More Food From Small Spaces

Food, we can't live without it, yet its costs are rising and consuming more of the family budget. In addition, health concerns about the use of pesticides, gmo foods, and potential soil mineral depletion in the food supply inspire more people to want to grow their own vegetables. Many of these live in cities with only small yard spaces. This book presents new methods devised and tested by the author to maximize food production from a small yard. By tightly spacing plants in deep, fertile soil, training plants vertically, and harvesting year round -- with the help of the inexpensive, portable greenhouse one can build from this book -- a great proportion of a family’s vegetable needs can be grown at home -- even in the space it takes to park a car. The author devised and tested a great growing system. Even if people have more space, it doesn't make sense to use more space. Gardeners won't necessarily produce more vegetables, but more space does mean more area to cultivate, weed and water; less space for other backyard uses. Soil fertility is more important than additional space. The system of composting we use requires an EM medium (mostly wheat bran inoculated with beneficial micro-organisms) and two buckets, one for collecting kitchen waste and one for further fermentation. The microorganisms not only feed the plants, they also clean up the soil.

Margaret Park When Margaret Park moved from rural North Carolina to downtown Salt Lake City, she needed to come up with new methods of vegetable gardening in her small urban backyard. Over four years, she experimented with tighter seed spacing, vertical growing supports, multiple cropping through the year and composting with EM bokashi to arrive at a highly productive system to grow a lot of food in a small space. Margaret Park is the author of four children's books. She was a 2012 Grow America finalist.