Farmers should make house-calls

John Robb wants us to stop landscaping our lawns, and start foodscaping them -- growing food for our families. And he thinks the way to jumpstart it is for farmers to make house-calls. I love this idea, but don't think I could participate in it: when we applied to Hackney Council in London for permission to add a greenhouse frame to our balcony they rejected it because it would "interrupt the vertical rhythm" of our building. As far as I can tell, "vertical rhythm" is an imaginary aesthetic quality that is more important than real food.

Of course, since most people in the developed world don’t know how to grow food anymore and many of the methods and tools used to grow high quality food are still being developed, we are going to need to some help.
One great way to do that is to join a local foodscaping program.
This type of program is like a food subscription at a CSA. However, in this program, the farmer comes to you. He/she converts your yard into a high performance garden and teaches you how to garden it successfully.
I think that if we are smart, we’ll be spending more money on foodscaping in ten years than landscaping. If so, good food will be available everywhere.

What if Farmers made House Calls?

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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sdmikev

I love that idea.
In the last couple years, we converted the two back corners of our yard into raised beds, but imagine if someone could come and help a bunch of us urban farmers in our neighborhood be more efficient and give us growing tips? That would be amazing. Most of us in our old city neighborhood don’t have a lot of space, but we do have space. Collectively, it could be amazing.
Michael Polo

If you get all your neighbours above and below in on it, you can preserve the vertical rhythm, and trap them in their fancy word-smithing attempts!
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  If you break the vertical rhythm, then you won’t attract a worm.
  - http://jambeeno.com/ Jambe
    
    If you break the vertical rhythm, huh, you’ll never learn.
http://twitter.com/nonnihil Grant Gould

“Vertical rhythm” sounds like a name for the Rock Band/Guitar Hero genre of falling-beat-pattern games. Architectural Busybody Hero!
Gilbert Wham

Hackney are second only to Camden for awkward mentalness. Have you considered rotating the plans 90 degrees and resubmitting them?
greenberger

We have that already in NYC, though I don’t think it’s taken off that well. BK Farmyards is the organization and their hope is to turn Brooklyn and Queens homes into mini-farms, but how many people have participated since they started, I’m not sure. They have accomplished a lot of other cool things, though, including an Egg CSA with chickens living in the back lot of an old church. Great stuff.
http://grathio.com Steve Hoefer

As someone who grew up on a farm I think it’s a great, but flawed idea.
Farmers are not gardeners. The processes and foods modern farmers are familiar with are not really suitable for home gardens. Better, I suppose, than nothing, but not great. It would be like hiring an electrical engineer to help you buy a mobile phone. You’d get the one with the most efficient charger, the most cleverly laid out circuit board, and that used chips from the engineer’s favorite chipmaker, but would you get a good phone? Impossible to say.

In the US we have the Cooperative Extension Offices. Few people seem to know they exist, but this is exactly what they’re for. They’re funded by the USDA and can provide all kinds of knowledge about food production to anyone who asks.
http://www.csrees.usda.gov/Extension/
- Snig
  
  I think some farmers would likely hate the idea, but I’ve known retired farmers with large gardens. Yes, it’s a different knowledge base and skill set, but there’s a lot of overlap. Some will be better at teaching novice then others. I agree that cooperate extension offices are a good resource.
- allenmcbride
  
  Yes. I checked the comments to see if anyone had mentioned extension agents. They do great work. They’re like the reference librarians of growing things.
- Navin_Johnson
  
  Wow, thanks for that. I sort of expected an address and phone number if you know what I mean, but my local office looks pretty great.
  http://web.extension.illinois.edu/cook/
- Boris Bartlog
  
  It’s actually more like hiring an electrical engineer to assemble a special mobile phone for you. The basic problem is one of efficiency (lack of economies of scale). As a way of spreading knowledge about hobby gardening, and perhaps improving the landscape, it’s a great idea. For food production… not so much. Growing row crops by hand just isn’t competitive with large-scale production unless your effective labor costs are tiny or negative (because it’s your hobby).
- Gilbert Wham
  
  Aye, you’d probably be better asking for advice from your local allotments’ Supreme Soviet (anyone who’s dealt with ‘em knows what I mean…).
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Shane-Simmons/100000053744641 Shane Simmons
  
  Man, that’s better than what I was going to post. There are farmers who garden, but what they do is a whole different ballgame.
http://www.facebook.com/thomashiles Tom Hiles

Cory, you don’t need a greenhouse to grow vegetables on your balcony. Sounds like a silly excuse to me…
SamSam

There are companies that do this in Massachusetts. They’ll come and build your raised beds for you (or with you), and teach you how to garden. I know a couple of families who have done this as a way to get their kids into gardening.

