My journey with Urban Farming

I was pretty lucky to get started with gardening or "farming" as young as I did. Growing up just outside of Johannesburg in South Africa, keeping a vegetable garden was a common thing (much like many part of the world). What struck me, even as a kid, was the scale and effort people put into growing food at home vs what I have been accustomed to since moving to Canada.

I will point to the fact that we, and those in my immediate neighbourhood, had full time gardeners or grounds crews who took care of most of the watering and weeding. South Africa also has a longer and gentler growing season than the one we have in the great white north. Still, I was given the opportunity to see "back yard local" food production on a scale that would be totally out of place in North America. 

Fast forward 15 years, I now live in a Condo in the downtown of one of North America's largest and most densely populated cities. While I love everything about the city and the abundance that it offers, I still feel the urge to be attached to something natural. Fortunately enough I have an oversized balcony with tons of room for light and a girlfriend who, like me, grew up with a childhood filled with gardening memories. 

So we decided to make use of the sunniest spot on our balcony to create a small scale "urban farm".

Out first step was building a 180L planter from scratch. To do so I enlisted the help of my brother (out on a trip from Vancouver for the week) to help me.

We searched on Kijiji and found free pallets available at a local warehouse, bought a saw (already had the hammer and nails) and built this bad boy from scratch (60' x' 20' x 40' x 20')
(see photos below).

May 2017:

Shown planted: Tomatoes (4 varieties), Peppers (4 varieties), peas, cauliflower, cucumber (from seed), Herbs (cilantro, oregano, english thyme, basil).

August 2017:

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Results: Overall, 2017 was a mixed bag. We ended up getting a great yield with our strategy to intensively cultivate every square foot of the planters (which neither of us had tried before). But it was so different than being able to cultivate in a wide open space such a back yard. We definitely bought less peppers and tomatoes from the supermarket but some of our crops, like the cauliflowers, failed to materialize (note for 2018).  

We certainly learned a lot about planting in small spaces, like which plants could be planted closely together to maximize our small cultivation plot, and how much sun and shade and water each spot in the planter gets. And these are all things we have carried over into our latest iteration of the garden.