Your Guide To Green

I live in a condo and like to walk through my neighborhood looking for edible treasures as the alleys in Phoenix are loaded with figs and citrus. As a way to meet my neighbors I always ask their permission to pick. I have found that they love to share their abundance and have someone else help "harvest" and enjoy their fruit. This is also how I stumbled into my own garden.

Two years after buying a condo and living city-style in the heart of one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the country, I was hungry for growing my own groceries. Daily I pondered my options so I began scoping out back yards and abandoned patches of dirt in all corners of my neighborhood. I spread the word to everyone with a yard, that I was looking for a patch of dirt where I could grow a small garden. I even considered guerrilla style planting in the drip-irrigated landscape planter at the adjacent condos.

Preferring the legal route, I was drawn to my neighbor Meg's place. We had never met and I was a little bit nervous -- I knocked on her door, forgot to introduce myself and said in one long, run-on sentence: "Hello, I'm your neighbor to the south, in those condos, and I've been admiring your lavender patch for years--any chance you'd let me garden in your back yard?" I could tell by the look on her face that she was taken aback. She looked at me quizzically, then got a big grin on her face and immediately said yes.

Meg offered me her gardening tools and many tips on how to easily and inexpensively, amend the soil using steer manure, bone meal and the mulch from a tree she recently had to cut down. There's nothing glamorous about reclaiming a garden plot from the encroaching weeds as it requires moving a whole lot of dirt. I dug, flipped, tossed, turned moved it here and there - all in the process of getting the grass roots out - to sixteen inches deep. Standing in the hole, I decided that a five-by-six-foot garden was a good place to start.

Of course in my zealousness I over shopped for plants and found out exactly how many would fit in my little patch of paradise. Exhausted, I laid in my bed that evening dreaming about expanding it. Now when I walk around the corner through the alley to my forty-five square foot microcosm of a garden I have a spinach-eating grin on my face. My garden, which is now chock full of heavenly greens, herbs and flowers, is more abundant than I would have imagined. Oh and the lovely bonus -- I love giving garden goodies to my friends.

I didn't realize how much this condo-dweller would gain from a tiny garden. Every time I think about it, I get all worked up about the cost of fresh herbs at the grocery store. And look at me now -- organic, home grown goodness on my dinner plate on a regular basis.

The garden has given me a greater sense of participation in the world outside the walls of my condo. Sharing food and problem-solving garden issues with others has given me a renewed sense of community. And on deeper a level, the act of cultivating plants through the seasons has heightened my connection with nature's cycles.

I am no longer a consumer and an observer. I am a gardener.

Epilogue

After I had done all the work to start my own garden, I found the out of print book The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping . Here are a few things I learned from the book that I had intuitively done right:

1. "Double digging:" A garden aerates the soil and you can put plants closer together than the instructions dictate (good thing: I had bought too many plants, and stuffed them all into my garden, so they were definitely a little closer together)
2. "Composting in place:" Dig a hole in your garden and place your kitchen scraps in and cover them with soil. Give it a soak occasionally and it soon becomes compost that nourishes your soil.
3. "Second crop:" I planted spinach seeds around the radishes and Swiss chard, knowing that those crops would finish and the spinach seedlings would come up in their place.
4. Tossing seeds on decent soil then watering them really works. I planted my garden in October in Phoenix, with the space in nearly full sun. I sprinkled kohlrabi seeds all around my freshly planted garden and practically every single one of them sprouted. I thinned them to allow space for growth, and they have done very well. I am collecting kohlrabi recipes.
5. A vertical barrier is so important to keeping grass at bay. Because I spent the time and effort, I now spend little-to-no-time weeding in my garden.