Welcome to our 1/8 urban farm…
Where the first 7 years of our adventure began!
Ever wonder what it might be like to take an average city lot and turn it into an urban farm? Well, the truth is, we didn’t plan this whole adventure when we moved into our home in 2007, but an urban farm it happily became, none-the-less!
Our home was your average home, nothing special by any stretch of the imagination. Here are some details:
- Built in the 1980’s
- 1600 square feet
- Two stories (living area downstairs, bedrooms upstairs)
- Single car garage/storage area
- Three bedrooms
- Two & 1/2 bathrooms
- Sits in a modest neighborhood surrounded by the hustle and bustle of some very busy roads
- Considered a “single family dwelling” even though our home shares a wall with our direct neighbor)
The size and specs of the land were also pretty average for our area and our socio-economic status:
- 1/8 acre (5,445 square feet)
- Landscaping consisted of rocks covered by weed cloth and another layer of rocks + juniper tree and bushes
What did we do to turn a blank slate into a working urban farm that might inspire you?
The large picture above shows a graphic representation (aerial view) of the property and can give you an idea of what our entire property turned urban farm might look like if you were a cartoon bird flying overhead, but it doesn’t give you the whole picture. So here are a few details to show you what it took over the course of a few years to turn our postage stamp of dead earth into an 1/8 acre urban farm.
Front Yard
- Pulled out Juniper bushes by street and plant Russian Sage
- Cut down old/half-dead Juniper trees
- Tore down a half wall
- Built 6 foot tall wooden fence
- Removed all the gravel, weed cloth and… more gravel
- Tilled the entire yard
- Amended the dead soil with nutrient rich soil and compost
- Built raised and ground level vegetable beds
- Planted fruit trees (two espalier apples, one espalier pear, one cherry, one apricot)
- Planted a small, drought tolerant patch of grass
- Put in a rain barrel for water catchment
- Put in drip irrigation
- Mulched all of the paths
- Added in a couple of seating areas
- With help and inspiration, we’ve sown a million seeds
Back yard
- Built dog run
- Created a compost pile (using straw bales)
- Amended dead soil with nutrient rich soil and compost
- Built a chicken coop, then chicken mansion
- Built two chicken brooders (one indoor and one outdoor)
- Built ground level and raised beds
- Put in drip irrigation
- Put in two rain barrels for water catchment
- Built a Top Bar bee hive
- Built vertical pallet beds as screen for our bee hive and for a bit of extra growing space
- Built an amazing potting table/wash station
- Put in a small fire pit and various seating areas
- Mulched a walking path
Some garden specs:
- We created ~165 square feet of raised bed growing space (~115 sq. ft. in the back yard and ~50 in the front yard)
- We also created ~260 square feet of ground level growing space
- Our rain barrels held a total of 175 gallons of water to help offset our water usage during our continued drought conditions
Perennials included:
- Strawberries
- Rhubarb
- Grapes
- Echinacea
- Random bulbs (tulips, daffodils and hostas)
- Two rose bushes
- Ivy along the back wall in the backyard
The fruit trees:
Four of the five trees we put in were spliced with different varieties of the same fruit. Here’s how it broke down (You can read more HERE, too):
- Our two apple trees were espalier. Each tree had four main branches and each branch carried a different variety of apples: Red Fuji, Gala, Granny Smith and Golden Delicious.
- Our Pear tree was also espalier, spliced with four main branches and four varieties of pears: Red Bartlett, Red Anjou, Bartlett and Comice
- Our Cherry tree was not espalier, but was spliced with four main branches and four varieties of cherries: Bing, Lapins, Van and Rainer
- Our Apricot tree was simply a dwarf…No splicing, no espalier.
Seeds and starts:
- Built a grow light stand to start all our own seeds each season
- Saved our own seeds from tomatoes, greens, squash and corn where possible
Food preservation techniques learned and used:
- Water bath can all acidic foods
- Pressure can all other foods (beans, corn, etc.)
- Dehydration (Garlic Powder is our favorite)
- Tinctures and tonics were also experimented with 🙂
Chickens and bees:
What started out as five little chicks in the spring of 2011 grew to a max city flock of 20 at one point! Read about some of our reflections HERE.
Additionally, our adventures in bee keeping have been all over the place. We are currently without bees after our heartbreaking loss, but are in the process of ordering our next batch as we speak. We are determined to help the bees in every way possible.
What else did we dream of learning about and doing on our little urban farm? You know, in an ideal world with unlimited resources, time and energy?
- Install a small green house or build a cold frame
- Rid the backyard of the remaining gravel
- Practice crop rotation
- Intensify companion planting
- Become successful at succession planting
- Assess compost and chicken interaction
- Utilize vertical growing space better
- Learn the art of fermentation
- Assess the keeping of rabbits for either fiber or meat
- We learned a lot about how to work smarter, not harder 😉
:::
Between 2011 and 2013 I tracked our harvests to the ounce (a little crazy, yes, but also fun and achievable at the scale we were at). In total, with a few harvests in 2014 before we moved, we harvested over 1,000 pounds of produce from our tiny yard (about 1 pound per square foot of growing space each year when you average it all out).
If you’re interested in details, those can be found here.
In addition to the fruits and veggies, we also harvested honey from our hive, a baziliion eggs, and the most delicious echinacea roots I’ve ever tasted or turned into a tincture.
In 2013 we were featured in the Homegrown New Mexico Kitchen Garden & Coop Tour. This was such a cool experience and allowed hundreds of locals to come through our tiny yards and be inspired by what we’d done. The feedback was phenomenal and reinforced that people are hungry for natural spaces (no matter how small) and homegrown food. You can read more about that experience here and here.
In the summer of 2014, we left our little Urban Farm for the next adventure and began renting a portion of an old hacienda on ~6 acres!
In the spring of 2015, we quickly figured out that that move was not the best move for our family and hopped several miles further north, landing on a phenomenal 11 acre homestead which we called home for an amazing three years of learning (goats and turkeys and large-scale gardening, oh my) and growth!
The late winter of 2018 found us packing it all up again and moving two hours east to caretake an amazing 10-acre property tucked way back in a gorgeous valley on the Pecos River where we’re learning all about orchard and berry care in a whole new high desert microclimate.
In the summer of 2018, after being reluctant (though lucky) landlords for a bit, the real estate market turned up and we sold our Urban Farm to a new family. We hope and trust they will love it as much as we did and enjoy the perennials we put in all those years ago! The sale of this beloved property officially closed that chapter in our lives with a bittersweet moment of reflection and an immense gratitude for all the lessons our little urban farm afforded us.
While we’re not sure when the final step in this ever-growing adventure of ours will appear and we’ll find our Forever Farm, we’re enjoying learning all about larger scale farming while maintaining our menagerie of animals where we are and grateful for every moment!
xoxo,
M
PS –
Want to know a bit more about our postage stamp’s journey into becoming an urban farm? Here are a couple of older posts about our journey from the grey, rock-filled, dead earth world to the green, living world we created…
- Part One – Before the fence
- Part Two – The front yard
- Part Three – The back yard