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A special treat for you today, urban planning enthusiasts. We don’t have the longest growing season here in Edmonton, so we have to make sure we make the best of what we have. On that note, we’ve asked local growing ace and blogger Kevin Kossowan to talk a bit about urban gardening and how to look differently at the space use city-dwellers have.

Nine years or so ago, I couldn’t garden to save my life. I grew up hating the chores associated with gardening and swore off it entirely. Then I got interested in food. In a big way. Gardening seemed a logical place to seek the freshest of local ingredients, so I got my feet wet – or dirty, as it were. I now grow the majority of the vegetables, fruits, and herbs for our family of five on our small central city lot. It can be done.

The first leap to producing a significant amount of your own produce is reconsidering the logic of ‘lawn’. “Food Not Lawns” is a good book to get you well on your way to sheet mulching, planting, and harvesting rather than mowing, raking, and weed-eating. (Edmonton’s public library has a copy.) We have a patch of grass under our mature apple tree to enjoy the cool shade in the summer heat, a place to picnic, put a kiddy pool, etc – but the balance of the lawn has been developed into a space to grow food. Our yard went from a lawn monoculture requiring lots of water and maintenance to meet cultural expectations of ‘nice’, to a chaotic polyculture of 150 edible species of plants that defies ‘normal’ but produces loads of organically grown food. “But where will your kids play”, we were asked when making the change. Turns out our kids adore the gravel paths, mucking about in the soil, picking flowers, looking at bugs, and otherwise entertaining themselves in our gardens. Far more fun and creative than a big patch of grass, I think.

Once you’ve made that leap to axe the lawn, the next step is figuring out how to lay out your space to make best use of it. There are quite a few books about permaculture at the library that are good idea resources. Our yard could essentially be divided into two spaces: perennial borders and annual veg bed. Our perennial border is filled with things like Saskatoon, strawberry, asparagus, highbush cranberry, rhubarb, raspberry, haskap, red and black currants, wild onion, indigenous grasses, etc. Permanent residents that need a thoughtful space. The soil’s left undisturbed, mulched heavily in the fall with leaves, and I’ve often said that if I end up with a patch of wild-looking bush around my yard full of edible species of plants, I’ll have achieved my goal from both an aesthetic and function standpoint. Do not underestimate the production capability of perennials – including fruit trees. The annual production of our still-immature yard is in the hundreds of pounds.

The veg beds are in the sunny spots of lot. Again, resources abound for square foot gardening and the like for best use of space. We grow about 100 different annual edible plants. The way I see it, I’m paying taxes on my whole lot, so no space is sacred – if it sees sun, I’m growing stuff there. The narrow side yard will produce garlic, onions, and cabbages this year. Between my garage and the alley – a usual dead-space – are tomatoes, corn, and squashes. I haven’t planted our boulevard…yet.

It’s perhaps important to mention that my first step into gardening was not a big one. I tackled lettuce and spinach at our ground-floor apartment-style condo. It was a quick success, and slippery slope. A couple years later, I had a garden producing a surprising amount of food and herbs along the wall of our condo. It’s only in the last 2-3 years that I have been far less constrained by space. For apartment dwellers, it may require a further thinking outside the box and using somebody else’s space – either at a community garden, a neighbor’s, or family member’s. I know folks that do each of those. There’s even a lady who has a CSA of veg grown and harvested from other people’s city lots.

So rather than gardening technique or space-use-idea-of-the-week, I’ll leave you with the suggestion that making the best of your space mostly requires a decision on your part to do it. I think that’s the hardest part. Committing to it in a meaningful way. It’s not the social norm, and hasn’t been for half a century or more – but be brave, it can be done.

Thanks to Kevin for sharing his gardening expertise. Once again, you can see Kevin’s fantastic blog at http://www.kevinkossowan.com/.

Do you have an idea for a guest post you’d like to share with the Charrette? Drop us a line with your idea at blog@thecharrette.ca