6 of The Best Places To Grow Food At Home

Growing your own healthy & fresh vegetables and fruit is so rewarding! Find out the best places to grow food right at home.

And it’s better for the environment. You may have heard of the so-called zero mile diet, that doesn’t depend on food being flown in and trucked in from other countries or even continents. It literally is grown within footsteps of your kitchen!

It’s also a great way to teach children where their food actually comes from.

There are other health benefits as well in growing food.

However there are still people who say they don’t have room to grow anything or don’t know where they can grow. That is not a valid excuse in the majority of cases. There are many different places you can grow food, some very common, others perhaps a bit more radical.

Read on to find out what in my opinion are the best places to grow food in your garden.

Raised Beds

While building raised beds is an expense and time commitment, there are advantages to growing in a raised bed. A raised bed:

• warms up quicker in the spring
• drains better
• looks better
• easier to access especially for the elderly and people who can’t bend down that much
• paths are separate – people don’t walk on planting areas, compacting them, which eliminates the need for deep tilling

Raised beds when built properly can last many years. You can also easily add season extenders such as row covers and hoop houses.

And you can add trellises to grow your vegetables vertically to maximize production in a small space.

A small raised bed or garden planter box is ideal for someone living in a townhouse or on the ground floor of a multi-story building.

Children will also gladly take ownership of their own mini version of a full-size raised bed. To learn more about building a garden planter box perfectly sized for a child or the aforementioned townhouse or condo dweller, check out the Children’s Garden Planter Box eBook.

Containers

Imagine this: you step out of your kitchen door, snip off a few leaves of lettuce and a green onion, pick a ripe tomato and a juicy cucumber and snip off a bright orange bell pepper.

You now have the makings of a salad! Something you can take with you to work in order to save money on pre-made salads from your cafeteria. Plus your taste buds will explode with the fresh, clean taste of your own vegetables, not the week-old, tasteless vegetables in the cafeteria salad.

You can easily achieve this with a salad container garden. It will have to be a decent size pot (wide as well as deep). Just plant:

• one or two heads of lettuce (you can include a red-leafed and green-leafed variety)
• one or two green onions
• a tomato plant (cherry tomatoes work well as they usually are more compact plants)
• a pepper plant
• a cucumber plant (have this plant at the back of the container and train it up a trellis
• a basil plant

Or plants some peas in a pot, add a teepee trellis and watch the sprouts wrap themselves around, growing tall. Fresh pea soup anyone?

The advantage of containers is that you can move the containers around to best suit the food you are growing (shade vs. sun). Or whenever you want to change the decor of your space.

You can also move them into a greenhouse or under protection to extend the season.

Or start the container in the greenhouse early in the spring and then move it outdoors to it’s final growing location.

The flexibility that you get with containers is key, especially in a small garden.

Hanging Baskets

These could be lumped under the previous section, Containers, but I think these deserve their own section.

The main advantage of hanging baskets is that you can keep the plants off the ground and away from walking or crawling pests. This works especially well for strawberries which are a magnet for slugs and wood bugs when they are planted in the ground.

It also supports the idea of vertical gardening. You can hang baskets above and have containers or a planter box below, doubling your growing space.

The main disadvantage is the need to water frequently in the heat of the summer. You can however setup a drip irrigation system that will water the baskets automatically with a timer.

Caution: Always make sure you hang them from hooks that are screwed into structural members. There is a lot of weight from all the soil, especially when it is wet.

And some condo and apartment rules prohibit hanging baskets, mainly because they could drip on your neighbours below when you water them well.

Greenhouse

A greenhouse is the perfect place to grow heat-loving vegetables such as tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, cucumber, melons and citrus. They will enjoy the heat during the day and at night benefit from the stored heat if you have a passive greenhouse.

You can also use it to start seeds as I do. They get a head start and can grow strong before you transplant them outdoors.

In the cooler seasons you can grow cool season crops in your greenhouse that would normally not do well outdoors.