Looking online, I see Green City Growers does this — the prices look expensive, though, so I think there are others as well. (Personally, I think anyone can build a raised bed, but having someone come to look at how to re-landscape your yard to make the most of it could be really helpful for many people).
- IronEdithKidd
  
  You’d think anyone should be capable of building raised beds. Sadly, we’ll be rebuilding the raised beds in our backyard that the previous owner built because the dude just didn’t know how to build things. Wrong wood, poor jointing methods and nails instead of screws. What the hell?
  - bcsizemo
    
    Screws, really? Not going all out on a pegged mortise and tenon joint….
    
    /jk I run into a lot of those types of things….like really you spent time doing this and did what?
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    You don’t really need screws, either. Install uprights, place planks, fill with soil. The laws of physics will do the rest to keep everything in place.
    - IronEdithKidd
      
      Give it 5 or 6 years. As I said, wrong wood, too. The wood is peeling away from the moist soil, tearing the nails out (not even ring-shanks, FFS). It’s a disgrace of carpentry. The professional at home (a real-live carpenter) and I will be building new ones this spring.
big ryan

sheesh, growing food isn’t that hard people. just stick some seed in the ground and water it, the plants and the sun do all the real work for you
- orangedesperado
  
  Hahaha ! Sounds like you have never tried this personally.
  
  Ask me about my 5 % success rate using this method, with no advice from experienced gardeners in my vicinity.
  - IronEdithKidd
    
    I’ve been growing food from seed since ’97. What big ryan wrote holds true for tomatoes, lettuce, most vining veggies and some herbs. If you don’t get around to cleaning out the garden in late fall, you’ll have ‘volunteers’ of these plants come spring.
    - CH
      
      Hmm… must depend on where you live. I don’t think any vegetable I’ve grown has survived the winter, and for growing in the summer it has been a pretty hit and miss. Carrots and peas have done pretty well each summer, but for instance lettuce grew like crazy the other summer where last summer it just would not grow.
      - IronEdithKidd
        
        I’m in the Detroit area. It’s USDA zone 5. These plants do not survive the winter, however, they are really, really good at self-seeding. Lettuce is a cool-ish weather crop. Last summer was too effin’ hot for cool-weather crops to do even OK. Peas and beans were an absolute waste of time and space last summer. Ditto for lettuce. It grew, but it bolted so fast that we never even got a damned salad out of it.
- bcsizemo
  
  I agree with this pretty much. So things can be a bit finiky, but for the most part if it makes it to a decent sized plant there isn’t to much to worry about. Sure everything has its own set of special problems, but there isn’t much that can’t be figured out from the web or visiting a real gardening shop. Besides my parents go about a 1/2 acre garden every year, the biggest problem they have…animals eating everything.
  
  (A solar powered electric fence works wonders.)
  - IronEdithKidd
    
    I’ve been meaning to look up reviews for solar electric fence equipment. Do they work well to deter large, urban rodents such as racoons, skunks and groundhogs? Other than the odd traveling cat, those are our only critter problems.
    - bcsizemo
      
      My father purchased his from Tractor Supply (mostly because he won’t buy things online…):
      http://www.tractorsupply.com/en/store/zarebareg%3B-2-mile-solar-fence-charger?cm_vc=-10005
      
      It has worked pretty good. The first one he got lasted about 5 years. Really the only issue with it was corrosion to the PCB inside. If you took it apart and applied a little clear lacquer to it the unit should hold up fine. Their problem is mostly deer and it handles those with ease.
      
      Groundhogs are a problem as well, but he handles those in a more permanent way.
      - IronEdithKidd
        
        What we can get away with for dispatching large rodents permanently is quite a bit quieter than what one’s allowed on the farm. :(
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Really? Try that here where the temperature goes up to 123°F and the dew point dips down to -10°F.
  
  At any rate, growing food on a London street might just be a way to ingest more pollution.
Snig

Alternatively, clover lawns are making a very mild comeback. Bee friendly environmet, lower need for water and fertilizer. Nitrogen fixing, so enriches the soil.
http://cloverlawn.org/
http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher

The city where I live has, in the past few years, allowed residents to keep chickens. Oddly enough a couple of people I know who have installed chicken coops in their backyards aren’t also planting their own food gardens.

