By taking over the space in an unused service alley, Brian Green proves that you don’t have to have a garden to grow your own fresh produce.

With a huge trend towards small-space living, wannabe vegetable gardeners can often find themselves without a garden. So what do you do if you don’t have a spare bit of lawn that you can dig up to plant tomatoes, potatoes and onions; or you live in an apartment with no balcony and nowhere to grow vegetables other than perhaps a windowsill for herbs? One unconventional option is to turn to guerrilla gardening.

Guerrilla gardening first began as a movement in New York in the 1970s, when a group of green activists transformed an abandoned lot into a community garden. Part-social activism, part-political protest and mostly about enriching or beautifying neglected or abandoned ground, there are now guerrilla gardeners worldwide.

At one of Johannesburg’s busy intersections in Greenside East there’s a perfect example of a guerrilla garden: a local resident and gardener have spent many years creating a beautiful area for public enjoyment, where before there was just uncut grass.

Last year I received a call from Brian Green, a friend of mine who was planning to start an edible guerrilla garden in a municipal service alley below his property in Forest Town. Although he has a fairly large garden of his own — and had never grown veggies before — he wanted some extra space to plant fresh organic produce to supply his restaurant, II Giardino Degli Ulivi.

Brian has always been a bit of a maverick; he’s the brains behind Milpark’s 44 Stanley Street development, an alternative enclave of creative shopping and eating venues. So it’s not surprising that his approach to vegetable gardening was a little unorthodox.

When I first visited the service alley, it was overgrown with weeds and littered with piles of rubble. After a few days of concentrated sweaty labour, the space was cleared and turned out to be much bigger than Brian expected. He decided to go with a design using raised beds and set himself the challenge of spending as little money as possible on this new venture.

He collected boxes, crates, metal sheets and boards from the side of the road to build the raised beds  and created gravel pathways between them using stones leftover from work done at his house. The soil and compost to fill the beds came from his personal garden.

Today the guerrilla garden that fills this reclaimed alley has beds bursting with tomatoes, carrots, eggplant, beetroot, herbs, spinach and more. “The taste of vegetables picked just an hour ago is fabulous!” says Brian. “I feed my own household and the restaurant gets kilos of fresh vegetables a week.”

Brian’s approach is entirely organic. He uses heirloom seeds he purchases from Mahlathini Organic Seeds, a small organic seed supplier in KwaZulu Natal. All the organic leftovers from his resturant are recycled into a large worm farm and compost pile.

He’s also discovered the joys of using companion plants, as he puts it “to keep the nasties out”. He says: “I’ve found that if vou plant marigolds, you don’t see a single bug. Another example is onions planted with lettuce – pests don’t like a strong oniony smell.

“I have made mistakes, but for me it’s not about becoming a garden scientist. It’s about experimenting and having fun,” says Brian, who readily admits that he’s now hooked on vegetable gardening.

Tips for Wannabe Vegetable Gardeners Without Gardens

• Try the guerrilla route by looking for vacant, neglected land near you.

  

  (We recommend that vou find out who the owner of the land is and get their permission before you start planting.) It also helps if you rope in a couple of neighbours as you might have to carry water to your plants during dry spells.

• Find a neighbour or relative who is willing to give you a corner of their unused garden in exchange for some of the harvest.
• Look for a community centre or library nearby and talk to them about starting a community garden. All it takes is one person to start the ball rolling and others will join in.
• If your apartment block has a flat roof, investigate the possibility of starting a rooftop garden. Make sure that the roof is suitably waterproof and can take the extra weight of beds or pots. Also take care to protect your plants from wind and hot sun.
• Get together with a few other parents and start a vegetable garden at your child’s school. Involve the children and teachers so everybody can learn and share the bounty.

Text by Jane Griffiths. Photographs by Jane Griffiths and Keith Knowlton. This article was taken from the May 2010 edition of Garden and Home magazine.

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