Getting Ready for Earth Day: Growing Your Own Food
by Collin Dunn, Corvallis, OR, USA on 04.12.07
As we are wont to mention, making green food choices is one of the best ways to live a more TreeHugger-friendly lifestyle every day; eating local food is a great way to do this, but certainly no the only way. With spring in full bloom in many parts of the US and the world (and Earth Day right around the corner), now is the perfect time to start thinking about growing some of your food for yourself -- it doesn't get any more local than that -- and you don't have to have a garden or a green thumb to do it.
1) Hydroponic gardening is a great alternative to in-ground growing, requiring less space, dirt and sunlight than traditional gardens.
2) Aeroponic gardening, the waterless cousin to hydroponics, can be even easier: just drop the pod in place and wait a couple weeks for your own indoor garden to grow right in your kitchen.
3) Things like the Hortuba table and the Leopoldo City Vegetable Garden offer space-efficient container gardening for those without a plot in the ground to call their own.
4) You can grow mushrooms just about anywhere, from in a bag at home to your desk at work.
5) You Grow Girl is a great resource for DIY gardening, including tips on growing cascading herb pots in tiny spaces and making beauty products from the plants in your garden.
6) Check out our top five spring gardening tips and top five gardening ideas for more ways to grow more with less.
For even more ideas on growing your own food, check out TreeHugger's guide for How to Green Your Meals, take a spin through the food section of our site and stay tuned for more info on getting ready for Earth Day.
The notion of total food self-sufficiency is often seen as totally unrealistic. While John Jeavons of Ecology Action has demonstrated how it is possible to grow one person's food needs in 4,000 square feet of garden space (focusing on things like potatoes), here's my thought experiment on how much space it would take to grow for oneself the food that I would actually want to eat, day in, day out:
The Self-Sufficient Gourmand
Aquaponics is another growing system that is pretty interesting. It combines an aquaculture and hydropnic system to produce high quality fish and vegetable.
Basically, water starts in a fish tank. From there, the nutrient-rich water (from the fish waste) is drained into grow beds where herbs, flowers, and even fruit and vegetable plants (requires an extra filtration step, though) can be grown following a hydroponic model. When the water has made its way through the grow beds, all of the nutrients (and toxins to the fish) have been removed by the plants, and it can be recycled into the fish tanks again.
I wrote an article on this recently for the magazine I work for. It's subscription-only, but if you posted that you wanted it, I'm sure I could slip you a .pdf of the article if you were really interested.
Helpful aquaponics link:http://www.aquaponics.com/