Title: Tiny Victory Gardens: Growing Food Without a Yard
Author: Acadia Tucker with Emily Castle
Publisher: Stone Pier Press
This is another excellent effort from Acadia Tucker which should be a great help to anyone beginning container gardening. She also gave me a few things to think about that I hadn’t considered for my indoor plants.
In Acadia Tucker’s first book, Growing Perennial Foods: A field guide to raising resilient herbs, fruits, and vegetables, she described the regenerative farming techniques she developed as a farmer in multiple U.S. states. In her follow up, Growing Good Food: A citizen’s guide to backyard carbon farming, she explored the importance of why and how every gardener can play a role in slowing climate change by using those regenerative farming techniques on a smaller scale.
Now Tucker is thinking smaller. In her 3rd book, Tiny Victory Gardens: Growing Food Without a Yard, Tucker shows how those with limited outdoor space can use the same eco-conscious techniques to grow food on their patios, decks, paved spaces, and even indoors.
Container gardening for beginners
For those new to gardening who may be intimidated by the amount of work required to maintain a flat earth garden or raised bed, growing in containers is a great way to get to know plants. And of course, it’s the preferred method of gardening for those who are physically unable to maintain a traditional garden or who simply don’t have the space.
The importance of growing food in urban areas
The vast majority of container growing happens in urban environments where little green space is available for pollinators. Growing food in containers helps support these dwindling populations of bees, butterflies, wasps, and flies as their local habitat dwindles. Having plants close by their nests provides much needed sources of nectar and pollen. Container growing can be helpful for the same reasons in suburban areas too, as previously forested areas are given over to ecologically barren swaths of manicured grass.
Food security plays a role here too. In the most densely populated sections of our major U.S. cities, fresh fruits and vegetables can be difficult to find. In these food deserts, having tomatoes or peppers or cucumbers in a pot just outside your door is truly liberating.
Homemade potting soil and DIY containers
Most commercial potting soils are loaded with ingredients that can benefit your containerized plants but are not environmentally sustainable. Helpfully, Tucker explains how to make your own potting soil to nourish and support your plants year round. She recommends various eco-conscious materials and dissuades readers from using peat moss, vermiculite, and perlite, the most common ingredients in commercial potting soils. She also recommends soil boosters to beef up nutrition and lists the best sources to increase nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous (NPK) in your potting soil, along with microbial blends to really get your plants going.
She also shows how just about any sturdy container can be re-purposed for growing plants, from old bathtubs to spackle buckets to corrugated metal (however, move cautiously in using any old thing as a container. While it may be functional, your spouse may take a “not on my back porch” position on the matter…not that it ever happened to me).
Tucker also covers the bases for those who only grow indoors. She explains how to make your own compost indoors, how to use artificial lighting and even how to pollinate your plants indoors. She includes charts with how to maximize your containers to grow the most amount of food all season, the best fruits and vegetables to grow in containers, and indoor and outdoor pest solutions.
More info: Stone Pier Press