If there’s one thing everyone should know, it’s that it’s easy to grow your own food, anywhere.
That’s what we hope to show in our urban kitchen gardening guide.
It’s the ideal thing to do if you’ve recently adopted plant-based living or invested in a nice vegan cookbook and once you see how simple it is, you’ll wonder why you haven’t been doing it for years.
The Qualities Of An Urban Kitchen Gardener
It’s always good to be realistic about your prospects for success with a new project.
In this case, it’s not too hard to be a good urban kitchen gardener but you will need:
- Some free time. You don’t need to dedicate hours each day to this project but you do need to water your plants, tend to them, dig them over, etc. if you don’t have time, it won’t work.
- Some patience. You won’t be waiting forever but your plants aren’t going to shoot out of the ground in a couple of days either, patience is essential.
- Some degree of tenacity. Things can go wrong when you garden, if you quit the first time you fail at something, it’s not going to be very satisfying but you will succeed in the long run if you keep trying.
- A desire to learn. When things go wrong you need to find yourself online working out how to make them right again. It’s not a massive challenge as everything you could need to know is out there for free.
- Ability to do the labour. You’ll be rummaging through the soil, handling plants, doing potting, etc.
What Do You Need To Make An Urban Kitchen Garden?
There’s not much to an urban garden.
You need:
- A raised bed (roughly 12’ x 12’) or some plant pots (with a surface area as great as you can muster)
- Some red sand, compost and soil – in a 1:1:1 ratio to fill the bed or the pots
And that’s about it, though you may also want to consider:
- The available light – your veggies need light to thrive, most require 6-8 hours of direct sunlight daily, so make sure your garden has enough sunlight
- The position – the closer your garden is to where you live, the easier it will be to do the work on it
- The ease of watering – you, ideally, want to be able to use a hose to water your garden, so make sure there’s a water supply and hose reel nearby
- The weather – in harsh winters you can move any pots you have indoors, you can’t do this with a raised bed
- The ability to grow vertically – we love using trellises to grow tomatoes and other plants on vines and you can get a lot more out of a garden by using the extra dimension of vertical space
- The wood for a raised bed – never use treated wood, it can poison the soil and your plants
Tasty Treats For An Urban Kitchen Garden
No one else can know what you want to grow and you’d need a huge guide to provide all the possible combinations of veggies, herbs, flowers, etc. that you can grow.
So, we offer, instead, the advice that has best served us – when you plan your garden, it’s best to give it a theme.
That is you grow plants that are related to a specific school of cookery – that could be anything from Greek to Indian or Colombian to Australian.
By growing related plants, it’s easier to create dishes that really take advantage of your efforts and the more home grown content on your plate, the tastier your food will be.
One piece of good news is that vegetables tend to be very hardy and thus, you won’t need to use much in the way of pesticides and disease remedies, normally.
However, if you do need these things, it’s always best to opt for natural pesticides, etc. rather than use chemicals.
Final Thoughts
If you’ve found this urban kitchen gardening guide useful, we hope that you’ll go on to grow much of your own food.
It tastes better and it’s better for you too than mass produced food. However, if you’re cooking with cannabis, please make sure that local laws allow you to grow it or you could get in a spot of bother.
