Urban Gardening For Dummies
Overview
The easy way to succeed at urban gardening
A townhouse yard, a balcony, a fire escape, a south-facing window—even a basement apartment can all be suitable locations to grow enough food to save a considerable amount of money and enjoy the freshest, healthiest produce possible.
Urban Gardening For Dummies helps you make the most of limited space through the use of proven small-space gardening techniques that allow gardeners to maximize yield while
minimizing space.
- Covers square-foot gardening and vertical and layered gardening
- Includes guidance on working with container gardening, succession gardening, and companion gardening
- Offers guidance on pest management, irrigation and rain barrels, and small-space composting
If you're interested in starting an urban garden that makes maximum use of minimal space, Urban Gardening For Dummies has you covered.
Read More
About The Author
Paul Simon is a nationally recognized landscape architect, public artist, horticulturist, master gardener, and urban designer.
Charlie Nardozzi is a nationally recognized garden writer, speaker, and radio and television personality.
Sample Chapters
urban gardening for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Urban gardening requires some creativity and flexibility, but the benefits you reap are well worth the effort. Your family can enjoy fresh vegetables and herbs all season long, and gardening is great exercise. You can plant an urban garden in a vacant lot, an underused parking area, or your roof, back deck, or patio.
View Cheat Sheet
View Cheat Sheet
HAVE THIS BOOK?
View Book Companion Site
Access practice tests
Additional Book Resources
Articles from
the book
Children’s gardening has become huge all across the country. Many educators, parents, and public officials see gardening as a way to reconnect kids with nature, get them outside for some healthy exercise, and teach them about healthy eating habits. You can find many ways to encourage and entice your children to be involved in the garden at home.
Sustainability involves three practices that ensure the wise use of water, materials, and other resources to make sure they last from one generation to the next and in harmony with nature.Know your soil conditions.© piyaset / Shutterstock.com
Many urban gardeners are correct in thinking they have poor soil. The urban garden area is likely to be compacted and poor in structure and quality.
City residents in many areas are challenging the notion that they can't grow gardens in their urban settings, by finding creative ways to garden in limited space. Some folks are even pulling up their small city lawns to plant vegetable gardens, urban orchards, and edible landscapes. Of course, there are plenty of other ways to garden in the city.
Herbs are the perfect edibles for the urban gardener. They are mostly small plants that produce abundantly all season. Herbs fit equally well in a container, flower garden, or vegetable garden. Many are perennials that will come back year after year. They grow best in full sun, but some, such as parsley and chives, can tolerate part shade and still produce well.
Urban
The key to success in any annual flower or veggie garden is a properly prepared soil bed, and in an urban environment, the best way to prepare a soil bed is to use a raised bed. Generally speaking, raised beds are filled with 8 to 10 inches of soil and are no wider than 4 feet so you never have to step in the bed to reach your plants.
Understanding wind flow and how it affects your landscape may be useful to you in your sustainable farming efforts. Perhaps you would like to screen against harsh winter winds or channel in a cool summer breeze?
Wind flow is created by the sun heating the air. Of course the direction of winds varies quite a bit.
The urban farmer has to remember that urban environments typically experience higher temperatures than suburban areas because the paved surfaces that abound in urban areas lead to a lot more sunlight penetration. The roofs, buildings, and paved surfaces of the urban setting heat up and reradiate the sunlight, causing increased temperatures.
Who says families who live in the city can't grow their own vegetables! If you'd like to grow enough to feed your family all summer, here are some guidelines on how much of the most popular vegetables to plant to keep your family stocked with super-fresh veggies. You can adjust these numbers based on which vegetables you most like to eat.
So where do you begin when it comes to vertical gardening? There are a number of reasons for growing plants in urban areas on vertical structures.
Vertical structures for growing up
Whatever you’re looking for, adding a vertical structure to an urban garden is a space saver and can provide a three-dimensional element of colorful and creative context to your urban garden.
Urban
Roses are really just specialized shrubs, so planting them in your garden is similar to planting other trees and shrubs, except for a few additional considerations you need to remember.
Roses are best purchased as bare root or container plants at the local garden center. When purchasing bare root roses, follow these tips:
Check that the roots are moist.
Urban
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure! You can sustainably reuse many materials as garden features in your outdoor room or urban garden, from old skis and bicycles to antique furniture and bed frames. We’re sure you can find at least a few old items around your home or at yard sales that you can repurpose into a garden art feature.
Container gardening is key to successfully gardening in the city. No matter how busy you are or how limited your yard, a beautiful container situated near the front door or back patio will help highlight, accent, and jazz-up your urban garden with color and pizzazz! A drab-looking porch, patio, balcony, or driveway can be transformed with the addition of flowering container gardens!