The main problems to look out for are to ensure pollination can happen and that the greenhouse gets adequate ventilation during the hottest part of the day. These actually are complementary, as a greenhouse that gets too hot will stop pollination.

Ventilating the greenhouse cools it down and air movement will help to pollinate your crops as well. If you want a relatively cheap way to provide ventilation in summer, check out my post on Free Greenhouse Ventilation Via Solar Panel.

While greenhouses can be expensive and time-consuming to build, the payback is well worth it. Alternatives include building a hoop house out of PVC pipe and clear plastic, which is a less expensive way and is more portable, but also less durable.

Lawn

Do you really need that large expanse of lawn? Whether it be in your back yard or your front yard, consider replacing some or all of your lawn with a food garden or a food forest.

It is debatable if one is less maintenance than the other, but I do know that grass is not that tasty!

Lawns also require lots of power equipment to maintain, such as a lawnmower, trimmer, leaf blower and aerator. Usually this means polluting 2-cycle gas engines. If you are going to keep your lawn or part of it, consider switching to electric or manual lawn equipment which is better for cutting down on noise pollution and air pollution.

Lawns generally can be converted over to a garden bed with the lasagna method. You place cardboard or several layers of newspaper over the location you want to convert to a bed. Then pile on layers (the lasagna) of organic matter such as straw, compost, manure and other good soil-building materials.

And it is becoming more acceptable now to have food gardens in your front yard, although check first as some areas don’t allow it.

Existing Flower Beds

I’ve left this place for the end, as it is not as mainstream as some of the other places above. Typically in a small urban lot, there isn’t that much space for garden beds to grow vegetables and fruit in addition to flowers.

So in order to still have a bounty of fresh produce from your own garden, you need to expand your mind to other possibilities. Using existing flower beds is a great way for a few reasons:

• obviously you are using space more productively and can eat what you grow.
• if you pick colourful vegetables and fruit, it will stand out or blend in well with the colours of the flowers.
• many colourful vegetables that fruit such as eggplant, zucchini and other squash, and beans also have colourful blossoms.
• your vegetables are closer to the flowers that attract beneficial insects and/or are companion plants, resulting in healthier vegetable plants
• food plants can be used as ground cover to help block weeds and retain moisture. Lettuce works well for this.
• You can have a fully edible bed if you replace the flowers with edible flowers.

Incorporate colourful vegetables such as multi-coloured Swiss chard, peppers, tomatoes and eggplants.

Use them as you would flowers – tall ones at the back and compact, short ones in the front.

I’ve even seen basil hedges edging a flower bed or creeping thyme used to cascade over the edge of a raised flowerbed.

Bonus: Boulevard Gardens

Note: check with your local municipality or city to find out what you can and can’t do on the boulevard, seeing as it is not your property. It would be disheartening to have the city bylaw officers come and ask you to rip out a productive boulevard garden because you violated local bylaws. Most of the bylaws focus on safety as having tall plants on the boulevard can mask pedestrians from cars.

Okay, I’ll slip one more in. There is an untapped location that most homeowners have: the boulevard in front of their houses. This is usually the narrow strip of land between the sidewalk and the road. In areas where there are no sidewalks, it is the few feet/metres next to the road that is considered to be city property.

Growing on the boulevard means that you’re willing to share your food with passerbys. However this is a great way to build community, especially with your neighbours. And to teach others that you can grow your own food.

There are also a few downsides to boulevard gardening:

• boulevard plants are prone to dogs urinating on plants when they pass by on their walks with their owners
• on busy streets, car exhaust could be absorbed by the plants, which you then end up eating.
• in areas that use salt to melt snow and ice on roads, the soil could become too salty which will kill most plants

As you can see with a bit of imagination and thinking outside of the traditional row garden, you can grow more in less space. Give some of these best places to grow food a try in the next growing season to see which ones work best for you.

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