APRIL/MAY 2009
Creating Community Prosperity
Crystal Arnold
Re-Localizing Capital
Jeff Golden
How Unlimited Interest Rates
Destroyed the Economy
Amy Goodman interviews
Thomas Geoghegan
Honoring the Duh-Design Principles
Shaktari Belew
Stimulating Local Agriculture
Jody Woodruf
Fresh Food From Small Spaces
R.J. Ruppenthal
Small Farm Renaissance
Chuck Burr
Where Are the Seed Growers?
Don Tipping
Try it On Everything!
The Healing Power of EFT
DVD Review by Jill V. Mangino
A Naturopathic Perspective
on Vaccination Choices
Michael H. Shuman
Safety and Protection
Peter Moore
Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain
Fresh Food From Small Spaces
By R. J. Ruppenthal
“While the information in this book will benefit all those seeking to grow
and prepare their own food at home, it is especially informative for
people with only limited space. This is the perfect answer to the
question many people are asking me: How can I take charge
of my own life now that food prices are soaring when I
hardly have space for a container-grown tomato or two?
Reading Ruppenthal, I get a distinct feeling that one
an grow enough food to survive on down in
the cellar and out on the porch.”
- Gene Logsdon, author of
The Contrary Farmer and Small-Scale Grain Raising
Fresh Food From Small Spaces teaches the reader how to transform balconies and windowsills into productive vegetable gardens, countertops and storage lockers into commercial-quality sprout and mushroom farms, and outside nooks and crannies into whatever you can imagine, including sustainable nurseries for honeybees and chickens. Free space for the city gardener might be no more than a cramped patio, balcony, rooftop, windowsill, hanging rafter, dark cabinet, garage, or storage area, but no space is too small or too dark to raise food.
Books on container gardening have been wildly popular with urban and suburban readers, but until now, there has been no comprehensive “how-to” guide for growing fresh food in the absence of open land. Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square-Inch Gardener’s Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting fills the gap as a practical, comprehensive, and downright fun guide to growing food in small spaces. It provides readers with the knowledge and skills necessary to produce their own fresh vegetables, mushrooms, sprouts, and fermented foods as well as to raise bees and chickens—all without reliance on energy-intensive systems like indoor lighting and hydroponics.
With this book as a guide, people living in apartments, condominiums, townhouses, and single-family homes will be able to grow their own fresh food using a combination of traditional gardening methods and space-saving techniques such as reflected lighting and container “terracing.” Those with access to yards can produce even more.
Author R. J. Ruppenthal worked on an organic vege-table farm in his youth, but his expertise in urban and indoor gardening has been hard-won through years of trial-and-error experience. In the small city homes where he has lived, often with no more than a balcony, windowsill, and countertop for gardening, Ruppenthal and his family have been able to eat at least some homegrown food 365 days per year. In an era of declining resources and environmental dis-ruption, Ruppenthal shows that even urban dwellers can contribute to a rebirth of local, fresh foods. Thanks to Chelsea Green Publishing for the following excerpt.
If you’re reading these words, chances are you that you don’t have a lot of space. You have a small home with an even smaller backyard, a townhouse with a patio, or an apartment with nothing more than a sunny window. Regardless of what kind of space you have available, though—a rooftop, balcony, staircase, garage, storage space, windowsill, or countertop—you can probably utilize it for food growing. We may be limited by the amount of free space we have, but not by our imaginations. This book is about imagining what’s possible, about putting those ideas into action, and about producing good, fresh food for yourself and your family, even from tight spaces.
No one can ever be entirely self-sufficient in the city. But in most urban spaces, with enough creativity and dedication, you can grow a sizeable portion of the food your family needs. You may even decide to specialize in one crop, such as chicken eggs, mushrooms, or carrots, leaving you with more than enough to fill your family’s requirements for that food and still have enough left over to sell or trade for other things you need. By reading this book, you will learn some ideas and strategies for making productive use of your available space. You will learn what equipment and resources you need to get started. And you will receive my encouragement along the way, because it’s important to me that more people start reconnecting with their food sources. Think of this as an enjoyable “mini-course” in urban food production.