It never occurred to me before, but it seems like it would be really easy to use chicken waste as fertilizer, not to mention that, by eating bugs, the chickens could help keep the plants healthy.
- Snig
  
  They let them keep roosters as well?
  - http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher
    
    No roosters. That was part of the deal that finally got the bill to pass. Although there have been times when, leaving the gym after an early morning workout, I’ve heard a rooster crowing. (Insert cock joke here.)
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  You have to age it, or it burns the plants.
http://cobramcgiantballs.tumblr.com/ Xploder

Here in Michigan (USA), my wife and I have grown food for our family for years. Luckily, I DO have a local farmer who comes over with tips and whatnot – we call him Farmer Jim, seriously. Now if I could just talk all my neighbors into doing it too.
http://twitter.com/vermindust vermindust

If the somewhat pushy government’s many layers will let you do this thing, then good.
Orlando Florida:
http://www.examiner.com/article/city-may-fine-florida-couple-500-a-day-for-edible-patriot-garden
Michigan:
http://www.myhealthwire.com/news/food/180

Never expect your idea is so sensible and pleasant that some municipal official won’t take offense that you forgot to bribe him.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Apparently, we need to amend the fucking Constitution to make it legal for people to grow food.
- http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi
  
  Where’d this douche in Michigan read his definition for suitable? No part of the definition of suitable includes the property of ‘common.
  - IronEdithKidd
    
    Michigan’s not monolithic. I live in a different part of the Detroit area and growing food is totally fine. We also have a permit for keeping chickens.
    - http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi
      
      Didn’t ever say it was. I asked where this one idiot read his definition of suitable.
      
      I visited Michigan recently, Detroit was interesting (Cliff Bell’s was amazing) and Ann Arbour was a very nice town I’d love to return to.
      - IronEdithKidd
        
        Ah yes. Ann Arbor, nice to visit not always so awesome to live in or near. But, hey, at least we can have foodscaping and backyard chickens!
        
        Oh, and sorry about the shitty roads. Hope you didn’t drive your own car.
http://www.madmadrasi.net/ mad.madrasi

I don’t know whether you need a landscape for a small kitchen garden. But for last 2 years, twice a week, I’m getting a handful of flat beans good enough to add in my Dal. I’m sick of flat beans and trying to grow ladies finger for some time now. And all of that from kitchen discards.
:-D
http://www.madmadrasi.net/2011/01/green-is-10-at-pot-or-180-in-farmville.html
Scatter

Hey Cory, no need for a greenhouse. There’s loads of food you can grow in confined spaces in the UK. Get in touch with Mark from http://verticalveg.org.uk who is a master of this art.
PaulDavisTheFirst

just as a mild counter to this … when i moved to philadelphia (technically suburbs by about 300 meters) 16 years ago from Seattle I was appalled by the lack of back or front yard gardens here. We had gardened intensively in Seattle and loved it, and there were gardens all over.

it took me just a couple of years to understand at least part of the reason. what we have instead of gardens here are trees. specifically trees that cast a huge amount of shade in the summer time, making the weather more bearable without A/C. but also enough shade to more or less make any intensive food production difficult without large swathes of open space between homes.

i don’t know if people here have ever consciously traded food production for trees and shade, but that it is the net result, and i’m not sure that i don’t like it in some way, even though i’d love to be growing more food that we do in the tiny patch that we have which occasionally sees the spring+summer sun.
- Rick Westerman
  
  A good observation — that the east side of the USA has trees everywhere and that to garden inside the city or ‘burbs you’ll have to have a lot of land or convince your neighbors to cut down trees. Good luck with that!
  
  Not in response to PaulDavis’s message but to the topic as a whole, I suspect that a lot of people simply do not want to garden. Oh sure it is fun to have a tomato plant or two or a fresh herb window box but to actually grow enough to eat — and the canning/preserving for winter — is hard. I happen to enjoy it (and have a couple acres of non-tree land to do a proper “big” garden) but it certainly is not easier than sitting on my rear end at my job. One hour at work is more than enough to pay for several days of food from the local farmers’ market. I suspect most of my co-workers would rather just join a CSA or go to the farmers’ market or the local “organic food” supermarket … if they even care about local organic food.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1208962828 Eric Legg

Or better idea, make basic horticulture a mandatory requirement for HS diplomas. You plant a garden, keep it alive, and if you survive eating what you’ve grown, you pass.

