Growing your own food is back in style.
Mail-order nurseries are reporting that seed orders are way up, First Lady Michelle Obama and the White House chefs have broken ground on a garden for family meals, and the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show featured a food garden at this year's event in March.
The garden show has usually had some edibles in the main display gardens primarily for their ornamental appeal – or a smaller, off-the-main-concourse edible garden. But this is the first year I've noticed a garden under the big tent focused on food production.
Created by Alane Weber of the Master Composter Program of San Mateo County RecycleWorks and Patricia Becker of Common Ground Garden Supply and Education Center, the garden featured four types of raised beds.
Raised beds are an important part of biointensive vegetable gardening, whose goal is to produce the most food from the least space. Rather than being planted in rows, vegetables are planted in a space-saving pattern so that their foliage will completely cover the soil as they reach maturity. A raised bed about 3 to 4 feet wide allows you to reach across the bed without stepping on, and compacting, the soil.
The simplest type of raised bed is created by mounding soil up to a foot high. The mounded form creates more planting space than its flat footprint. On the sloping sides of one mound were shorter vegetables; another one used longer-season flowers and herbs that stabilize the soil and also attract beneficial insects.
In the rainy season, a mulched swale between raised beds can collect rainwater so that it can slowly soak into the soil instead of running offsite.
Another type of raised bed shown at the garden show used straw rolled into bundles, called wattles, to hold the edges of the garden bed temporarily. Lyngso Garden Supply in Redwood City sells wattles. Depending on the garden, wattles might last from 1 to 3 years.
If you're breaking up a concrete sidewalk, driveway, or patio, you can reuse the broken-up chunks, called urbanite, as stepping stones or stack them to make a taller raised bed. Urbanite makes a nice low wall for sitting on the side of the raised bed.
In a talk on urban gardening at the show, San Francisco landscape designer Alma Hecht said that dry-stacked urbanite is sturdier than mortared rock for walls under 3 feet high because its uneven surfaces keep it in place. You can tuck small plants into the nooks and crannies, or at the base of the wall, to help it blend into the garden.
The last type of raised bed used concrete or cinder blocks, stacked three high. With the open sides facing up, invasive plants such as mint could be grown in the cavities. The garden creators also suggested growing strawberries or herbs in the cavities.
The blocks are less expensive than wood, don't leach toxics as would pressure-treated lumber or reused railroad ties, are modular and reusable, and last forever, they said.
Themes emphasized in this garden, and echoed in many other show gardens this year, were the use of recycled materials, habitat gardening, creative reuse of repurposed materials, and sustainability.
© 2009 Tanya Kucak