Mama Renegades Urban Gardening Secrets

Urban gardening seems to be picking up up some steam - pun intended. Urbanites are picking up their trowels and trading in their patches of high maintenance grass for yards that keep on giving. While flowers give the gift of beauty, edible gardens offer even more. In addition to filling our bellies, even when the season ends, gardening provides health benefits including exercise, critical thinking, and exposure to beneficial soil based organism.

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To reduce pressure on the public food supply, victory gardens were introduced during World War I and II. Citizens were encouraged to grow food in their own backyards, in church yards, city parks, and playgrounds. As society recovered, the notion of growing our own food fell by the wayside for many in favour of high fashion yards instead. With the increase of GMO foods, crop spraying, and financial struggles we've been seeing a resurgence in edible backyard gardens once again.

In these last few days, we shared with you Mama Renegades amazing gardens. Over the past 17 years, she's transformed her yard into a luscious edible landscape. That's right, this garden is the result of hard work, dedication, and patience. She even had Matthew remove a poorly placed deck from her yard and repurpose the wood into raised beds.

For those of you who have been curious enough about how her delicious garden came to be, here are some tips from the pro herself.

There were no plantings in her yard when she began. Only two large spruce trees, one weeping birch tree, and poorly maintained lawn. The area behind the garage was covered in gravel and had previously been used to store an RV. This was a good site to start with because there wasn't anything growing there. She began by by raking the gravel off and installing three 4' x 4' raised beds They were filled with whatever decent soil she could acquire.

Over the years she continued adding more raised beds around the yard and removed sod from the front of the side fence, an area which has a good south facing exposure. The soil in these beds has been built up over the years through continuous use and amending with home made compost and whatever else could be scrounged up.

In the springtime, instead of digging up the existing soil she adds amendments to the surface and sometimes mixes them into the first few inches of soil. The lower soil layers natural structure is left undamaged.

Mama Renegade is thrifty! When available (usually for free), she has acquired and added rabbit manure, well-aged horse manure, and her own compost from three ongoing small compost bins. This year, she added free wood chip mulch around the tomato plants.

She captures water into six water barrels when it rains and uses this water on her garden, watering the root area only by watering can. This year, she also watered a few times with the addition of a couple cups of epson salts dissolved into the rain barrel water

Her gardens are all organic, and she does not use any artificial fertilizers or sprays.

Mama Renegades Noted Resources:

• David the Good's The Survival Gardener and YouTube videos for renegade gardening ideas

• Library books are a wealth of information

• Always learning and experimenting and weeding

  All photos in this post are original work by Mr. Canadian Renegade.

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