Do you walk on a sidewalk to get to your front door? Do enjoy plants more than concrete? If you answered “yes” to both of these questions, you are one step closer to becoming a proud sidewalk gardener.

More and more people are removing excess pavement and replacing it with vegetable, pollinator, and native plant gardens. These guerilla-type gardens perform more than aesthetic or edible functions for your enjoyment; they are contributing hidden services as well. Stormwater management, pollinator habitat, and cooling and cleaning of the air are just a few of the hot ecosystem services you will be adding to your streetscape. It is a bit of work to get started, but cities are making it easier for residents to bust out the hardscape (concrete, asphalt, etc.) for softscape (plants, mulch, etc.).

Getting started: Begin With the End in Mind

The first thing you’ll want to to is determine an ideal location for your sidewalk garden.  (For starters, don’t obstruct traffic, people, cars, etc., or havoc will ensue.) Two other high priority items on your checklist are permitting and community support. Most cities/communities will require a permit in order to protect underground utilities. Permitting can be tedious, but many communities have organizations that will help you with this. In San Francisco, Friends of the Urban Forest will help fund and coordinate the project with enough properties on the block participating.  In Portland, OR, Friends of Trees and DePave are two organizations that can provide technical support, and even volunteer power!

The department of public works and the department of transportation will often be your first departments to check out (the exact department(s) you need to work with can vary by municipality). Acquiring a permit is not glamorous; just be sure to smile and breath, you’ll get through it!. Be sure to document everything along the way: record names and contact info of people you talk to, etc., so you can always get back to them with questions or if you run into any roadblocks in the process.  Throughout the process, having a design to show people along the way will help communicate your project (and may be necessary for permitting too!).

Once the permitting is through, the fun begins.

Concrete Removal

A jackhammer (large area) or 20-lb. sledge hammer (small area) will be your tools of choice.  What? Don’t have a jackhammer tucked in a corner with your bike? Your local hardware store can probably rent you one, or point you in the right direction. They will also be able to help you/tell you where you can take the concrete that is being removed; or better yet, you can reuse it in the new garden as a retaining wall or pathway.

Planting

This may seem like the easiest part, and it will be once your plan is in place. Major points to consider: How much sunlight is hitting this spot? How do you want the plants to function? What is your maintenance plan? Once these questions are answered you can get your hands dirty! Don’t forget to amend the soil and add plenty of mulch; raised beds are a quick and inexpensive way to get started. Now get some friends and plan a work party!

It’s a full project, but the result will be a long-term ecosystem service benefiting your community. If construction and implementation takes a while, I highly recommend putting up a sign stating your purpose. Even the biggest skeptics are much more comfortable when informed of changes!

Anyhow, most of them absolutely suck (WHY did TLC, eHow, and Emeril have to jump on the urban farming bandwagon?!), so I’ve saved you some disappointment by picking out a few of the highlights.  Unsurprisingly, Manhattan and Brooklyn are leading the way…

• A packed 2′x3′ fire escape garden in NYC, complete with self-watering containers and upcycled soda bottle planters.
• Interesting conjecture about the legality of fire escape gardening, with an interesting tip to keep pigeons and squirrels out of your veggies.
• Not a post, but it’s notable that there is a EFFING STORE IN SAN FRANCISCO CALLED FIRE ESCAPE FARMS!!!  What?!  They sell lots of unecessarily-expensive-but-very-amusing stuff for the urban gardener.
• For some beautiful photos of fire escape gardening (but relatively little text), check out thefireescapegarden.com’s 2009 archive (apparently, in 2010 they moved the burbs…)

(Photo credit: Flickr user Kristine Paulus.)

Every year, around this time in late January, I start to get fidgety.  It’s usually around this time that we Portlanders get fooled by a little warm spell.  The buds on some of the early blooming trees start to swell, and the crocuses get confused and start to poke up through the soil.  I call it the spring tease, and it’s when we garden nerds start obsessively pouring over our seed collections and catalogs, counting down the days until planting can begin.

In the meantime, it’s nice to remember that winter is a great time for observation, planning, and preparing.  In that vein, here are some things to do to keep you sane until things warm up a bit…

Observation

If you’ve recently moved, as we did last September, this lull before planting time provides a great opportunity to attune your senses to a new site.  A keen understanding of how sun, wind, wildlife, neighbors, traffic, and other phenomena affect the site is essential to any food production effort.  This is a great time to play with sector diagrams, which help to map out how these forces influence your site (two decent articles on that topic: 1 , 2 ).

Here is another useful pdf put out by the Kentucky Master Gardener’s program that explains how to understand sun/shade patterns on a site.   (In teaching workshops and classes, I find that a lot of folks don’t intuitively have a good grasp on how sun changes over the seasons, and how that affects gardening.)

