Large versus small growing spaces

General Discussions
21

It sounds like you’ve done a really great job of making use of the space you have. High five!

I used to live in a townhouse that we were renting. I had about six square feet of space in deep full shade that I was allowed to grow in. The rest of it was paved over. I tried to make use of it, but after a few years, I completely gave up. There just wasn’t enough sunlight in that space.

Knowing what I do now, I would have figured out something to do there: hablitzia, maybe, or lettuce. A pawpaw tree would’ve been neat, but trees were forbidden.

I tried pots on the pavement, but I couldn’t keep them watered enough. They had to be watered every day, or they would dry out. Over the years, I tried two baby apple trees, a gooseberry bush, lots of bananas, a living Christmas tree, three strawberry varieties, and a whole ton of vegetables. They all died from lack of water. And I was spending several hundreds of dollars a year on gadgets and inputs that were supposed to help. No harvest at all. I think I once got two pea pods, and I once got two gooseberries.

I tried putting strawberries on the side of my house, in the soil, in full sun. The HOA pulled them out and threw them away. I cried.

After somewhere around my fourth year, I gave up in despair. We lived there for seven more years.

In 2020, we moved here, to a house that we own. No HOA. (That was an absolute necessity; we agreed that we would not move anywhere with an HOA.) A fifth of an acre of land, most of it in full sun. My husband and I agreed that we are never going to move again. I tentatively tried starting a garden in 2021, and it was my first one that had worked. I harvested loads and loads of zucchinis! I was absolutely thrilled!

By the end of 2021, I was digging up grass and bindweed in other parts of the yard to prepare for more garden in 2022. In spring of 2022, I planted my first-ever fruit tree in the ground. Now I have something like a hundred baby fruit trees of a dozen different species, with a bunch more seeds in the ground. And my front yard is now almost completely xeriscaped in wood chips, with ornamental pathways, all ready for me to finally plant the seeds for the fruit bushes I want there.

Now that I have a lot more experience, as well as knowledge, I often think back to that time a decade ago when I had six square feet of deep shade, and I think, “I could have done something with that.” I also could have gotten a raised bed in the community garden, which I didn’t know existed until after we had left that house. Instead, I just gave up.

But perhaps it was better that I did. I think I needed to take a break after years of failure and discouragement before I was ready to try again. And when I tried again, I needed to try it in a completely new way that was more likely to give me an easy win (planting things in the ground in full sun). I needed that easy win to encourage me to tentatively try a bit more, then a bit more, then a bit more. I needed to heal from the place of despair I had reached.

To anyone working with severe constraints similar to what I had in my old house, I can offer encouragement. A tiny space in full shade where you aren’t allowed to plant perennials is a humongous challenge, way too hard for a brand new beginner, but that’s one of the wonderful things a community can do: we can help you succeed at something that is too hard to do alone. All of us together can figure out solutions for you.

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22

Oof, that rental situation sounds absolutely brutal. It took me a few years of trying to get some fiddlehead ferns and wild ginger established in my dry shade areas on my current (owned) property, dry deep shade is super tough to work with. I did grow a pretty decent container herb garden on an upstairs balcony at our last rental, but we didnt have serious drought issues/water restrictions.

Our property is small and paved, but we own this house and don’t have an HOA, so we have pretty free reign to make more permanent changes and be creative. In fact all our neighbours are largely very positive, if sometimes puzzled and amused by my front yard and driveway farming and rewilding experiments, so we have that going for us. Somebody has been nominating me for the municipal garden awards every year.

We’re in a medium sized city surrounded by prime farmland. External inputs such as manure, straw and hay, woodchips etc are plentiful waste products quite locally. We use groundwater for drinking water, but have enough regular precipitation that a couple of rainbarrels usually keep us well supplied for garden watering provided dense plantings or mulch (most years - 2022 was freaky dry). The big constraint we have aside from space is we’re in Canada (zone 5) so a much shorter growing season than some.

23

My biggest constraint now is how dry our summers are – zero rain or humidity for five months, basically. And it’s very hot, with lots of UV. But all that intense sun has big upsides as well as downsides, depending on the species – squashes love it, for instance! And apple trees seem to be perfectly happy. So my vegetables that supposedly want full sun but actually want heavy afternoon shade in this climate are now going to have apple trees on their west, happily taking all that very hot sun they don’t want. (Grin.)

Meanwhile, my pawpaw seeds just got planted underneath the north side of my neighbor’s big, large, well-established apple tree. I’ve noticed that space is always shady during summer, and therefore always cooler.

That’s one of the great things that small growing spaces can provide: a reason to pay very close attention to individual microclimates. Which can sometimes suggest really awesome opportunities to put an optimal crop in an optimal space. This is something that is much easier to do on small scales.

24

The Dry Farming Collaborative in NW USA has some great you tube webinars, with a few on squash growing with low inputs (including dry farmed variety trials with storage out comes). One study looked at soil moisture at depth, recording it through the growing season. Mostly they were harvesting water from quite deep in the soil profile (4 feet if i recall) as the season went on.

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25

Yeah, my suspicion is that crops with really deep roots that are really good at drawing up available water from deep in the soil are exactly what I need. There is water down there! We get 18 inches a year of precipitation (the vast majority of it as snow in the winter). It’s there! It just needs deep roots in order to get accessed in summer.

Two more adaptations that seem ideal for my climate are:

a) extra cold tolerance (so that they can be planted earlier, while there is still early spring rain), and/or ability to germinate from farther down in the soil (so they can be planted where there is still some soil moisture after the rain stops), and of course
b) any adaptations that reduce transpiration (and therefore water loss) from the leaves.