As you learn more about the possibilities, think about which spaces you can use for your food production. If you have space outdoors and want to start a small garden in the ground or in containers, then the most important considerations will be light and warmth. Most gardening experts will tell you not to even think about vegetable growing if you get less than 6 to 8 hours per day of direct sunlight, but in fact you can raise many types of vegetables on much less light than this. It is true that to grow fruiting vegetables such as tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, squash, or berries, your space needs to receive at least 4 to 5 hours of strong, direct sunlight per day (preferably more), plus some reflected light and residual warmth. If your light conditions are no better than this minimum, then I would recommend starting with smaller fruiting vegetables such as cherry tomatoes, which need less light energy to ripen than the larger varieties. The same goes for peppers: If you’re right on the edge of not having enough light and your summers are warm, you might be able to coax a few banana peppers or chili peppers to ripen, but probably not the larger bell peppers. Bright, warm, south-facing walls can add some reflective light, and a porch or patio light with a compact fluorescent bulb will help too. If your outdoor growing space is light poor, then look to legumes, root vegetables, and leafy greens. Bush beans and peas can handle partial shade, as can carrots, beets, and other root vegetables. Leafy vegetables such as spinach, chard, rhubarb, broccoli, cabbage, and kale can produce even in a shady spot that has some reflected light. Potatoes, herbs, onions, and garlic can function in partial shade also, but they are much more productive with more sunlight. Consider trying a variety of veggies at first to see what works on your site; you may be disappointed by some, but pleasantly rewarded by others.
You also can use outdoor space for growing mushrooms or for a chicken coop or bee colony, giving you a sustainable supply of fresh eggs or honey. Chickens can live in a coop or hutch on a minimal amount of space, whether it be on a lawn, porch, patio, or mounted on the side of a wall. Their manure can fertilize your garden too. Chickens are useful primarily for egg laying, and their eggs are a renewable resource that provides balanced protein and good nutrition. A beehive can take up even less horizontal space than a chicken coop, does not need sunlight, and takes less work than owning a dog. Raising a colony of bees in a medium-sized hive can provide you with 100 to 150 pounds (two or three big buckets) of your own honey each season. If you can’t eat it all, remember that local honey is expensive; you can either sell it or trade it (along with extra beeswax) for something else you need.
Indoor space can be used for gardening too if there’s a sunny spot on a windowsill or in a room: container vegetables, herbs, and small fruit trees are all possibilities here. The more vexing question is how to use shadier spaces such as extra rooms, closets and cabinets, garages, storage areas, unused bathtubs, and kitchen counters. Perhaps you never thought of these as growing areas, but where there’s space, there’s growing potential! I have a very vertical sprouting operation on top of my refrigerator that produces 2 to 3 pounds of sprouts per week for eating and wheatgrass for juicing. You could also raise gourmet mushrooms or brew ginger beer, wine, or kefir in that space. Start a worm bin on a balcony or in a garage for composting organic wastes or for fishing bait sales. There are many possibilities for using even shady urban spaces in a productive way.
If horizontal space is limited, don’t be afraid to think vertically: I have seen chicken cages mounted on vertical walls outside a person’s home, and many small gardeners successfully grow strawberries or tomatoes from baskets that hang from an eave or rafter. A dwarf fruit tree or berry bush can make the best use of a dusty patch of ground or large container, giving you a vertical harvest without using much horizontal space.
In full sunlight you can grow anything you can fit, including fruits, berries, and vegetables of all kinds. Your main limitations are likely to be climate and space, but thankfully you do not have to worry about a lack of light.
Urban (and Suburban) Chickens
If you have sufficient yard space, why not try raising your own chickens? This is sustainable farming at its best. Chickens can roam a small backyard and rid it of insects, slugs, and weed seeds. In exchange, you can get around 4 to 7 eggs per week from each chicken plus some yard fertilizer. Free-range chicken eggs are delicious and nutritious; if you’ve never had fresh eggs, you’ll be amazed at how much better they taste than the factory-farmed ones. If you have access only to a shared yard or common area in an apartment or condominium building, you might try talking your neighbors and building management into sharing some chickens. If you volunteer to take care of the birds, others might agree to share the small costs in exchange for some eggs, and this could give you access to the yard space. If allowing chickens to roam is impossible where you live, then look into buying or building a chicken tractor, which is essentially a mobile pen that you can wheel from place to place. Using a chicken tractor allows the birds to eat all the bugs, seeds, and weeds they want in one spot and then move to another. If you live in a larger building with a shared backyard, tell your building manager or homeowners’ association that your chickens can fertilize the lawn. If you don’t have any space to let chickens roam, then you can still keep them in a small coop, but you’ll have to provide all their food, and this can get more expensive.
Before deciding to get chickens, make sure that it’s legal to keep them where you live. Check local zoning ordinances by visiting the Web site for your local city or county. The good news is that even though many cities regulate chickens, most of them do permit you to keep a few chickens for personal use.
