Just came across this article in New York Magazine, written a few weeks ago by Lisa Chamberlain.
When I took a glimpse of the image above, I saw a valiant attempt at an organic system packaged and marketed to fit the “profitable development” aesthetic. The funny thing is that urban farming can be even simpler than large-scale projects such as this facility. According to verticalfarm.com, the idea was born 6-years ago, but let us not forget the hanging gardens of Baghdad amongst other ancient examples of maximizing growing pace vertically. In 1900, many people in New York still had chickens atop their houses and veggies in their city gardens. It is the lifestyle of the people that has brought a halt to urban farming, not the limitations of the possibility. Though for our particular system, a development such as this one might save us from high oil prices and would completely revolutionize the food market – perhaps even make food cheaper and better. This particular accomplishment would have to rely on architects and building contractors to work with farmers and botanists — a formula for a great collaboration of minds and industries.
Though the potential for such a development should not bring us enough comfort to stop striving to be more and more self-sufficient and beneficial to our environment. According to this project’s creators, “Roughly 150 such buildings could feed the entire city of New York for a year… and even produce a net output of clean water and energy” — great, but wouldn’t some of us still be aching for a source of energy less… processed… ?
To me, any form of industrial monoculture, no matter how much it increases the yield tends to repell my interest. Though in the case of this tomato tutorial, I found it can be usefully applied even when planting clusters instead of rows. Here is another great how-to-grow tomato site that is very easy to navigate and rather useful.
Ahem, sorry to digress. But where were we? Oh, right! I guess the moral of this post is to remind any other urban farmers out there not to let the challenges of attaining a successful yield in a dense and polluted city bog you down. One tomato plant in a city might yield you a little more than one kilo, which would cost $10 or more at whole foods. You could fit about a dozen plants a square a foot apart from each other in a 9 sq. foot space to save yourself more than $100 on good summer tomatoes.
Now try thinking about the kinds of vegetables you eat and what it takes to grow them. Some of the following resources might help:
- Watch Your Garden Grow
- List of books from journeytoforever.org
- Check out this site in Ethiopia
- Organic Consumer’s Association’s Mini-Garden Survival Kit
- Ecology Action
- there are many more sites like this that should help you auto-educate by just clicking around for ideas and implementing day-to-day
How much money can one save on vegetables in a city during a best-case-scenario growing season? This is one of those things I’ve been dying to figure out, but I’m not sure because each net-yield for anyone’s particular circumstance varies on scenario. Though popular conventions are abundant. The search for answers will require a collaboration between the experience of others and my own.
Though I shall amuse myself for now with this podcast from City Farmer TV (that I just added to my sidebar)!
