kicker, of course, is that this little exercise in fruit and vegetable production consumed most of their lives—or it sounds that way, at least, in her delightful telling. If you share her dream of extreme self-sufficiency in the food department, read her book before you plunk down money on the farm—you just might slump away, tired at the thought of all that gardening work. (One small corner of my self-sufficiency daydream she didn’t deflate, though, concerns cheese-making. I plan to spend next winter following her lead and turning my kitchen into a dairy. She makes homemade cream cheese and mozzarella sound very simple, and very tasty, indeed.)
What I found most revealing about Kingsolver’s story is not the time she needed to spend in order to eat off her land, but the relatively tiny amount of space in which it was possible. Others have found much the same thing. According to R.J. Ruppenthal’s book Fresh Food from Small Spaces, published in 2008, “Most urban residents can learn to grow as much as 10 to 20 percent of the fresh food their families eat from an average-sized urban condominium or apartment space. Those with a backyard or larger patio can do even better.” The Backyard Homestead (2009), edited by Carleen Madigan, suggests that “A quarter-acre lot, planned out well and cultivated intensively, can produce most of the food for a small family,” and estimates yields of 2,000-plus pounds of vegetables from a quarter-acre lot. Even those without in-ground growing space can get impressive yields: “you can grow as many as 15 pounds of tomatoes from just one self-watering container on the back patio.”
If all these numbers and stats seem a bit, well, theoretical rather than lived, here are some results from people walking the talk. In the late 1990s, a group of seniors in Toronto growing vegetables at the Frances Beavis Community Garden divided 1,000 square feet of land into twenty-six plots. One of the gardeners grew more than 35 kilograms of vegetables—pak choy, amaranth, spinach, hairy gourd, and more—in her 3 ½-square-meter plot. The Dervaes family of Pasadena, California, had even more dramatic results. In 2002, they decided to grow more vegetables and fewer flowers in their front yard and backyard. The first year, they harvested 2,500 pounds; the second year, 3,500 pounds; the third year, 6,000 pounds. All this—350 different types of vegetables, herbs, edible flowers, fruits, and berries, grown organically—from one-tenth of an acre. (The film HomeGrown documents their adventure.)
My favorite story of inspiring fecundity, though, comes from Chris Thoreau, a British Columbian gardener and urban agriculture activist. In 2008, Thoreau harvested more than 800 pounds of squash from one Vancouver yard—and passed it along to a local community center.
Of course, things don’t work out so productively for everyone. Brooklyn writer Manny Howard tells the disastrous story of his experiment in subsistence farming in that city in a 2007 New York Magazine article. Soil tests revealed that his 20-foot-by-40-foot backyard plot was loaded with lead, so he had 5 ½ tons of topsoil trucked in from a Long Island farm, at great expense. Just as his
> Maximizing Space
On small urban lots, the gardener’s lament, if only I had more room, takes on added urgency. One way to maximize yield in minimal space is to plant in layers, making use of the productive potential beyond ground level: tucking fruit-bearing shrubs under nut trees, for example, and shade-tolerant herbs and salad greens under the shrubs.
> Tree (or canopy) layer: fruit trees, edible nut trees
> Smaller tree layer: serviceberries, pawpaws
> Shrub layer: currants, gooseberries, blueberries, raspberries, elderberries
> Vine layer: grapes, kiwis
> Perennial layer: mint, rhubarb
> Annual layer: arugula, lettuce > Groundcover layer: strawberries, creeping thyme
> Soil layer: potatoes, carrots, daikon, parsnips
garden was starting to provide him with food, an August tornado flattened his crops and splintered the roof of his chicken coop. His rabbits failed to reproduce like rabbits, and after taking them to a stud farm to do the deed, the mother rabbit killed all her baby bunnies. By the end of the summer, his garden had managed to feed him for only three weeks—a string of meals he characterized as monotonous. He’d spent $11,000 and lost 29 pounds.
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