my garden I have 2 of these for my cucumber trellis, and 3 of them bound together with 4 t-posts for my green bean trellis, and then another one for my blackberries. It's a very simple and easy way to make the most of the space you have by growing vertically. There are many other options with tower raised pots but I've only ever utilized the wire mesh panels.
While raised beds are certainly not required, if your growing space is filled with rocks or clay or similar unfriendly growing material, raised beds may be your best option. In my case, my land is filled with old fieldstone and there's so much of it, it was hard to dig or plot to grow anything. So, I built two 4'x8' raised beds and filled them with rich, dark garden soil & compost, then planted tomatoes and peppers. They exploded the first year and have ever since, so now I know what those plants love the most.
Thanks for stopping by, and if this post helped you in any way, then I'm really glad. 💖
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