Beauty + bounty: growing local eats (part one)
In 2012, the United Nations reported that 67% of the world’s population will live in a city by 2050.As our population doubles so will the infrastructure in our built environment. Urban Agriculture is a growing movement to provide beautiful solutions to our growing challenges.
“Urban farming is the way of the future” assures urban gardener Sass Ruthven. In addition to the ability to feed people locally, the energy saved is enormous in terms of eliminating the need to transport goods. “There is virtually zero carbon footprint for growing and consuming your food.”
Sass started as a garden educator at Lowell Elementary for fifteen years, then seven years later worked for another seven years at Portland Ave Nursery while still educating Tacoma elementary students. She learned the art of successful gardening the good old-fashioned way, learning by doing it. She began a CSA called Share the Wealth Organics (STWO) in the fall of 2012, with 2013 her first official season.
“My daughter was the first one to tell me to start a CSA when I was just growing so much food for our family; freezing a lot of it and giving a lot of it away. I had no idea what a CSA was” Sass recalls. My daughter explained that CSA stood for community supported agriculture and soon we were borrowing an urban CSA model from Portland, Oregon.
STWO just finished it’s fifth season. Sass reports that “Last year, our season yielded 3.2 tons of produce from one sixth of an acre, that’s a phenomenal number that you’d never come close to with conventional farming. Typically conventional farming is about one seventh of what I produced in the same amount of space, just because they require so much more room from row spacing.”
Adopting a basic square foot gardening method, the CSA spreads across six urban sites amounting to one sixth of an acre combined. All except one site are located along the same block, with the remaining site only a mile away.
Mel Bartholomew, author of the book Square Foot Gardening, describes this innovative gardening method first introduced in the 1980s. Small raised garden beds are densely filled to eliminate the need for circulation space within the bed. Therefore the beds stay safe from compaction and this allows for huge yields from small spaces.
Sass says basically ”you are using all the bed space and everything is in a gridwork, it’s all measured out, nothing is just thrown in here or there, it’s all documented and measured. So we are getting as much as we can possibly fit into a bed without overcrowding it.”
Sass recalls how STWO began: The first yard who joined the CSA was my neighbor next door. The second yard was across the street. Usually people offer before I even ask because they think it’s really cool and I maintain it all. They provide water and the space, and they get a full share or a half share depending on how many beds they have; it varies from location to location.
One CSA block homeowner shares “I just love coming home because every week things look different. It’s so much fun to watch everything grow!”
Inspired by Sass’s story? Create your own beauty and bounty. Simply plant the seed, start a neighborhood garden, work with others, share food and stories, preserve the produce while creating culture.
Don’t know where to start? Sass teaches free workshops at the EnviroHouse in Tacoma and is also happy to share her recipe for raised beds. Contact her at sharethewealthorganics@gmail.com for more information and a chance to tour and learn more about starting your own neighborhood garden.
This is part one of a two part article on urban agriculture.
