If you live in the city you may feel like you’ve got no space. If so, you definitely have no garden space.
A lot of cities provide a community garden space, but you probably have to pay to use them. It’s a garden that you’ve got to drive to and when you get there you notice how your garden has changed. Not necessarily grown, but changed.
Because you can’t get there often, you can’t ensure your veggies and herbs are growing properly. A number of things can ruin your spot in the community garden. Other people hijack your space. It’s not truly “your space”. You don’t know how the other gardeners work, what products or chemicals they use, and how that affects your garden space.
Dig It
City gardens can contain more than just the seeds you plant. Toxins from pollution, exhaust from passing cars, and heavy metals, organic chemicals, and other contaminants are all potential problems in a city garden, a study shows. They could even all be carcinogens.
So what can you do to make sure your garden is happy and healthy? Even if you live in the city you can make and maintain a garden space to call your own.
Just look at what NYC restaurant Bell Book & Candle owner1, John Mooney, is doing. He has a rooftop garden built six floors above his restaurant, in the heart of New York City. His rooftop hydroponic garden uses no soil, but a nutrient-rich water system to make his goodness grow.
A Bulb Is A Good Idea
Mr. Mooney is able to produce different kinds of vegetables (like tomatoes and lettuce), herbs, and spices by growing them vertically. It is a great use of dead space that would otherwise go unused.
When his produce is done growing, Mooney, hoists the delicious leafy greens down to his restaurant, where he can truthfully claim homegrown ingredients. If not homegrown, at least very locally sourced.
So how can you make your own clean garden space? Here are a few things to look for initially:
- Location, location, location: Try to secure a location for your garden that doesn’t have a lot of traffic. A lot of cars and trucks means air pollution, oils, and other carcinogens getting into your garden’s soil. Foot traffic can be an issue too, as people may kick other contaminants into your healthy garden, tainting it.
- Get the soil’s history: You can test your garden soil, but all the contaminants won’t necessarily show up in the tests. If there are laundromats close by, detergents may have seeped into surrounding soil.
- Use the right materials: If you’re making a raised garden you’ve got to choose safe materials to construct your garden’s foundation. Pressure-treated wood contains chemicals that will seep into your soil. Recycling wood from a build site may seem smart, but you’ve got no idea what that wood was used for, or how it was treated.
The Garden Is Growing Up
Big urban cities have no more space to grow out, so they’ve been growing up for decades. Tall buildings and skyscrapers are the future of gardening. Soon, whole floors of large buildings will be used to produce fruits and vegetables of all kinds. These spaces will also help to purify air and water, as well as give a quiet retreat for residents.
1 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5tnHfikb64
