Comments: The concept of urban gardening has been around for a long time. Many urbanites enjoy nature and gardening but are limited by the many challenges of urban life. This post explores the basics of urban gardening as a foundational post for this series on Urban Gardening
Urban Gardening Overview
By
James T. Bogden, PMP
Urban gardening is the process of growing plants of all types and varieties in an urban environment. Other terms used in place of urban gardening include urban horticulture, urban farming, and urban agriculture. The Urban Gardening concept is broken into five generalized categories: Container, Indoor, Green Roof, Community, and Guerilla gardening. Growing in an urban environment has many challenges and can be difficult. Nonetheless, the discipline is expanding, and more attention is being brought to the challenges and benefits.
Container: This gardening approach is used in highly confined spaces and when portability is desired. The gardener will place the container in the window, balcony, or on the patio for sunlight then move the container when the environmental conditions are hostile to the plant. Both edible produce and plants of beauty are grown. However, the production of crops is very low. Container gardening is also a form of art that is often found in shopping malls or other high traffic public areas.
Indoor: Typically, this form of gardening involves sunrooms, solariums, atriums, and shelving systems. The plants are commonly grown in containers but not for public display or portability. In some cases, such as the shelving systems, artificial sunlight will be employed. This form produces significantly more than container gardening.
Green Roof: This Gardening Overvtype of gardening is for the more environmentally conscious and appears in many forms. The most common involves the use of large containers permanently fixed in place to grow larger plants such as bushes and trees. This form is often found on top of skyscrapers and residential condominiums. Another more aggressive form covers the entire roof in a thin layer of earth and has ground cover such as grasses or vining plants growing to absorb rainwater and reduce temperatures in the space below the green surface. If the roof is visible to the building occupants from some vantage point, then small plants such as bushes and flowers may be arranged on the green roof.
Community: This form of gardening is often a business and can be a governmental initiative or a combination of the two ventures. The goal is to provide leased plots to the urban community for citizens to grow produce for food or beauty. Often social groups organize around the venture which can also be an outcome of economic or political strife. For example, food rationing during war and hard economic times results in this form flourishing to offset the austere food availability.
Guerilla: This form of gardening is often used by environmental groups who plant in public spaces that do not belong to them. The guerilla gardener will plant in vacant lots, medians, alongside freeways, or disparate patches of earth in order to advance their cause. A more illicit form of guerilla gardening involves planting drug-producing plants such as marijuana, poppies, and other plants on another's or public property in order to avoid attribution to themselves. A common practice is for marijuana to be grown in the woods of public parks. The plot is small in order to prevent detection and sometimes remote surveillance and tampering methods are employed.
The challenges of urban gardening involve aberrant environmental conditions, pilfering, and urban life distractions. The harsh environmental conditions of urban life can place real challenges to cultivating a crop. The plot selected could have the soil contaminated from toxic waste spillage or dumping years before our awareness of this issue. Another challenge is drift pollutants in the air. Plants operate on photosynthesis in which carbon dioxide is processed into oxygen that is released into the air and carbon which is returned to the ground. Contaminants such a carbon monoxide from automobile exhaust will cause burns on the plants surfaces damaging their ability to photosynthesize. As the crop begins to produce, many folks are tempted to steal the maturing produce causing pilfering to become a concern. Hence, a real need for security. Life in urban areas can be a hustle and the ability to return to or put the time into maintaining the garden can be easily distracted or attenuated.
The benefits of urban gardening can be an environmental, social, economic, and even healthier life. Environmentally, gardening in various forms increases the green matter which counters the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere and helps maintain the carbon cycle. Another issue of urban areas is ground which is mostly asphalt and concrete. This situation does not allow water to soak into the ground. Instead, water is routed into rivers and streams where it often found away. Community and even guerilla gardening help return water to the underground aqueducts and reservoirs. From a social perspective, people bond and commune over gardening. The product produced can aid in reducing the economic impacts of rationing and challenging economic times. Finally, urban gardening gets people outdoors and exercising having general health benefits. After all, vitamin D is a result of activity in direct sunlight.
Overall, urban gardening is an excellent activity for everyone, getting people out from behind their computers, socializing, and contributing to an improved environment. On top of that, the crop produced can be a healthier solution to grocer produce at a lower cost. Go grow!