It is a common misconception that it is almost impossible to grow food and herbs in the city. In reality, we can grow much more, and this article shares how.
At one of the most stressful times of my life, I discovered growing food at a small permaculture garden in the city I was living. It changed everything. I met extraordinary people and began a journey connecting with a much bigger world.
With over half the globe living in cities, there are plenty of practical arguments for urban food production. We need more good food, more habitat for wildlife, and as much carbon sequestration as we can manage. Another (often underestimated) reason is that urban growing is a vital way to reconnect with land and life. When you start to grow food in cities you start to pay attention in different ways. Critical questions about our built environment arise: What is that derelict plot next to Asda for? Why don’t we have fruit trees on our street? Why is that development project more important than the park?
Tending gardens is a journey of becoming more intimate with life, and it can be a powerful tool to reclaim some agency. While cities (stacked with concrete-profit-siphons-for-speculative-finance) can be intensely alienating places, they can also be places where some of the most imaginative interventions happen. The limitations of brick, glass and unequal access to power, can occasion gorgeous horticultural resistance. Let’s explore some of the ways we can all do this.
Growing in your home
Many of us aren’t lucky enough to have access to outdoor garden space. But this doesn’t need to mean we can’t produce food for ourselves. If you have windowsills with enough sunlight, plants like tomatoes, salad greens and herbs are terrific low-maintenance plants to experiment with, while avoiding plants that prefer deeper soil like beans, cucumbers, courgettes and squashes.
If you don’t have enough sunlight (or even if you do), I recommend growing mushrooms. They are absurdly easy. All that’s required is a starter spawn, either a plastic bag or a bucket, some straw from a pet shop and used coffee grounds from your morning cup or a local cafe. Oyster mushrooms are especially straightforward, beautiful and delicious. They can be ready to eat in as little as four weeks. For some detailed guides on growing different kinds of mushrooms, the FreshCap Mushrooms Youtube channel is a good place to start. After harvesting your mushrooms, which can fruit a number of times, the leftover straw (the substrate) is a great addition to your compost pile.
This is the other subtle bonus of growing even a small amount in your home: it encourages you to pay more attention to the cycles of nutrients and energy that sustain us. For those of us who have a green waste council collection scheme, we are in fact giving away enormously energy and nutrient-rich material for free. Even without an outdoor space, it’s easy to turn our food waste into compost. The 1000 Worm Farmers project has a great detailed guide on how to do this using worms which you can purchase. A small adjustment to the kitchen routine means we don’t have to buy compost, rather we can cut our waste and forge new friendships with our invertebrate allies.
Growing in small gardens or plots
If you do have access to one, you can produce an enormous amount of food in a small garden. The Instagram influencer Spicy Moustache (Alessandro Vitale) might be one of the most popular spokespeople for this at the moment. His videos show how, by using vertical space and layering different plants, as well as including mushroom logs, you can produce over 100kg of food in a year.
Alessandro’s also a great guide for thinking about the whole ecosystem. He plants pollinator-loving flowers that are also edible like calendula, cornflower and (a favourite of ours) nasturtium. He uses woodchip -which tree surgeons are always more than happy to give away!- to mulch his paths, eventually turning it into usable compost. He reuses old plastic bottles to cover his walls in strawberries and herbs. And he innoculates logs with mushroom spores which can sit quietly in an unused shaded corner.
His is an intensely managed space, which requires frequent, consistent attention. Not every garden can be stewarded so carefully. It’s important to ask at the start, what is your relationship to the plants you’re growing likely to be? Will you have a few minutes every day to tend them? Will you have a few hours one day a week to tend them? Will you have barely any time to tend them at all? This might shape whether you decide to grow low-maintenance perennial plants, like herbs, berries, jerusalem artichokes, or kale. Or whether you might grow plants that are slightly needier, like tomatoes or cucumbers.
It’s also important at this point to recognise how growing in cities is a different thing to growing in the countryside. The heavily built-up city creates different opportunities and limitations to growing. To start with, we have access to resources that farmers can only dream of. Food waste is abundant, most cafes and restaurants will gladly give away their coffee and food scraps which can be turned into extremely rich compost. The ‘heat island effect’ of cities created by the concrete, brick and glass gives us an extra few degrees to grow in and usually a longer season. At the same time, other resources, like sunlight and space can often be scarce.
