The Perks and Perils of Backyard Gardening

When I was growing up, in the suburbs, gardening was something retirees took up as a way to pass the time. But these days, in Berkeley at least, gardening is hip, vital, and growing in popularity.

Home to ’s prestigious College of Natural Resources, which draws greenwardly-mobile young people from all around the world, and groundbreaking projects like the Edible Schoolyard and Spiral Gardens, Berkeley is all about “urban ag.”

And in these lean times, it seems that more and more people in Berkeley are taking up gardening as a way to supplement their income; so much so that Berkeley officials recently proposed changing the law to make it easier for residents to sell small amounts of produce grown in their backyards, following a similar move in San Francisco last year.

So when I moved into a house in South Berkeley this past March - the first time in my adult life that I had my own backyard - it seemed the right time for me to join the growing ranks of gardening Berkeleyans.

I was enthusiastic about the prospect of starting a garden for a mix of personal, economic and idealistic reasons. First of all, it seemed like a fun project, and a great way to ease the stress of a busy schedule. Eating locally and sustainably is important to me, but as a recent college graduate I’m also on a tight budget, so being able to grow organic produce in my own backyard has a lot of appeal.

It also helped that I had a head start. Before I moved in, my new roommates, who are all around my age, had already set up four raised beds in the backyard, filled them with compost, and scored some free organic seeds through a friend who works on a farm down the coast. What’s more, the house had a lot of good, though long-unused, gardening supplies like seeding trays, planters, and trowels left over from former tenants.

What the garden lacked was someone at the helm. When I arrived, responsibility for the garden was diffuse, so progress was sluggish. The intention was there, but the seeds had quite literally not been planted. They were still in their pouches.

None of my roommates - very busy people, to be sure - felt up to the responsibility. As I work mostly from home, and I have some agricultural experience from I summer I spent working on an organic farm in upstate New York, it made sense for me to take it on.

I didn’t have the experience to know which seeds it would be wise to plant, in this climate region, in early March. What I did have was Golden Gate Gardening by Pam Pierce, the Bay Area gardener’s Bible. It’s an astonishingly detailed compendium of information - from composting tips and planting schedules, to individual entries on crops and each of the region’s most common pests - tailor-made for Bay Area growers.

After seeing what Ms. Pierce had to say, I decided to seed peas, chard, spinach, lettuce, collards, broccoli, and a little later, some peppers. Using a trick I learned while working on the farm, I put them in the oven with the oven light on - the incandescent bulb, not the heating element - giving them just enough heat and a protected environment to help them germinate. 

As a first time gardener, I’m learning that there are a lot of advantages to living in such an agriculturally and progressively-minded place as Berkeley. For instance, there’s the free compost the city provides for residents.

If you don’t already know what becomes of all those scraps you’ve been dutifully tossing in that little green bin, it’s available in fertile decomposed form at the on the last Saturday of every month, February through October.

Berkeley residents can help themselves to it, and my roommates had already gotten a truckload of the stuff before I’d arrived. It’s what was in the raised beds.

But why, I wondered, had they just put straight compost into the beds, and not mixed it with the soil?

The reason, I learned, was one of the perils of being an urban grower. Lead contamination in soil, my roommates informed me, often occurs because the paint on many older homes and fences contains lead, which eventually flakes off into the soil. The paint on the back wall of our house is flaking and peeling away, and the spectre of lead contamination kept my roommates from using the soil.

This put a small hitch in our plans. I certainly didn’t want to use the soil if there was a chance it could have lead in it. When the seedlings were ready, I transplanted them straight into the compost, which for the time being seems to be working fine. To my great satisfaction, we've got several plants shooting for the sky, boding well for a lush summer harvest.

But I wanted to know for certain about the state of our soil, and whether we could eventually use it.

In my next installment, I’ll tell you about the free social service I found that lets you test whether your soil has dangerous amounts of lead, and I’ll also tell you what you can do if it does.

Have a gardening tip you'd like to share? An urban ag tale of your own? Tell us in the comments.