Urban Farming and You

By okaygrace, 23rd May 2012 | Follow this author | RSS Feed | Short URL http://nut.bz/oknqnph2/
Posted in Wikinut>News>Environment

Discussing urban farming and how it is beneficial to you and your community

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In my opinion, one of the best movements of the past decade is Urban Farming. Urban farming is basically the transformation of private land that was not previously used for agriculture into a garden filled with a variety of homegrown fruits and vegetables and sometimes even livestock. It is a practice that has especially been growing in popularity over the past several years mainly due to the ever increasing cost of food and ever diminishing supply of food in certain locales.

Through urban farming, individuals and communities are able to not only obtain a sustainable source of food, but they are also able to begin to bring back plant and animal life to urban settings that had previously eradicated it. As urban farming continues to increase in popularity, great steps forward for the future are made because people will begin to be able to depend on themselves for food, rather than the government or other for profit agencies.

While community farms are an important aspect of urban farming, I personally am more interested in the ways that I can use my own backyard and turn it into a high yielding agricultural oasis.

The cool thing about the process, is that not only are you going to be saving money on groceries in the future, but you are also going to be beautifying your yard and adding additional value to your property at the same time.

The first step to starting urban farming is to pick out which plants you plan to grow as some grow better at different times of the year. Once you have done that, you can move forward with the planting process.

The biggest time consumer in all of this is setting up your garden for the very first time. Personally, I have built myself some raised beds in my backyard to accommodate my plants, but you can get away with just about anything especially when growing resilient plants such as spinach and many different types of beans and herbs.

Once you have set out your growing area and decided what to grow, then all it takes is regular watering and care and you can have yourself a sustainable garden year round.

If you can make the time, then I guarantee it will be worth it!

For more information on community based urban farming, I suggest you check out http://www.urbanfarming.org