Here is something you don't know about your own backyard: You have room for a farm.
"But if there is a farm in my backyard, there will be no room for my grill," you might argue. "There will be no room for my picnic table. There will be no room for my croquet set!" Relax. You can keep all the things that make your backyard the family room of the summer months. The experienced gardeners of
A Backyard Farm can take a small plot of your land--that one neglected corner, or that unused spot snug up to the house--and coax magical waves of delicious greens and veggies out of it.
Their secret? Raised beds and vertical plantings--think tomatoes, squash, and beans crawling up towards the sky--allow a bountiful yield from a modest parcel. And because the crops are nurtured in their own plot of organic soil, they are safe from lead and arsenic contamination, a concern in urban spaces.
When a customer calls in the services of A Backyard Farm, the first step, during a free consultation, is to determine how much involvement each party will have. Some families might only want guidance setting up the garden and learning how to tend to it. With owners Joan James and Coleen Gregor checking in during the growing season, customers can take responsibility for weeding, watering, pest control, fertilizing, and harvesting themselves. For others, the farmers-for-hire will do all the dirty work, right down to picking vegetables and leaving them in a basket by the back door.
The raised bed frames and trellises are assembled on site. "We make the frames and install them," explains owner Joan James. "They have plywood bottoms, so they fit anywhere--on balconies, on gravel, on driveways. For one woman, we're building them right on her back porch."
Clients choose their individual preferences from a list of herbs and veggies. "You can't buy plants right now, so we grow everything from seeds," says James, who transfers and plants the seedlings so that the first crops--usually salad greens-- are ready to eat six weeks after planting. Come summer, families could be harvesting up to 10 different vegetables a week. By growing their food in organic soil in their own backyard, they end up with fresher, more nutritious produce at a location that could hardly be more convenient.
James recommends maintaining between 1- 3 raised beds per veggie-hungry mouth--even a single bed will provide enough for a small salad every day, while larger plots will allow for sharing your precious green loot with friends. Many of James' clients are familiar with Community Supported Agriculture programs, where customers invest in a share of a particular farm's yield, doled out in weekly boxes. "To replace a CSA box," James says, "you need two 4' X 8' beds."
The farmers at A Backyard Farm put each plant in its own tidy square, and each square can be replanted with a succession of different plants. "We plant for spring, we plant for summer, we plant for fall. Say you use cilantro all season long. We'll plant it in one square, then two weeks later we'll plant another square, and two weeks later we'll plant another, so you'll have cilantro all year," says James.
The market for backyard gardens seems to be going up as families look for ways to economize on their grocery bills. While the initial investment in the raised bed structure costs more than a CSA share, at about one thousand dollars (plus extra for add-ons like a trellis or irrigation systems), it can be used year after year. The cost of a weekly visit from the Backyard Garden fairies, at $30, is comparable to what many spend on produce. And they're not worried about customer education taking away from their business. James says, "Our goal is not to create dependent customers--we want people to learn how to do it."
In fact, this year they are building three beds for the children at the St. Paul Jewish Community Center's summer camp program. "Part of their summer camp is growing vegetables--it's really going to be a cool thing," says James. Remembering a young neighbor's reaction to last year's harvest, she laughed. "We had a 40 pound Hubbard squash hanging off a vine last year. A 2-year-old came and wondered when we were going to get the 'alien head' out of the tree."