Gardening Old Farm Land For Sustainability

Suburbanite, are you a good steward of our farmland?

What? Farmland…what does that mean.? I don’t have any farmland! That is probably your reaction.  Well, not so fast.  What do developers want? Answer:  Flat, cleared land, close to a city with great transportation routes. Farmers and foresters are loosing.  Your suburban home is probably sitting on old farm land, an old orchard site or a once productive forest.

Recently Michael Pollan, the well know writer on food and environmental matters, said in an October 2008 New York Times Magazine article, “Farmer in Chief”, that here in the United States we are loosing nearly 3,000 acres a day and many times the land lost is some of the most fertile land we have for growing food.

Just think about that for a moment.  In just one week, we lost an area about the size of Manhattan forever, to development.  The land is lost to Walmarts, apartments, strip malls, new highways, and of course single family home suburban developments.  Making a comparison to Manhattan is interesting because just imagine if we lost our financial centers and our corporate headquarters located in Manhattan.  Our government, as we have seen recently, will spend untold amounts of money to protect those assets.  The same can not be said for lost farmland and forest land.

We really don’t have time for a pity party.  What is done is done.  You own your home with its beautiful green yard, ornamental trees and some pretty flowers.  Could you put your yard to better use?  Can you return at least a bit of your yard to agriculture via gardening?

Yes you can! You can grow just a bit of your own food or you can transform your yard from decoration for your home into a productive, decorative and attractive agricultural asset.

Even the smallest yard can provide food for the family.  Square foot gardening is a great way to start. Utilizing the techniques popularized by Mel Bartholomew in his series of books and television shows on Square Foot Gardening, you would be surprised at the amount of food which can be produced by a tiny 4 foot by 4 foot square foot garden.  Mel says you’ll need a minimum of 8 of these blocks to provide fresh vegetables for a family of 4. Folks that is 128 square feet! Do you have 128 square feet, 10 feet by 13 feet, that you could use for a vegetable garden?

Square foot gardening is just one opportunity for the suburbanite to return a bit of farmland back to producing something more than grass and flowers. As we discussed last week here at Green Earth Friend, a suburban hedge garden is an option for screening the view from nosy neighbors, providing a windbreak for your garden or utilizing that awkward narrow side yard. Just imagine elderberries, hazelnuts, blackberries or apples growing in living hedge. Your hedge garden will be ever changing with flowers in the spring, fruit in the summer and shelter for the wildlife in the winter…right outside your window.

The really ambitious suburbanite might want to try fish farming. Water features are all the rage. Why not make a water feature a productive part of your suburban food complex.  By combining hydroponics techniques with your water feature you can begin aquaponics which utilizes the waste from your fish to fertilize vegetables. The vegetables in turn help clean the water for the fish. While Koi are cool, fresh organic tilapia is well…delicious.

Do you compost?  Composting is very simple.   A person can fret over it and turn it and aerate it or just pile it up in a corner, behind the hedge garden, and one year later nice fresh compost will be ready for the garden. A more aggressive means of returning vegetable waste to the garden is a worm bin. Buy or make one of these. Once the red wiggler worms get going you will have a steady supply of worm castings which you can put right in your garden to enrich the soil.

Do you want cute and cuddly instead of wormy? Get a bunny or two.  No not for eating but for fertilizer.  Most HOAs will not be concerned about these quiet “pets”.  No need for them to know that you are using the cute and cuddly creatures to convert vegetable waste into the stuff which comes out of bunnies.  Unlike other manures you can apply rabbit manure directly in the garden without composting.  Rabbit manure is superb fertilizer.

So, my fellow suburbanite, are you ready to start tapping into the productivity of your fallow farmland? I hope so because while you read this little article a few more acres disappeared under asphalt….forever. Resurrect your farmland. Wouldn’t a fresh salad from your own organic garden be a nice change for the better?

For more information on gardening on your suburban lot, please visit the backyard food production complex section of our forum.

Here are some internet websites which you may find useful in your upcoming gardening adventure:

Square foot gardening:

squarefootgardening.com

forums.gardenweb.com/forums/sqfoot

Urban Aquaculture:

webofcreation.org/BuildingGr … Chap1.html

How to make a worm bin:

whatcom.wsu.edu/ag/compost/Easywormbin.htm

A rather humorous article on manure:

plantea.com/manure.htm