The joys of urban gardening: A porch garden in Portland produces delicious bounty
author: Johnny Tomatoseed
Raising your own food has many advantages. Rising gas prices are driving up the cost of food in the markets. The insidious spread of genetic engineering is reducing the safety of that food. The industrialization of agriculture funnels increasing amounts of money into corporate hands, rather than to farmers. These are economic, health-conscious, and political reasons. Less quantifiable but no less real are the emotional and spiritual rewards attained from nurturing seeds or starts into full grown plants that end up on your plate.
Urban gardening presents its own challenges - space, light, uncooperative landlords, etc. i want to share with indymedia readers a few photos and thoughts from my own attempt to grow as much food as possible on a front porch in the middle of the city.
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These photos are of my porch garden. My landlord allows me only one small raised plot (about 4x8) in the backyard because he wants the rest for his kids and dogs. This is a compromise that i'm willing to make because my landlord actually lives in the same building, so we're sharing this space together. i have no patience, on the other hand, for absentee landlords who won't allow their renters to garden. That's ridiculous. In many other times and societies, it would be criminal to forbid someone to raise their own food. But that's a subject for a different post (or for comments to this one).
So, since that small plot isn't much space, i started a container garden on the front porch to supplement it. Over the course of several months, i collected 5 gallon plastic buckets from a co-op. I drilled holes in the bottom, filled them with soil i bought from a local organic farmers (which was much less expensive than buying soil by the bag), and mixed in casings from a worm composting bin we'd been maintaining in our kitchen for the 9 months previous. i tied strings from the bucket handles to the top of the porch roof, and planted starts in them: snap peas, collards, mizuna, spinach, and red dandelion greens. As the peas grew, they climbed the strings. The greens were happy growing lower down in each of the pots. Within 6 weeks i was harvesting greens, and within 8, peas.
The greens have all started to bolt now. (That's when they send up a long tall shoot from the middle and flower and go to seed. They also stop producing many edible leaves at that point, and the flavor of the remaining ones often changes for the worse.) But the peas are in full-on glory. i can go out there and pick a handful every day. i suppose you could make a great stir-fry with peas like these, but i always just eat them right there, sitting on the bench among all the greenery.
The space has become an almost magically pleasant one to hang out in. The dappled sunlight shimmering through the pea vines is quite beautiful, and it is cool on hot days. Bees and other insects buzz around, and there's even a few worms in some of the buckets. When i water the buckets, the rich smell of wet earth hangs in the air with a sultry presence. The space is both productive and alluring; it nurtures and satiates and enlivens. It has become a tiny oasis in a sea of concrete.
This kind of gardening is not difficult. It just requires dedication. And the tangible and unquantifiable rewards are obvious. My life is definitely better for having this garden in my life.
When the peas are done, cucumbers will take their place, for pickling. i've started those already, from seeds, in another set of buckets, and when they are ready to start climbing, the peas will be about done and the buckets can be swapped out. Here in Cascadia, our long growing season means that you can have two or even three generations of a crop. As food prices rise and global warming makes other parts of the world less habitable, our position here will be a good one. The time is now to start learning self-sufficiency skills like these.
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