Even if it is legal to keep chickens where you live, you can still run afoul of other laws relating to public health and noise levels. Public health laws remind you to keep the pens clean and the chickens free from disease, which is a good idea anyway. Where noise ordinances are in force, residents may be cited or fined for animals that bother the neighbors. Hens are not as loud as roosters, but they can cluck enough to bother close neighbors. One way to handle this is to talk to your neighbors before getting the chickens and help them understand what you are planning. (Hint: If you offer neighbors some free eggs, they may see the logic in your plans.)
When selecting chickens, remember that you don’t need roosters for egg laying. Roosters are loud, can be obnoxious, and are illegal to keep in many jurisdictions. You’ll do better with three or four hens that can live together peacefully and lay eggs.
Chickens need basic shelter and enough space to roam a little. Their shelter need not be a formal chicken coop or animal hutch, but could be any appropriate small structure that you can either construct or commandeer. For example, an old toolshed or doghouse might work, or you could build your own shelter from some wooden crates or salvaged lumber. A small 2’ W x 4’ L x 2’ H coop could be space enough for a pair of smaller chickens. An 8’ x 12’ coop can accommodate up to 30 regular-sized chickens, but you should avoid overcrowding or else you will risk stress, disease, and unproductive hatching. Using chicken wire and a frame, you can either build in a small yard or run outside the main structure, or let them roam free when they come outside. Cover the bottom of the chicken house with some sand and a layer of bedding material (known as “litter”), which could be 3 to 4 inches of straw or untreated wood chips, or more in colder weather. For other chicken coop building plans, try an Internet search or seek out a book (there are several in print) that covers some different coop designs. You also can purchase chicken coops ready-made from pet stores and feed stores.
Whatever structure you use for a chicken house should provide some protection from the elements and from extreme temperatures. In mild climates, the building alone should shield them from any wind and rain, but in colder winter areas, you may need to both insulate and heat the structure. Optimum temperature range for egg laying is between about 55 and 85 degrees F. There are many types of acceptable structures for this, and some are handmade. During the winter in a cold climate, if you do not want to heat or insulate, then you could consider bringing this coop into a garage or greenhouse for protection, at least during the night. Since egg laying is a function of day length, you can encourage egg laying in colder weather by installing a regular incandescent lightbulb and leaving it on.
Inside the chicken house, you also should place some nesting spots and places for chickens to roost (sit up off the ground). The roosts can be anywhere they can climb up and sit, such as a shelf or ladder made of small dowels. The nesting areas, which encourage egg laying, should be fairly tight wooden boxes measuring about 14 inches on each side and about 12 inches deep. An unused shoe rack with individual-sized boxes or a few old tool drawers may do the trick, but you could easily make some boxes yourself out of any available wood.
It’s good to protect against other dangers as well. Wild predators are not the problem in the city that they are in the country, but even dogs and cats can do great damage to an unprotected flock. Also, though I live in an urban area, we occasionally see owls, crows, raccoons, and opossums as well as plenty of squirrels. These animals can either steal eggs or harm the chickens themselves if both are not protected, particularly at night. Chicken wire or poultry wire, available at hardware stores, has a small enough mesh that it should keep out any predators. The chicken house, and perhaps the entire coop, should be surrounded by chicken wire. Ideally, you should make a “floor” of chicken wire as well to seal in the coop, which still allows the chickens to peck at the ground below if you have their pen or a lawn or bare earth. With no chicken wire base, you need to be extra careful to weight down the sides with a wooden or metal frame, so that no predator can push up the wire or dig beneath it to make an entry hole. Make one mistake and you’re bound to lose some chickens, and any survivors may be too stressed out to lay eggs for a while.
Buying commercial chicken feed is the easiest way to ensure your chickens get balanced food, and it’s a good way to start out, but you can reduce costs over time by allowing them to supplement their diet through foraging. Chickens enjoy eating your fruit and vegetable scraps as long as you avoid giving them anything strong-tasting (for example, onions or garlic), which can affect the flavor of eggs. Bread scraps and grass clippings are also good chicken food. But do not feed them any more than what they can eat in 10 to 20 minutes, or else their diets may become imbalanced. You also can feed them whole grains to cut down on costs, but limit this to 1/2 pound per ten chickens to maintain balance. Scattering these grains on the ground encourages them to scratch the litter for their food, which will aerate it and keep it in better condition. You can purchase feeders and waterers fairly cheaply online or from pet or feed stores. Finally, make sure you change the litter in the coop frequently (the bedding and manure, when aged, make great compost), gather eggs once or twice per day, and maintain the chickens’ living quarters in a sanitary condition, which often means limiting outside moisture and keeping things dry.
R. J. Ruppenthal is a licensed attorney and college professor, but he has never given up on his gardening passion, even when his day jobs led him to a more urban life. He currently teaches at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose, California, and lives and gardens in the San Francisco Bay area.