Urban
One idea to save space on your balcony or condo or apartment patio is to place your urban garden along the walls surrounding your space. Much like hanging a beautiful painting indoors, a picture frame garden can help define and complement your outdoor room, patio, or balcony and add some beautiful color, texture, and a focal point to your exterior living area.
To start an urban community gardening program, begin by assessing the level of interest in your community. The first step is to find like-minded folks to help you organize the project. Ideally, you’d like to recruit at least five to ten families interested in helping. Survey neighbors to see who would like to participate and hold planning meetings at least monthly to get the ball rolling.
Urban
You usually add manures, compost, organic matter, and/or manufactured organic fertilizers before planting your urban garden to build the fertility of the soil in anticipation of the new garden season. But you can use fertilizers in another way, too, with a technique called side dressing. Side dressing means adding organic fertilizers while the plants are actively growing to ensure a steady supply of nutrients.
Growing your own annual flower or vegetable transplants from seed for your urban farm isn’t difficult; you just have to have the right equipment, time, and dedication. Here are some simple steps you can take to get your seeds started indoors:
Find a few good containers to use.
You can use many different types of containers, including clean yogurt cups, peat pots, peat pellets, plastic pots, and plastic trays.
Urban
If you’re not yet ready to go the grow-your-own-seedling route, head to your local garden center to buy your annual flowers and vegetables as transplants. Here are some things to keep in mind as you hunt around for the best plants:
Check the tops. Healthy transplants have dark green leaves all the way to the soil line.
Urban
Digging a hole big enough to add a tree or shrub to your garden in urban soils can be challenging. Many urban soils are compacted or made up of gravel, fill, and concrete. Often what looks like a nice green lawn is really only a few inches of topsoil on top of old construction debris and fill.
After you have the hole, the planting process is similar to the way you plant many other plants.
Urban
A large concern with your urban farming site is the contamination from past use of your site. Old industrial cities, in particular, may have soils contaminated with a variety of chemicals.
Contaminated soil is an especially important issue if you’re growing edible crops or have young children or grandchildren who may ingest the soil.
In most situations, adding raw organic matter, compost, and manures to your urban soil will be enough to grow healthy flower and vegetable gardens, trees, shrubs, and lawns. But sometimes, you have to give your plants an added boost. That’s where commercial fertilizers come in.
Commercial fertilizers apply the nutrients that plants need directly to the plants.
The soil is the heart of your urban farm, and organic matter is the soul of your soil. Organic matter in the soil is miraculous stuff. It can take a sandy, lifeless soil and make it teem with vitality again. It can take a rock-hard, clay soil and open it up into a loose, easy-to-work, fertile material.
Although it’s a great addition to any soil, organic matter is a particularly important addition to soils that you till or turn over a lot, such as the soil in a vegetable or annual flower garden.
Urban
In creating an outdoor room out of your urban garden, you should start by taking an inventory of your existing conditions and how to plan for the development of your outdoor room, including listing current and proposed uses.
Of course your analysis also identifies other important features such as the size of your garden area, solar orientation, existing utilities, site features, and topographical conditions, to name a few.
Most people think of farms as beautiful places in pastoral settings. Even in botanical gardens that grace most cities around the globe, the greenery and gardens there create a sanctuary that is fenced in and often hidden from view.
But cities have many places to garden beyond the botanical garden. Many city residents have a yard where they can tuck in gardens.
Creating the perfect urban garden is one thing. The right tool makes or breaks a gardening job. Using a hoe to dig a hole for planting a tree is like eating soup with a fork. It’s just not the right tool for the task.Hand trowels and cultivatorsHand tools are perfect for gardening in raised beds, containers, and window boxes.
Although you can't change your regional weather or macroclimatic conditions to be ideal for urban farming, you can figure out how to effectively analyze your own urban landscapes at a microclimatic level and make important adjustments to improve your urban gardening success. Understanding your urban microclimate can help you save money and (literally) create your own "cool place" within your urban garden space.
In some ways, animal manure is a better sustainable fertilizer for an urban farm than raw organic matter like grasses or woodchips. It doesn't take much time to decompose, like raw organic matter. Think of animals as composting factories: In goes the raw materials in the form of hay, straw, grass, and kitchen scraps, and out comes the fertilizer in the form of manure.
Many urban farmers favor organic fertilizers over chemical ones for several reasons. Although organic fertilizers may be slower to release their nutrients, they offer you and your garden many advantages:
Organic fertilizers feed the soil by supplying nutrients to microbes that help keep a healthy, balanced soil ecosystem.
