Making Space for a Garden in the City
In all the years I lived in Washington DC, I never owned a house, never lived in any one spot for more than two years, and only once had access to a yard. But I had gardens. Every place I lived, if I found a patch of dirt I grew food.
If I didn’t have a patch of dirt, I made one.
My first garden started as a tiny odd-shaped bed of weeds and litter behind a shabby English basement in Mt. Pleasant. I tore out the weeds and planted whatever I could fit. By summers’ end I was giving away jars of scarlet runner beans simmered in tomato sauce with oregano, rosemary and thyme — all from the garden.
The following year I shared a two bedroom apartment in Shaw with my friend Ada. There was no yard, but the parking space in the back alley was bordered by a narrow strip of kudzu covered ground. I ripped out the kudzu, opened the hard ground with a mattock, and dug in decayed leaves I had raked up from the sidewalks in the fall and stored in a big trash bin over the winter, occasionally adding some coffee grounds or banana peels. The narrow border of earth spilled over with spinach and tender greens in the spring. Plum tomatoes, okra, basil, banana peppers and cucumbers flourished throughout the long hot summer.
When I moved into my friend Kristina’s row house in Petworth, I was in heaven. She already had some garden beds in her narrow backyard. But there was a jumble of junk filled construction backfill piled in a steep slope behind the house. Ooohhh. I can do something with that, I thought. (Keep reading to find out what).
As tiny and seemingly inhospitable as these spaces were to gardening, the main challenge was in maximizing the existing space. I see a lot of folks asking questions about what to plant in a small space, but today I want to address an even tougher urban gardening challenge: What can you do when there seems to be no space at all?
Look again. Here’s how you can work with these common city scenarios to make your own little Arcadia in Babylon.
The Rowhouse with a little patch for terraces
Most older cities have them — blocks of row houses with nothing but a steep slope of ground covered with ivy or kudzu running along the front and/or back steps. Sometimes in the back of the house there is a narrow yard, in which case you have an abundance of options. But more often than not, there’s only a paved slot to park a car.
Let’s focus on the slope — the patch of dirt. There’s a lot more space there than you think. All you have to do is make some terraces.
Terrace? What’s that? Terraces are wide steps carved into steeply sloping ground to make it ready for gardening. Terracing creates flattened areas where plants can root down and grow straight up. On a steep slope, plants have to struggle just to stay in the ground, but a terraced space allows them to relax and do what they are meant to do — flower, fruit, and seed.
Terraces also conserve water for plants because the flattened areas absorb rain instead of letting it run off into the street. Throughout history, in Mesopotamia, China, the Mediterranean, and the Inka empire, people have carved terraces into hillsides to create arable land.
Whoa. Hang on. The Inka Empire? Have you seen this patch of dirt here by the steps. It’s like 5x2.
Ok, I get a little excited. The size of your "hillside" doesn't matter. In fact, smaller is better because you yourself can do the job in one afternoon with just a shovel whereas emperors had to mobilize thousands of people.
Point is, making a terrace is a simple DIY way to make space for a garden. See my post on How to Make a Terrace for easy to follow instructions.
The Apartment or Row House with NO patch of dirt
From the apartment in Shaw, I moved back to Mt. Pleasant for a summer stint dog sitting two adorable ageing dachshunds, Choco and Pepi, while their mom was on a cross country bicycle tour. I had just shy of four months to get a garden up. The tiny front yard was the doggies' domain. The only space available to me was the partly shaded tiny back "patio" — a spit of broken concrete bordering the alley.
With no real carpentry skill, I built two boxes. If I did it, you can too.
Place your boxes where you want them to be. Mostly in the sun is ideal, but some shade is good too. If you are dealing with the shade from a row of houses as I was, position them as best you can. Don’t worry, many plants wilt in full sun and like some shade.
Fill your box or boxes. You can use potting soil or leaf compost (more economical) if necessary. I was lucky in this situation in one regard: the back of the house bordered Rock Creek Park (DC's wooded city park) so I was able to harvest some loose fertile soil from under trees, carry it back to the patio bag by bag, and fill my boxes. If you do this, take care not to take too much soil from any one place. Skim the surface lightly, don't dig holes. While you're in there, look around at the jumble of plants growing in symbiotic profusion. That's a kind of garden too, one that requires much less work to grow. And I'm going to tell you more about how you can learn from it to turn your garden box into a miniature edible forest.
The Apartment or Condo Building with no space for a garden box
Now the challenge appears even more formidable. But even a large apartment building offers space--open, accessible, with sun… hello, the ROOF. Gorgeous and productive rooftop gardens are springing up all over urban centers and if your apartment condo building doesn't have one, you can be the one to get it started. Get the necessary permissions, get your fellow apartment dwellers together (at a six foot distance properly masked and gloved) and put your garden on the roof. Youtube and other sources on the Internet can show you myriad ways to do it beautifully and practically. Trade in your scrolling thumb for a green one.
Another motivation: Just think about the view you'll have while working on your rooftop garden.
However, there is an even more challenging scenario to consider, and that is:
The Apartment/Condo Building with imbeciles in charge
It happens. As the current "leadership" in the US painfully shows, sometimes the clowns take over the circus. If your request to garden on the roof of your dwelling falls on unreceptive ears just remember, not your circus, not your clowns. If you REALLY want to plant a garden, you still can. Here's some options.
Find a friend or neighbor with one of the above scenarios and work out an arrangement to garden some of their space. I've done this too. You can trade with the veggies you harvest for use of the space.
Find your closest community garden and sign up for a plot. Maybe you didn't even know such spaces existed. But yes, most cities and large towns have community gardens where people can rent a plot for the growing season to garden. They are also often wonderful places that offer courses, workshops, use of composting bins, and more. Although I had my own little patch in Shaw, I loved to wander through the community garden a few blocks away and get inspiration from the collard greens spilling out of stacked auto tires and kiddie pools turned into planters, cucumbers and beans snaking up the chain link fences, and watermelons sprawling across the paths.
Whatever your particular challenge may be to get your garden going, a community center plot is worth a look, especially if you would rather pay a bit of money than excavate a terrace, build a box, or deal with your landlord or condo board.
No matter what, if you have the desire and determination to make space for a garden in the city, there is no insurmountable challenge.
At Sueño de Vida we work in a meaningful way to heal land ravaged by deforestation. How meaningful? According to a recent UN Foresight Brief on climate change,
--It is of the utmost importance to stop deforestation and to increase reforestation efforts around the world. Agricultural practices should focus on soil building, year-round soil cover with plants and the use of agroforestry methods.
That is exactly what we do here at SdV. You can help by helping us do what we do every day: plant forests that nurture soil, people, and community.
Click HERE to donate directly to our reforestation fund OR make a monthly pledge on our Patreon.
Thank you.
Kristen Krash is the director and co-founder of Sueño de Vida, a regenerative agroforestry farm, education center, nature reserve in Ecuador’s Chocó Andino Cloudforest. Prior to moving, Kristen was known for her guerrilla gardens — productive green spaces she created in any available space. Now an urban transplant in the South American rain forest, she has adapted her urban gardening and sustainability skills to large-scale reforestation of degraded land. She takes a practical and accessible approach to helping others achieve more balance and self-sufficiency in their lives.
Kristen’s articles and interviews have been featured on popular sustainability platforms like Abundant Edge and The Mud Home, and in the Rainforest Regeneration Curriculum at the Ecological Restoration Camps.