- Author: Betty Homer
For the past few months, I have been featuring one location per month of an urban farm tour that I attended in June 2014. Unfortunately, these tours only occur once a year, so you will have to wait until June 2015 for the next round of tours (the tour is organized by the Institute of Urban Homesteading located in Oakland, California, and the sites change annually so there is always something new to see and explore). The good news, however, was/is that in 2014, these tours were extended into Solano County; hopefully, this trend will continue. Because the sites are private residences, with rare exception, I have not disclosed the addresses in this and prior blog entries, to preserve and protect the privacy interests of the urban farmer-homeowners.
This blog entry about Wildheart Gardens located in Berkeley, California, is the last of four installments in this series. I was excited to learn that Wildheart Gardens made it onto this year's tour list, as it is owned and operated by Christopher Shein, a permaculture instructor at Merritt College and the author of The Vegetable Gardener's Guide to Permaculture: Creating an Edible Ecosystem. Wildheart Gardens is considered a "medium" site in that the lot size consists of 6,800 square feet and of that square footage, 2,500 square feet is used for urban farming (i.e., 36% of the total lot size).
Wildheart Gardens began in 2007. I was particularly interested in this site because I wanted to see what an urban food forest looked like. This particular site had chickens and ducks, perennial vegetables, a straw bale building, rainwater catchment, timber bamboo, a plant nursery, vertical gardens, kids' forts/play area, a mushroom habitat and a composting system. This garden generates an abundance of food, building materials and compost each year and offers a live-work space for the family who lives there.
As I am growing sunchokes this year (a perennial crop), a great tip Christopher shared, was cutting down the stalks of the sunchokes (which can reach 15 feet high or taller; sunchokes are a sunflower relative) mid-season and laying those stalks down as mulch and compost for the garden; the sunchokes will re-grow and there will be plenty to eat at harvest. Although aesthetically, this mulching method may not be appeal to all, I did this after returning home, and now after 3 months, I can report that it does work. I have now begun to use other plants for that purpose.
For additional information on this site and other pictures, please see http://wildheartgardens.com/.