Start Growing Your Own Food Today: No Experience Required
May 23, 2011 
5 Comments
Fire Escape Garden
For some reason people are really intimidated to start growing their own food. They’ll come up with lots of excuses. One of the most popular is that they don’t have the space. They will also say that they have so little space so it’s not worth growing anything.
Plain and simple – those are just excuses. Lots of land and space are not pre-requisites. Action and commitment are what’s required. I’m a firm believe that it’s worth the time and effort if you grow just one herb or veggie.
But I’ve never grown anything before
I didn’t either when I first started. I also didn’t take any class or get some fancy certification. It was the Spring of 2009 and I was living in New York City. That’s when and where I started apartment gardening.
It all began with a 2×3 fire escape garden in the NYC. Despite the small space and lack of experience, I was able to grow cherry tomatoes, lettuces, chard, kale, peppers nad herbs. Since that time, I’ve moved out to the left coast and currently live in Los Angeles where I have a balcony garden.
So growing without any land and experience is possible. Here’s how you can start.
Location, Location, Location
Scope out your home or apartment and decide on where a good location would be.
A major thing to consider is the distance from your water source. I’m sure that you’d prefer not carrying water through your home to your garden.
Think beyond the floor
Ok, so you have your location picked. The next step is to evaluate the space that you have chosen. Besides the floor, look at other spaces as well – windowsills, ledges, railings and the space above you. Get creative.
What’s the conditions?
An important condition to keep mindful of is the sunlight. How much direct sunlight does your space get? To grow something, all you really need is at least 2-3 hours of direct sunlight. I’m currently getting 4-6 hours of early morning sun on my balcony. Since I get limited sunlight, I can’t grow everything, but I can still grow something. My selection is just smaller.
What to Grow In
For those of you that are into the DIY thing, you can build self-watering containers or you can buy some containers.
What I like about self-watering containers is that they are pretty low maintenance once the plant is established. I make mine using two 5-gallon containers. You can get from your local flower shop, deli, restaurant or farmers market for little to no money.
If the space that you plan on using has rails, you can use soda bottles to make hanging planters or buy new ones. I’ve successfully grown herbs such as basil, oregano and mint in these.
What should you grow?
This is the question you’ve likely been asking yourself since you started to read this post.
This might be dictated to you by the sun and space conditions. Like I said, I am restricted because of the smaller containers I’m using and the limited sunlight.
After you have all of your options laid out, grow something that you know you will eat and like. That is why you are doing this after all isn’t it? To eat something that you grew.
I always suggest greens and lettuces to people. I mean we all know how to use them and should be eating more of them. They also don’t get to be too big and grow pretty easily.
Herbs are also something else that I suggest because I think they are the best economic value. At the supermarket, you buy a big bushel of them. You only wind up using only a few sprigs and the rest goes to waste. When you grow your own, you can take what you need and let it continue to grow. It’ll always be on hand.
This helps to give you the basics of you starting to grow your own food. There is no need to plant a huge garden (unless you want to). I firmly believe that growing just one plant will make a difference.
I’ve proved that land, space, money and lack of experience shouldn’t be excuses. If I can do this, why can’t you?
Author
I love the idea with starig with just one plant! Starting a whole garden can seem overwhelming and if we spend the time and money and fail, we are less laikely to do it again. But just one plant isn’t too expensive and won’t require that much work.
I’m going to pick up a tomato seedling from the nursery TODAY
Starting an entire garden is way too overwhelming. Get that tomato planted and keep me updated.
What do you suggest when planting outside in a backyard and have dogs who like to pee everywhere? Unfortunately I cannot control my pets bladders and territorial urges. I was thinking of hanging my garden of veggies but it seems unfortunate to waste the available space.
I would definitely get a hold of Mike Lieberman at UrbanOrganicGardener.com. He has very creative ideas about how to garden in any space and I feel confident he will have a solution for pet intrusion on the garden.
Have you tried to fence off your garden area?