The soil particle size determines how well your urban garden will drain water. The microbes and plant roots need a balance of air and water in the soil to thrive, which is why proper soil water drainage is essential.
While some plants, such as cactuses, can survive on dry soil that drains water fast, and other plants, such as willows, can survive in temporary standing water, most plants need a well-drained soil to grow their best.
Worms are amazing decomposers and will produce excellent fertilizer important for urban farming. They’re voracious vegetarians, eating materials such as vegetable kitchen scraps, fruit peels, shredded black and white paper, pulverized eggshells, and coffee grounds. In fact, they eat their weight in kitchen scraps every day!
Urban
Compost can be a great way to reduce your trash and sustainably produce your own fertilizer for your urban farm. Compost is both the process by which many gardeners manage the decomposition of organic matter and the end result of this process.
How to choose a compost container
You can find many different compost bins on the market today, or you can make one yourself.
Urban
When you’re planning to grow an annual flowers or vegetables on your urban farm, you need to decide whether you want to start with seeds or transplants. Growing annual plants from seeds offers the following advantages:
Variety: Buying seeds enables you to select from a wider range of plant varieties than what you typically find at a local garden center.
When talking soil, a little knowledge goes a long way. And most important for urban farmers is recognizing your soil type and its health. Some soils are naturally fertile and need little altering, but others need an overhaul. Knowing where you stand with your soil helps you determine what fertilizers and amendments you need to add before you get started.
Urban
The sweetness (alkalinity) or sourness (acidity) of your soil is measured by a term called pH. This term is used a lot in farming circles. It’s not necessary to understand the chemistry behind this “measure of hydrogen ion concentration.” What you really need to know is the pH number of your soil.
The pH scale runs from 1 to 14, with 1 being the most acidic and 14 the most alkaline.
Urban
Before you get started sowing seeds or planting transplants in your urban garden, it’s good to understand about frost dates and how they affect when you plant your seeds or seedlings indoors or outside. To keep track of the process, create a seed-starting schedule.
You can begin planning your seed-starting schedule in the winter months or early spring season.
Whether you’re ready to plant your homegrown seedlings in your urban farm or the ones you bought at a local garden center, the basic steps are the same:
In the days leading up to planting, let your seedlings spend some time outside so they can harden off.
Hardening off means getting your seedlings accustomed to the outdoors before transplanting them into the garden or container.
You don’t need to plant everything as seedlings. For those annual flowers and vegetables that you want to sow directly in the soil from seeds, follow these steps:
Determine the right time to sow the seeds in your area.
Use your seed-starting schedule, look at each seed packet for information on the best sowing time for your region, or contact the Master Gardener Program in your area to determine the right time to plant.
Urban gardening requires some creativity and flexibility, but the benefits you reap are well worth the effort. Your family can enjoy fresh vegetables and herbs all season long, and gardening is great exercise. You can plant an urban garden in a vacant lot, an underused parking area, or your roof, back deck, or patio.
Regardless of what tree or shrub you want to grow, the planting process is the same. If you don’t know which type of tree or shrub you want to add to your garden, consider your three options:
Bare root: These deciduous trees and shrubs are dug from nurseries in the late winter, before the leaves emerge in spring, and shipped to you, usually via the mail.
Urban
In creating your own vertical garden, you can use do-it-yourself containers or ready-made products you can buy at the local urban gardening store. Here are some of these options:
How to make your own garden containers
Almost any plant will grow in a suitably sized container, so be creative and have fun! Don’t forget watering and maintenance considerations when reusing and building your own vertical container systems.
If you want to grow spring and summer flowering bulbs, such as tulips, daffodils, lilies, and gladiolus, you can plant them in the fall (for spring-flowering bulbs) or the spring (for summer-flowering bulbs).
Planting bulbs is especially fun in urban gardens because you always get a pleasant surprise in the spring when they start popping up around the garden.
Urban
Container gardens are perfect for small urban gardesn. Maintaining container-grown plants means keeping them well watered, fertilized, and pruned; and keeping pests at bay.
Containers in the city can heat up fast and furious in full sun. Even plants that are labeled as heat-loving can overheat on a hot summer day.
Urban
How well your tree or shrub grows in its first year in your urban garden depends on a number of factors. Planting the right tree in the right location and selecting a variety that’s adapted to your area are probably the two most important pieces to the puzzle. But after your tree or shrub is safely in the ground, you can help keep it healthy by following these basic guidelines:
Keep watering.
Load More Articles
Related Books
0:00
0:00
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6630d85d73068bc09c7c436c/69195ee32d5c606051d9f433_4.%20All%20For%20You.mp3
Frequently Asked Questions
No items found.