The sheer diversity of a city’s infrastructure makes it important to pay careful attention to the microclimate of each garden. Ours, for instance, has red brick on both sides and is south facing. It gets incredibly hot in the summer. Because of that, we grow tomatoes, cucumbers and other warmth-loving crops. When we try to grow lettuces, spinach and rocket in direct sun it almost always bolts (goes to seed) quickly. In other gardens, it’s the opposite: buildings cast shade and leafy greens, rhubarb and brassicas will fare better.
Growing in the community
If you don’t have access to a garden where you live, there are many other ways to get growing. It’s important not to gloss over some of the reasons why so many people don’t have access to land. One of the events that shaped world history more than most others was the enclosing of the commons and the mass dispossession of English people from their land from the 16th to the 18th century. It’s globally significant because it marked the beginning of capitalism and colonialism saw it repeated the world over. Since then land ownership has become extraordinarily unequal, and where people used to have rights to cultivate common land and smallholdings, now many of us are lucky to even have a small garden.
One of the small concessions that peasants and the newly dispossessed won were the right to have allotments (1). Even though they have gotten smaller and smaller over the 20th century, allotments are still a vital route to connecting with the land. Everyone (with citizenship status) has the right to apply for one.
Because of the alienating character of cities and the unequal distribution of land, more and more people are taking to guerilla gardening as a means of reconnecting and reclaiming agency. One of the beacons of this movement in the UK is Incredible Edible. It began in the small town of Todmorden in the north of England in 2008, and has since taken the world by storm. The idea is very simple: let’s grow food in unused public places and ask forgiveness rather than permission. When you walk through Todmorden today every verge, traffic island or over-wide pavement is heaving with plants. The loose group of volunteers meets every weekend and tends to the crops. Everyone is able to take as much as they need. Ellen Miles has recently published Get Guerilla Gardening, which along with the website, is a library of information on the history and how-to of guerilla gardening. You can use the Incredible Edible website to see if one of the 150 pop-up groups is near you.
This is a great intervention in our cities, but to grow lots of food, reliably, we’ll also need long-term community gardens. Typically these consist of council-owned land leased out to community groups. In my experience, these are vibrant places held together by committed and inspiring people. For many, they offer a gateway into the world of horticulture, or at the very least a break for overstimulated urban nervous systems.
Community gardens vary in scale, scope and ambition. Some might offer small learning hubs for people to explore alternative forms of agriculture like permaculture, agroforestry or natural farming. Others might be sufficiently organised to be supplying veg box schemes or schools. In any case, they are often havens: small examples of the world we’d like to see.
Growing in the city would be important even if we weren’t in a crisis. The connection to more than human life cycles can profoundly shape the decisions we make about how to live. And cities that don’t grow food often distort and exploit the countryside to provide for it, known in social theory as the ‘metabolic rift’ (2). Our cities also contain some of the most concentrated areas of economic destitution, and access to good, healthy food is a part of how communities can survive in otherwise brutal conditions (3).
But we are in a crisis. This summer El Nino is set to combine with global heating to take us into even more extreme heat conditions. Our global supply chains are not prepared for the shocks, and many large exporters of food are likely to need it themselves. Within our current economic system any shortages and rises in price will affect people with fewer resources more. Growing in the city is a way to strengthen food security for all of us, and, if done with accessibility as a priority, can help ameliorate the unjust impact of climate breakdown.
References
- Broad J. Agrarian Capitalism and Poor Relief in England, 1500-1860: Rethinking the Origins of the Welfare State – by Larry Patriquin. Journal of Agrarian Change. 2009;9:305-307. doi:10.1111/j.1471-0366.2009.00211.x
- Milbourne P. Everyday (in)justices and ordinary environmentalisms: community gardening in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods. Local Environment. 2012;17(9):943-957. doi:10.1080/13549839.2011.607158
- Moore JW. Transcending the metabolic rift: a theory of crises in the capitalist world-ecology. The Journal of Peasant Studies. 2011;38(1):1-46. doi:10.1080/03066150.2010.538579
