If you have a spot in your city yard that could be used as a garden but isn’t being used, you are not alone. Many people with the space don’t know how or are not inclined to make the commitment, no matter how tasty the rewards. If you fall into one of these categories and would like to see that soil put to good use, you now have a couple of unique options.
Garden Sharing
The first is to share your garden plot with an avid gardener in your neighbourhood. There are many people in apartments who would love to muck about in the dirt and many are willing to share their knowledge and the fruits of their labour for the privelege. Sharing Backyards offers an online matching service to connect yard owners with gardener-wanna-be’s.
Really, it’s an online matchmaking service for green thumbs. One partner has the skills, inclination and sweat equity, the other partner has the dirt.
It took some digging to determine that Sharing Backyards is a Vancouver City Farmer initiative in partnership with Life Cycles. It’s a great concept and I hope it takes off.
Garden Leasing
Another option is to have a gardening company come in and grow the garden for you. City Farm Boy grows organic produce in private backyards for sale at local farmers markets. And, as the garden owner, you get paid in veggies that you can enjoy without ever having to worry about breaking a sweat.
It’s all the perks of enjoying the look and harvest of a garden, without needing to read any how-to books or remember to turn on the sprinkler. This would be my approach if I hadn’t decided to launch the Urban Gardening Experiment of 2009.
I love the creative and collaborative solutions these organizations have come up with to help us urbanites make better use of the land we have all around us. They really couldn’t make it any easier.
Go ahead, give them a call!
Sharing Backyards is awesome! Thanks for the information. My garden-buddy actually has a garden but is running out of space. To help me, he’s arranging to have topsoil delivered at minimal cost to me. Plus he wants to transplant some of his own raspberry bushes to jumpstart my new garden. He also takes care of the gardening around the skytrain where he lives. Just because. Gotta love gardeners.
The guy who runs City Farm Boy, Ward, is really nice… he came to our house to give us a garden consult. He’s super knowledgeable, and you can tell that he really puts his heart and soul into what he does. You can buy a share of their CSA too and get a box of fresh, locally grown, organic produce every week for 20 weeks this summer. It’s a great way to be a part of the process!
I too love gardeners! Always ready to lend advice and/or a hand. I once read that there actually IS something in the soil that makes people happy (some kind of enzyme or happy bacteria or something), which would explain the generally more pleasant disposition of people who muck about in the dirt.