Ghetto Gardening

GHETTO gardening is the serious business of feeding families in economic and social crisis living in low-income housing as a result of social or economic restrictions, or hardships, with no access to green space and transforming urban spaces.

Ghetto gardening is an action for greening and renewal of cities, call it green graffiti an important aspect of urban horticulture.

Greening the ghetto
With 7 or is it 8 billion people on earth and the rapid urbanization of societies, any piece of land becomes strategic to feed the world.
Everyone might think gardening is expensive. On the contrary, I think it’s the cheapest hobby. When you don’t have a backyard, just use your balcony or verandah. You can plant a food forest in front of your house, in abandoned vacant lot, in traffic medians, along curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and as an alternative to junk food.

Really Ghetto!

How food affects the mind and body and health.
Growing your own food is like printing your own money. You are in control.

One of the ways you can gain or increase planting space is the use of containers, known as container gardening. Instead of going out to standard garden stores to buy fancy garden pots that can be expensive find objects around the house to put to use. Cartons, mineral bottles, buckets. Look at junk creatively, car tires, sacks baskets trough garbage cans grow bags, anything that will hold soil. Do not forget that you must punch holes in the bottom of any container you plant in. Pots bought from garden shops are fine too, but we want to keep the cost down to a bare minimum. What do you want more? Exotic new plants or fancy containers? So many choices in life.

Numerous places can be used to grow food and other living components that help enrich the urban ecosystem. Rooftops can be transformed into gardens. This way, not only would vacant lots and unused spaces in the city become green, but the spaces that buildings occupy would as well, which would greatly increase the ecological wealth and biomass of the urban setting. Green roofs would offset habitat destroyed by our buildings so when combined with trellising on their sides, any building in a city could easily provide biomass that the original landscape could have provided for naturally.

Vertical Gardening would increase growing space even more. Basically, vertical gardening is urban high-rise buildings that could produce a massive quantity of food. Their key strength is that they take up nominal space on the ground but multiply that vertically. A building that covers one-half acre at street level can easily provide several acres of climate-controlled space vertically.

Unique planters made from waste items

Square foot gardening or box gardening is all done in small squares or boxes. It’s one of the easiest ways to garden. It’s a great for small garden owners because you can concentrate a lot of plants together and keep the garden in little compact spaces. Also its simple and accessible to work with, it makes gardening a pleasure for those who are less agile, frail or disabled. They are concentrated little factories of delicious plants. All these are no-dig techniques.

Production Practice
Have some top soil, or potting mix and , mulch (straw leaves, sugarcane mulch etc) dig in fertilizer or manures choose a sunny spot and consistent watering. Other benefits include increased employment from non-commercial jobs where producers include reductions on food.

What style would you choose?
Do you like funk or glitz or techno or whimsy? Your ghetto garden can be created from necessity or otherwise.
In the gardening universe we may be witnessing the rise of a new, whimsical and environmentally sound genre in gardening and its fun.