Planning

Your garden design and planning should be driven by a clear sense of your goals:  What do you want to grow?  How much of it?  How much work are you willing to do?

Answering these simple questions gives you a clear picture of where you want to go, which makes it a lot easier to get there.   Mark Krawczyk, of Keyline Vermont, has put together this great pdf to help you really flesh out your goals.

Preparation

If you have access to a yard or other growing, this is a great time of year to build or repair raised beds, sheet mulch over a lawn, and get dormant trees and shrubs planted into edible container gardens.

In relatively mild temperate climates (say…zones 8 and above), it’s already time to start some seeds indoors.   Burpee seeds has a really great tool that generates a planting and seed starting calendar based on your zipcode. (NOTE: I don’t recommend buying seeds from Burpee. Rather, find and support your local/regional seed company.)

Even if you live in a much colder zone, or don’t have much of a place to garden, here are some other things you can be doing in the meantime:

-If you don’t have a place to garden, network now to find a yard to share.
-If, like many gardeners, you find yourself with way too much of one crop, and not enough of another, create a crop swap with neighbors.
-If you’re at all concerned about food sovereignty issues (and if you’re not, you’re not paying attention), start a seed lending library to strengthen local food security.

What else are you doing during the cold months to get ready for the growing season?

The Site

I launched the site in early 2009 and continued to blog regularly until February 2010, when other ventures pulled my attention away.  Amazingly, even after I stopped adding new content, website traffic has held steady at between 1000-1500 unique visitors per month, sometimes more.  In the last month alone, there have been visitors from 66 countries, from the US to Croatia, Sri Lanka to Trinidad.  And this is after almost two years without a new post!

The Opportunity

Contributing to the website is a great opportunity for established and newer teachers/practitioners alike to reach a worldwide audience, hone their writing and communication skills, and learn or develop new skills in internet marketing, social media, etc.  If you have an existing blog or website, regular guest contributing is a great way of directing new traffic to your site and build your readership.

Beginning in February, I would like to have a team of 2-4 guest contributors publishing roughly one short article each per week (500-1500 words).  Contributors will have significant creative license to develop and explore whatever subject matter they choose.

How to Apply

First, please familiarize yourself with the site to see if it looks like a fit for you.

If you’re still interested in becoming a contributing writer, please email me through the contact page (or at leonard[at]barrettecological[dot]com):

• A brief bio, including your background in permaculture and your experience (if any) with blogging or writing.
• Types of activities and projects you’ve been involved in that qualify you to write about applying permaculture to rental situations.
• One or two writing samples, preferably about applicable subject matter (permaculture, gardening, DIY projects, etc., unrelated writing is OK too.)  Can be sent as links or attachments.

Please submit by January 15th, 2012.Deadline extended to January 22nd.

Thanks and best!

LB

Via Apartment Therapy’s Re-Nest, here are two photovoltaic solutions for folks who rent:

SolMeter :: In this California program, you sponsor the installation of solar panels somewhere, and you receive a portion of the profits from the electricity that it generates, which you can apply to your own electricity bill, or whatever else you want.

Veranda Solar :: Again, from California (big surpise!).  This startup makes beautiful little panels that you could mount outside of a window with (or without, I suppose) a landlords permission.  According to the website, they’re orders currently exceed production, but you can sign up to be notified when more are available.

Coming Soon: Photovoltaic Curtains

One technology that I’m excited about, but that apparently doesn’t exist quite yet, are photovoltaic window curtains.  They’re such a simple and wonderful idea: when it’s sunny, just close the drapes and generate electricity!

It looks like several companies have them in the works, but they’re not available at this time.  Here’s a link to a CNN article about the concept.  I’ll definitely be blogging about these whenever they hit the market!

Are you aware of other solutions for renters who want to generate there own electricty?  Do tell!

[photo credit:Re-Nest]

City Farmer News served up the first two links in this roundup:

Hungry, Hungry Manhattan

Here’s a great video about what it would take to grow all Manhattan’s food on Manhattan Island. It’s a thought-provoking piece, although there are a number of other questions that it doesn’t address but leaves me curious about. Namely, I think a more useful question would be “What would it take to grow food for all Manhattanites within X miles of Manhattan Island?” Where X is less than, say, 500 miles.

At best, I think this video serves as a reminder that urban ag isn’t a silver bullet for our food system woes. But there’s also a way in which it sounds to like “Urban agriculture doesn’t work because you could never produce all of a city’s food in the city.” No one that I’m aware of, in the Urban Agriculture movement is arguing that any large city could ever be 100% food self-sufficient.  Anywho…

[photo: see those tiny little green roofs? not gonna cut it... credit: gonycbybus]

Garden in a Bag

Here’s a bit of inspiration for modular/mobile gardening using large plastic totes, the type used in the shipping of some produce and bulk materials. Think of it as a raised bed that you don’t have to build, just unfold!

