Back to mother nature

I know you're dying to know what will become of my garden! I haven't even had a chance to post about its progress and it's been seven weeks since I planted it. I started out with a lasagna garden but ended up hacking back the bamboo and making the garden bigger. I dug into the earth and pulled out pounds of debris - broken glass, rusted nails, old saw blades! I amended the soil with compost and manure and planted even more plants. I love digging out there, it's so relaxing.


San Francisco is chilly so my plants don't get enough consistent warmth and sun to really produce the way the seed packages promised. My mom's garden in So Cal, by comparison, runs wild and they can barely keep up. I will enjoy giving it some love and eating the fruits of my labor but will also miss my little city garden.


I returned a derelict patch of dirt filled with debris back to mother earth and there's an enormous amount of satisfaction in watching the cycle of life happening in the garden. I found this photo of what a dreary scene it was when I moved in.


I just hope that someone who loves vegetables moves in here and takes over. I won't have been here long enough to reap the full harvest of this garden:


I've been eating lettuce, arugula, fresh herbs, cilantro and radishes from it for weeks and there just might be summer squash before I hit the road.


A butterfly has been visiting me for the last week, flying around me as I water and pull weeds. It's the first time I've ever seen a beautiful creature back there and I believe it's because the garden is a happy place now. I did that.

Lasagna garden

I've decided to plant a garden. I've lived in this apartment almost nine months, I'm not sure why it's taken me so long. My neighbor said the soil in our small patch of yard was shit but then I remembered it doesn't matter. Last year, I helped a friend of mine create a lasagna garden in her backyard. The idea is simple: You put layers of wet newspaper on top of any ground surface - grass, weeds, rocks, it doesn't matter - and layer peat moss and any organic material you can find like compost, manure, clippings, etc. Then you plant your garden! My mom always says that vegetables are the easiest plants to grow. People always complaining that they kill plants in their house don't have to worry. As long as you have light and water, veggies will grow. Fruits too!


The best thing about this method, other than the obvious ease of it, is that you leave the soil undisturbed. That means earthworms and other bugs that till the soil will find their way into your garden and keep it growing. I remember reading an article about a guy who turns lawns into food gardens. In the article, his company was rototilling this front yard and broke their machine on the grass roots and rocks. It was totally silly, renting that expensive machine and going through all that work, and killing all the sweet little earthworms! All you have to do is layer on top. The lack of light kills grass roots and anything else much easier than any chemicals or forceful extraction, the newspaper eventually gets eaten by worms and dissolves into the earth.

I've been mulling over this idea for some time. I can't see the garden from my apartment so it's easy to forget that there is a patch of land down there. Then yesterday, walking around, I saw that someone in San Francisco was growing vegetables in pots on the sidewalk! It really is that easy and I have no excuses. Here's how to do it.


Without getting into this too much, I believe that water and food are going to become serious battle grounds as people start to realize that mass production of food has driven it into very unhealthy directions. Big agribusiness is not likely to give up huge profits to make our food healthier and treat the earth better but we DO have control over our food - we can all plant vegetables. Power to the people!