Or you could just call your local extension office, since that’s what their there for, rather than expecting some farmer who in all likelihood has enough to deal with managing his own several acres rather than expecting him to come out and help every ignoramus in suburbia with a tomato plant for free. Seriously. you already pay them via taxes, so you might as well use them. And really those plants went thru millenia of evolution, they don’t need that much help to do what they do. If they did no one would have bothered domesticating them.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Or better idea, make basic horticulture a mandatory requirement for HS diplomas.
  
  Schools have evolved to teach mostly academic subjects because of the assumption that families were teaching life skills. It would be great if everyone graduated from high school knowing how to manage a checking account, change a diaper, grow a tomato, etc. They’re certainly not learning at home.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1208962828 Eric Legg

Sounds like a prime market for a fruit tree nursery, or nuts. Plus food trees you pay for and plant once, but which can produce food for decades.
- Snig
  
  Good point, a couple berry plants, like some blueberries, are also good shade plants.
  http://www.chelseagreen.com/content/grow-berries-in-your-low-light-urban-space/
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1208962828 Eric Legg

Sounds like a prime market for a fruit tree nursery, or nuts. Plus food trees you pay for and plant once, but which can produce food for decades.
http://twitter.com/shareATX ShareATX

Here in Austin we have a volunteer organization called The Green Corn Project. According to the mission statement, “GCP installs organic food gardens for elderly, low-income, and disabled community members as well as for elementary schools, community centers, and shelters in underserved areas of Austin.”
derek prowse

oh, man, I’d kill for a proper agri-consultant session. I’m just starting a circle-raised-bed this year: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-wneqa04FFdw/UTDuHDpOoWI/AAAAAAAAI7A/KyQwHrSFPUE/s2000/IMG_20130301_120549.JPG
noah django

there’s an awesome guy in Atlanta that does this type of thing, I’ve heard him on the college radio community affairs program. K. Rashid Nuri. He’s a straight-up-and-down guy and a total happy mutant.
http://www.cityfarmer.info/2010/04/02/k-rashid-nuri-urban-farmer-in-atlanta-georgia/
https://www.facebook.com/k.rashid.nuri

though I rent and my job is physically laborious enough without doing “real” gardening on my off days, I applaud those who do; several (if not all) generations of my family have maintained gardens. My grandpa had one that took up half his backyard (mostly food) and another huge one on his vacation property that was all food. leave it to my grandpa to spend his vacation farming, but that’s the kinda guy he was.
http://greggman.com greggman

I don’t want them to teach me how to do it. I just want them to do it. I grew up with farming and while I appreciate it I’m not personally interested in spending my time farming.
I guess if I can afford to pay someone to mow my lawn and trim my hedges I could just as easily pay some one to farm my backyard farm.
drokhole

I think it’d be neat if every municipality had some type of program like this. Maybe have a “Master Gardener” who could help teach and oversee residents in planning and constructing their edible gardens, and a few other people to help with “foodscape” upkeep in people’s lawns. Maybe even have a central “town garden” that supplies food to the community and where people can take lessons.

Also, along along the lines of garbage/recyclables pick-up, each village/city/whatever could have a compost program where, if households weren’t making their own compost, they could have their food waste (which reaches 40% in America) picked up once a week and taken to some anaerobic composting center (which can also handle stuff like milk and meat). Residents could then use that compost in their garden beds.

I know, it wouldn’t be cheap (mainly with start-up costs), but if there’s anything that would be a worthwhile investment I’d imagine it would be this.
- IronEdithKidd
  
  Remove the meat from the household compostable waste stream, and welcome to Ann Arbor. There’s not a master gardener service, but MSU extension has an office just to the west of town.
  - drokhole
    
    Neat! My little sister goes to Madison and I guess the city is going to start some composting pilot program within the next few years. I think it’s gonna be something along the lines of this:
    
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND9QoDS4ScY
  - noah django
    
    MSU… in Ann Arbor? I know they have a better Ag dept, but seriously, wtf?
    - IronEdithKidd
      
      MSU has extension offices all over the state. It’s not in the city proper, it’s in Scio Township. You’re never very far from an operating farm around here.
Blue Ninja

I would love to do this if it weren’t for:

A. The Stepford-like community would never go for heads of lettuce on the lawn.

B. I live in the 10th level of hell and pretty much everything gets scorched on the vine. I learned the hard way when my tomatoes and beloved lemon tree burned in my courtyard. *sob*
http://www.alwayssababa.com/ lishevita

You should check out Kijani Grows http://www.kijanigrows.com/ which is an Oakland-based aquaculture farmer that sets up and cares for food grow beds and fish tanks with the assistance of arduino boards, a linux controler, sensors, and awesome.