Cheat Sheet for Growing Organic Food without a Garden

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Cheat Sheet for Growing Organic Food without a Garden

Janelle Sorensen

Saturday, June 19, 2010

We recently moved from the fertile Midwest to the mountains of Arizona. We lost the fruits of seven years of labor (thriving perennial gardens, an ever-expanding vegetable garden, and a sour cherry tree that gave us the main ingredient for the most delicious cherry ginger crisp). But, we walked away eagerly thinking about how we would be moving forward on our journey to grow more of our own food. We would now have five acres compared to a small urban yard and a much more temperate climate to contend with.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Upon moving out here, we quickly realized the soil was far too sandy to grow vegetables. We thought, that’s okay, we’ll just have a truckload of soil and compost brought out, just like doing raised beds anywhere else, right? Nope. Turns out we live too far out; on the very edge of civilization to be precise. If we grow food, it attracts bunnies, javelinas, raccoons, deer and elk, which all in turn attract coyotes and mountain lions (Holy Wilderness, Batman!). We were advised to build a very strong electrical fence around our garden, buried a few feet deep (because the Javelinas will dig under it), and with some sort of barrier across the top (because the deer and coyotes can jump very high).

Okay. I guess we won’t have a giant garden like we had hoped. Now, despite the vast open space around us, we are constrained to growing our garden in containers on our deck. See the sources below that I've found that I’ve found helpful tackling this very different way of micro-farming.

I must say most of the descriptions of these blogs leave a bitter sting in my psyche. I HAVE LAND! LOTS OF IT! I guess maybe I should start my own blog about container gardening when your environment is too wild to plant anything else.

How’s your garden going this year? Have you been able to harvest any organic goodies yet? Any advice about container gardening you’d like to share?

Articles:

Blogs to bookmark:

Plants on Deck - A space for city gardeners to share successes, mourn failures and most of all, exchange ideas.
Life on the Balcony - Gardening tips for apartment and condo dwellers.
Farm Apartment - Learning to live off the land without actually having any land.
You Grow Girl - Contemporary, laid-back approach to gardening places equal importance on environmentalism, style, affordability, art, and humour.

Posted by Amy Hanridge on 12/15/2010 at 07:45 AM

I live in the White Mountains of Eastern Arizona at 7000 feet elevation. We have a large garden (with a 6 foot fence all around it to keep out critters like BEARS) and chickens. Raised beds, raised beds, raised beds. We composted for years before we even started making the raised beds, to save money on filling those raised beds. Our short growing season with very cold nights even in the summer but hot, dry and sunny days make gardening very difficult. We had a large garden in Iowa before moving here and, uh, yeah… gardening in Arizona’s mountains requires special skills! But there are brilliant folks who’ve been doing so here for a long time. You can check out Lisa Rayner’s books (Gardening in the Southwest Mountains) and Gary Nabhan (who is in Tucson now but was famous for his year of local eating in Flagstaff before Barbara Kingsolver took the idea to her Virginia farm).

Have no fear! You’re not the first transplanted Midwesterner in the Southwest to try gardening! I also recommend Native Seed/SEARCH in Tucson. Read their seed catalog. They have seeds for all sorts of vegetables adapted to your specific elevation in the southwest!

Email me if you want more advice or if you want help with that blog! I wouldn’t know how to garden in our poor clay soils of Arizona’s White Mountains without raised beds! But I’ve sourced cheap and dirty (pun intended) ways create them and now have the large-and-always-expanding garden I always dreamed of!

Posted by Heather on 06/20/2010 at 05:00 AM

You should look into upside down container gardening! Grow tomatoes, peppers, and all kinds of vining plants from holes cut in the bottom of 5 gallon buckets. You’ll have to sink some sturdy posts in concrete to support the weight of the buckets, but then you can hang the plants up off the ground, You’d still need to protect from tall animals with fencing, but it might be worth a try!

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