Some of the incredible benefits of Food Gardens:
IN HISTORIC TERMS, there’s nothing all that new about urban agriculture; in fact, the very concept of staying in one spot and tending to your favourite foods first occurred not in isolation but in concentration, where big groups of people made permanent encampments. And even up until very recently, micro-farming and small amounts of animal husbandry were part and parcel of the urban experience for a large majority of its citizens. Only in the last half-century have backyard food gardens and chicken coops begun to all but disappear from the urban landscape. But now, the converging emergencies of depleted soils, peak oil, and population explosion mean that as a society, we’re going to have to start changing the way that food is grown and gets to our table. But how?
SOME SCIENTISTS CLAIM that the future of farming is bigger, taller, quicker, more. There is a movement to combat the crisis by relocating food production to the inner cities, by building skyscrapers that house high-tech farm factories. To better understand our possible options, we investigate this proposal in a series of articles. In Part I – Chow Towers of Babel, we come to terms with the full extent of the food problem that we’re facing. In Part II – The History of Height, we look at the logic of densifying human habitats. In Part III – Gasping At Grass, we question the wisdom of trying to prop up a collapsing industrial model with even greater complexity. And we include an Addendum – Approaching Population, in which we confront the controversial issue of population reduction and its implications for food.
AT GREEN APPLE, we are firmly of the opinion that we shouldn’t only be growing ornamental gardens, but that we can transform our little backyard plots into urban homesteads. Again, we’ve written a trio of articles that lays out the ways in which you can produce an abundance of delicious healthy food only footsteps from your back patio. In Part I – Backyard Farming, we deal with the fundamentals: herbs, fruits, & vegetables. In Part II – Backyard Chickens, we introduce animal husbandry for urban areas, and as an bonus feature, we include an exclusive interview with a notorious local expert. And in Part III – Extreme Urban Agriculture, we lay out some of the future food frontiers for hard-core homesteaders. Let’s talk about how to turn your under-utilized resources into a permaculture paradise.
BACKYARD CHICKENS FAQ
(Frequently Asked Questions)
