by Kate Jonuska
even a small garden can feed a family
THERE IS NOTHING more delicious or rewarding, according to Marv and Char Lopez, than eating vegetables grown with your own hands, harvested steps from your plate. And as a young family in the tight housing market near Toronto who understand the limitations of urban gardening, they’re determined to teach folks in their first book how to harvest those delicious rewards from tiny gardens, “The Compact Garden: A Beginner’s Guide to Growing Vegetables in Small Spaces.”
“Small-space gardening gives you permission to reimagine what’s possible,” say the Lopezes, who once gardened in the window of their first condo and now grow a bountiful harvest of veggies from a yard of only 1,500 square feet. They position smallscale gardening as an act of personal power and social change, writing, “Every windowsill herb, balcony tomato, or vertical garden you tend to becomes a small act of optimism, a daily reminder that growth is always possible, no matter your space.”
Their optimism is infectious throughout “The Compact Garden,” which bursts with colorful photos and stories. Beyond that inspiration, however, the book is also a down-and-dirty textbook offering all the knowledge an amateur urban gardener needs to successfully grow food on whatever scale is possible for them.
If that’s exclusively or seasonally indoors, no problem! One of several hydroponic methods or seedling starts might be the answer. Maybe it’s gardening outdoors in an area with extreme seasons. Shade netting, hoop houses and greenhouses can stretch your growing season and the variety of produce you can grow outside.
Perhaps the most creative tips the couple offers for compact spaces, however, are ways of reaching into your underutilized vertical growing space. Vertical gardening techniques— which include trellises, stakes, arches, lattice and more—allowed the Lopezes to double their growing area and therefore their harvests without needing an extra inch of land.
Such hands-on experience with small-scale gardening is also invaluable for space-specific challenges like small-scale irrigation, compact composting operations and promoting biodiversity despite being such a tiny part of a larger ecosystem. The optimistic Lopezes, however, frame these challenges as thrilling and manageable. After all, if gardening is a challenging endeavor, a smaller garden might be less intimidating.
“The worst thing that can happen to any garden enthusiast is to get so discouraged when problems arise, as they inevitably do, that they get overwhelmed with negative feelings and give up entirely,” they write. “Having a smaller space gives you a more manageable place to work with, experiment in, and eventually master. From there, you can continually expand your horizons.”
