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Grow Your Own Self-styled "square-inch" gardener R.J. Ruppenthal will try growing food just about anywhere inside his home. In the interest of self-sufficiency, city dwellers everywhere should do the same, he believes.  Image courtesy Seungmin Lee J. Ruppenthal didn't intend to become an expert in "square-inch gardening," as he calls it. It wasn't a love affair with nature. He worked on an organic vegetable farm when he was young, "but I wasn't all that interested in it." Ruppenthal was motivated by a conviction and a very practical desire. The high cost of energy will eventually make food much more expensive and the food supply unpredictable, he believes. To ensure his family's well-being - and for you to ensure yours, he argues - calls for a return to traditional methods of growing food. City dwellers must learn to grow food to sustain themselves. "We will need to relearn basic food production skills in a hurry if we are to survive and thrive in this new world," he says. Using balconies, patios, rooftops, windowsills, cabinets, garages and counterspace, city dwellers can raise enough fresh food to sustain their families. "No space is too small or too dark to grow food," Ruppenthal says. His brief, no-nonsense book "Fresh Food from Small Spaces" (Chelsea Green, 2008), is the fruit of years of experimenting to produce his family's fresh food in his own cramped living spaces. Ruppenthal lived in a series of apartments and small city homes, some of them gloomy and none of them with yards. Now living with his family in San Francisco, where he is an attorney and instructor at a community college, Ruppenthal says he has grown enough in odd corners and nooks for his family to eat homegrown fresh food 365 days a year. Using his book, he says, readers will learn how to produce 10 to 20 percent of their fresh food from an average-size apartment or condominium space. "Where there's space, there's growing potential," says Ruppenthal. He says the information in the book is "hard-won, through years of trial and error." Size up your space Assess the light: Fruiting vegetables such as tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, squash or berries need at least 4-5 hours of strong sunlight daily. If your light conditions are less, Ruppenthal advises sticking with smaller fruiting vegetables: cherry tomatoes, banana peppers. Leafy greens, bush beans, peas, carrots and onions tolerate limited light.Just the one: Start small. Ruppenthal says he started with one container containing one "crop." When that succeeded, he tried another, then another. When he ran out of limited balcony space, he expanded to interior space.Dwarf trees: Many varieties of berries and dwarf and semi-dwarf fruit trees will thrive in containers on a balcony or a patio. A neglected spot next to a walkway or sidewalk may be perfect for a productive fruit tree.Use all windowsills: Containers of vegetables, herbs and even small fruit trees will thrive on sunny windowsills.Top of the refrigerator: Ruppenthal produces 2 to 3 pounds of sprouts each week using a vertical sprouting system on top of his refrigerator: "an armload of alfafa, radish, soybeans and wheatgrass." They will grow in little or no light, Ruppenthal says; if you prefer to green them up just expose the plants to an hour or so of sunlight. He uses sprouts fresh in salads and stir fries and juices the wheatgrass.Make the most of mushrooms: Look to dark cabinets, the basement or other dark areas that you might not immediately think of as productive growing areas.Old plastic bottles: Ruppenthal grew a thriving bush bean in an old 2-liter plastic soda bottle cut in half and filled with soil. The bush produced well with the bottle positioned in diffuse light. "I got a crop from it," he says.Experiment: "I'm always trying new stuff," says Ruppenthal. Last year, his tomatillos turned out to be very productive. He has some small blueberry plants in containers. "If you get the soil mix right - acidic, with a good amount of peat moss, pine needles or shredded bark - they'll grow like weeds. |
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