“Next year, I’ll show you my tricks,” he offers.
URBAN FOOD PRODUCTION is not, despite often being perceived as such, an anomalous activity embraced by only a small percentage of the population—garden keeners like my neighbor with a hankering for fresh vegetables and the luxury of leisure time in which to indulge their hobby. It is, in fact, surprisingly widespread. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, for example, estimates that more than 100 million people worldwide derive direct income from urban farming. In terms of consumption rather than employment, a 1996 study from the United Nations Development Programme estimates that 800 million urban farmers and gardeners produce 15 percent of all the food consumed on the planet. As well, nearly 70 percent of global commercial egg production comes from poultry raised in or close to cities.
Though most of this global urban agricultural activity takes place in developing countries, there is also a high proportion of food grown in North American urban areas. According to a recent research report called Health Benefits of Urban Agriculture, by Anne Bellows, Katherine Brown, and Jac Smit of the Community Food Security Coalition, “One third of the 2 million farms in the United States alone are located within metropolitan areas, and produce 35% of U.S. vegetables, fruit, livestock, poultry, and fish.” Statistics Canada reports that there are more than 35,000 farms (15.5 percent of the total) within the country’s metropolitan areas. The Greater Vancouver Regional District, for example, produces 27 percent of British Columbia’s gross farm receipts. This is not as incongruous as it sounds when you consider that, historically, cities often sprang up on the best farmland, with production close to the market ensuring that the urban population could be fed. (Michael Olson, in his 1994 book MetroFarm, makes a surprising point regarding American cities: “According to a recent Census of Agriculture, the most productive farmland in the United States is in the Borough of the Bronx! The second most productive farmland is in the City of San Francisco!”)
If some of the best farmland in North America exists below and adjacent to urban centers, it should come as no surprise that city food gardens can be enormously productive. To be sure, it often takes a great deal of effort to return urban soil to some semblance of health, given the indignities to which it has been subjected. The parking pad where my neighbor grows all that food could hardly be considered farmland (you’d need to go back a century or more to find any trace of agricultural memory on that spot), but through creativity and ingenuity he has developed a garden that could go up against any farm within 50 miles and be in the running for the productivity prize.
Counterintuitive as it may sound, urban food gardens are often more productive—in terms of the ratio between food yield and size of space—than their rural agricultural counterparts. In other words, far from being unable to feed ourselves (at least partially, and possibly significantly) from our small urban plots, we can in fact generate a prodigious amount of food. One of my more benign and harmless diversions is to collect stories and statistics on macho food production—stories of the people who have managed to grow outrageous amounts of food on their small city plots; statistics of what’s possible. (In all honesty, I should confess that I don’t think of this as a hobby. It’s more like an addiction to urban ag porn . . . ) And such stories never fail to inspire and titillate.
The writer Barbara Kingsolver is the queen of my list, though I’m being a sneaky cheat by including her, since she and her family grow their food on a farm in the country not in the city. Still, their food-growing experiment—living for a year on the food they produced themselves—is hugely instructive. And equally exhaustion-inducing, since they appear to have done little else for a year than toil in their vegetable patch. In her wonderful 2007 book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle—just one of her many wonderful books—Kingsolver describes how her family of four grew all of their produce on 3,524 square feet of garden beds. That works out to just 40 feet by 22 feet per person—smaller than the typical urban yard, I’m guessing. (Kingsolver wryly notes that “it felt a lot bigger when we were weeding it.”) The family’s main off-farm purchases for the year were organic grain for animal feed and 300 pounds of flour for bread making. Other than that, they basically lived on each hard-won bite grown from that 3,524 square feet of soil. The family’s food footprint for the year was, she calculates, somewhere around one acre.
The kicker, of course, is that this little exercise in fruit and vegetable production consumed most of their lives—or it sounds that way, at least, in her delightful telling. If you share her dream of extreme self-sufficiency in the food department, read her book before you plunk down money on the farm—you just might slump away, tired at the thought of all that gardening work. (One small corner of my self-sufficiency daydream she didn’t deflate, though, concerns cheese-making. I plan to spend next winter following her lead and turning my kitchen into a dairy. She makes homemade cream cheese and mozzarella sound very simple, and very tasty, indeed.)
What I found most revealing about Kingsolver’s story is not the time she needed to spend in order to eat off her land, but the relatively tiny amount of space in which it was possible. Others have found much the same thing. According to R.J. Ruppenthal’s book Fresh Food from Small Spaces, published in 2008, “Most urban residents can learn to grow as much as 10 to 20 percent of the fresh food their families eat from an average-sized urban condominium or apartment space. Those with a backyard or larger patio can do even better.” The Backyard Homestead (2009), edited by Carleen Madigan, suggests that “A quarter-acre lot, planned out well and cultivated intensively, can produce most of the food for a small family,” and estimates yields of 2,000-plus pounds of vegetables from a quarter-acre lot. Even those without in-ground growing space can get impressive yields: “you can grow as many as 15 pounds of tomatoes from just one self-watering container on the back patio.”
If all these numbers and stats seem a bit, well, theoretical rather than lived, here are some results from people walking the talk. In the late 1990s, a group of seniors in Toronto growing vegetables at the Frances Beavis Community Garden divided 1,000 square feet of land into twenty-six plots. One of the gardeners grew more than 35 kilograms of vegetables—pak choy, amaranth, spinach, hairy gourd, and more—in her 3 ½-square-meter plot. The Dervaes family of Pasadena, California, had even more dramatic results. In 2002, they decided to grow more vegetables and fewer flowers in their front yard and backyard. The first year, they harvested 2,500 pounds; the second year, 3,500 pounds; the third year, 6,000 pounds. All this—350 different types of vegetables, herbs, edible flowers, fruits, and berries, grown organically—from one-tenth of an acre. (The film HomeGrown documents their adventure.)
My favorite story of inspiring fecundity, though, comes from Chris Thoreau, a British Columbian gardener and urban agriculture activist. In 2008, Thoreau harvested more than 800 pounds of squash from one Vancouver yard—and passed it along to a local community center.
Of course, things don’t work out so productively for everyone. Brooklyn writer Manny Howard tells the disastrous story of his experiment in subsistence farming in that city in a 2007 New York Magazine article. Soil tests revealed that his 20-foot-by-40-foot backyard plot was loaded with lead, so he had 5 ½ tons of topsoil trucked in from a Long Island farm, at great expense. Just as his
> Maximizing Space
On small urban lots, the gardener’s lament, if only I had more room, takes on added urgency. One way to maximize yield in minimal space is to plant in layers, making use of the productive potential beyond ground level: tucking fruit-bearing shrubs under nut trees, for example, and shade-tolerant herbs and salad greens under the shrubs.
> Tree (or canopy) layer: fruit trees, edible nut trees
> Smaller tree layer: serviceberries, pawpaws
> Shrub layer: currants, gooseberries, blueberries, raspberries, elderberries
> Vine layer: grapes, kiwis
> Perennial layer: mint, rhubarb
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