[photo credit: designboom]

Strawberries

Maria Finn at CityDirt penned this nice how-to on Strawberry Windowboxes. For those interested in starting strawberries from seed, now is a good time of year for many regions in the US.  Check out varieties such as ‘Italian Alpine‘ and ‘Pineapple Crush‘ (the latter a white strawberry variety!!!).

Workshops for Tenant Farmers in Flatbush

Unless Google Analytics is lying to me, a fair number of you are from NYC. So I thought I’d throw out this event that Sustainable Flatbush is putting on this weekend. Lots of neat demonstrations for renter-farmer types: vermicomposting, sprouting, seed starting, etc. (Thanks to Robin at Urban Gardens for the heads-up on this one.)

[photo credit: sustainable flatbush]

Have fun out there!

I’ve had this lying around for a while, not wanting to toss it, but not knowing quite what to do with it either.  So yesterday I decided to scan it and put it out as an inspirational morsel for folks who are gearing up for Spring planting.  Click the images below, or download it as a .pdf (1.5 mb) here.  Check out another great post about mixed containers here.

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I missed both last Tuesday’s and last weekend’s roundup, so I figured I’d have a huge backlog of links to throw at you….but…nada. Nothing has caught my attention in the last 10 days or so.

I’m currently following 35-or-so blogs, around half of them permaculture- and urban homesteading-related, but I am looking for more great blogs, and I know there out there!

Who are you following in the permaculture/urban homesteading/eco-groovy corner of the blogosphere, and what posts have rocked your world lately?

Polyculture in a Bucket: Goji berry, kale, onions, strawberry, and foxglove.

Food forestry (a.k.a. forest gardening) is a concept that people seem to become enthralled with when they hear about it: a way of gardening that mimics the diversity and resilience of a healthy forest, and provides an abundance of fruits, nuts, vegetables, flowers, herbs, and more.

You’d have to be a baby-eating robot not the like the sound of that!

But forests are big, and balconies are small.  So how to adapt this wonderful idea to the apartment-scale? All it takes is a basic understanding of how food forests are put together.

Layers of a Food Forest

Central to the concept of is the observation that forest ecosystems are segmented into distinct spatial layers.  The seven layers generally noted are as follows:

[image credit: Graham Burnett]

Each layer serves various functions that support the health of the others: canopy trees create shady, moist micro-climates for the others to inhabit; groundcovers hold the topsoil in place; tap-rooted species mine nutrients from the subsoil and make them available to other plants.  These are just a few examples of the inter-relationships that make forest ecosystems so healthy and productive.

Container Food Forests

While it would be difficult to re-create all of the complex relationships of a full-scale forest in a container, we can easily apply this concept of spatial layering to obtain a diversity of yields in a small space.  At this micro-cosmic scale, we might simplify the layers to look something like this:

Tree – Mini-dwarf fruit trees such as cherry, peach, apple, pear, olives, and various types of citrus.  Most common fruit trees can be adapted to containers. Shrub – Berry bushes such as blueberry, currants, goji (lycium barbarum.), goumi (eleagnus multiflora), huckleberry, and many others.  Also large culinary and medicinal herbs like rosemary, sage, lavender, and many Artemisia species. Herbaceous – Can include green leafy vegetables such as lettuce, kale, chard, spinach, arugula, and others.  Also tea plants such as bergamot, mint, lemon balm, lemon verbena, and stevia. Groundcover – Creeping or running plants like thyme, oregano, strawberries, lingonberries, violets, and purslane.  Also insectary and medicinal species such as yarrow, echinacea, and chamomile. Rhizosphere – Crops such as alliums (garlic, onions, shallots, etc.) carrots, beets, and radishes are good picks.  Potatoes and yams are less ideal, since you have to disturb all of the other plants to harvest the tubers.

The examples given above are only a small portion of the plants that can be utilized to create a container food forest.  By stacking plants from each layer in a single container, you can maximize the productivity of a small space, and create more interesting and beautiful gardens at the same time!

Take a 1 quart plastic yogurt container and make vertical cuts about 3/4″ apart all the way to the bottom. [pictured below]

Then make a cut all around the base of the container, snipping off each tab.  You can cut them to whatever size is appropriate for the pot they’re going into, and they’re easy to write on with a permanent marker, or better yet a grease pen or crayon (more UV and rain resistant).

Ta-da!:

Labeling vegetable starts with the variety and planting date is especially important if you plant more than one variety of a single crop.  It also helps you track days until germination, germination rates, and other information that can give you useful feedback about your seed-starting habits.

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