Urban Gardening

I so love the look of their living garden space. ~ I wish I had this family's weather.

Jules Dervaes - I Am Los Angeles from Joris Debeij on Vimeo.

He's my favorite urban gardening fanatic

In LA they can have this. I live in Iowa! Agriculture based! And I can't even have a chicken! Here we can't even have a rabbit unless it is an INSIDE pet! Grrrrr.....How do we get backwards? Rofl...I so am going to start hounding my city council (rofl...since I live in a town of 5000 I know them all!)
I want chickens!! I can't live on a farm because of asthma and allergies or I would. But if you don't have a rooster I can't see a chicken making as much noise as teenagers with booming bass!

Someone posted about this family last year. I read most of the blog from start to finish over Spring break. Ray and I are excited about what they have done. We do not mind so much that our garden has to shut down around Thanksgiving until Lincoln's birthday FOR NOW. This is a newish property for us. We are still learning about our micro climates and soil-less growing. We also like to travel. Today we are content to not have chickens and rabbits since we are not sure who would feed and water them while we are away. Neither of us has really consumed goat cheese or dairy since there was always someone with a cow who produced too much milk in the mountain valley we called home for 20 + years. In that valley we had chickens, ducks, and geese on about a third of an acre with vegetables and fruit. We raised pigs on Ray's sister's place just across the street. Another neighbor provided halves of beef from calves that we watched grow up (at least until we became vegetarians). A 25 mile drive to the waterfront provided whole halibut at 60 + lbs each in summer. Fishing for salmon and trout, hunting local deer and grouse, picking mushrooms and wild berries rounded things out for us. In the early years we took a trip east for Elk in the fall. Just before we moved back to the suburbs we stopped being vegans for the weirdest reasons and have not gone back.

Ray and my eldest son talk about building a hen house if the economy goes bad. We joke about getting a pigmy goat and naming her Dee-oh-gee (D.O.G.). There are plans to expand the garden this year by at least two more boxes in back and adding one to the front garden for cutting flowers (living at the bottom of a sloop our yard has a tendency to get squishy with water). Already we know what kinds of berries will be added to the back this year and we have an idea which fruit trees we will invest in. Our hope is that there will be enough excess to put up more than jam. We would love to bring a weekly box of produce to the other teachers at my school who cannot be home all day (I work with the distance learners from my living room). We do not make very much money and growing food HELPS(!) but if it is done right, teaching takes up so much time, there tends to be nothing left for gardening.

By the way Camp, that was the best overview of their garden I have seen. Thanks so much!