The rise of the inner-city farmer

Whether it's a vegie patch on the balcony, chooks in the backyard or a beehive on the roof, more and more city slickers are producing their own food, reports Roslyn Grundy.

(The Sydney Morning Herald)It started with an epiphany, a stopped-in-her-tracks moment while shopping for lunch at a Sydney farmers' market. Offered a cherry tomato that looked much like any other, Indira Naidoo popped it in her mouth and kept walking. "But when I bit into it, it tasted like a bite of candy," says the former ABC and SBS newsreader. "It was just so sweet and so juicy. I could taste Turkish delight and toffee apple. I thought, 'Hang on, where did that tomato come from?'"

Naidoo turned on her heel to ask the stallholder where she could buy them. “He said, ‘You can’t. But you can save some seeds and grow your own.’” In that moment, another seed was planted, an idea that bloomed into The Edible Balcony ($40, Lantern), Naidoo’s book on growing fresh food in a small space.

Like many city dwellers, Naidoo is experiencing the satisfaction of eating fruit, vegetables and herbs she has nurtured herself. An increasing preoccupation with fresh food, where it comes from and whether it’s produced sustainably means many urbanites are experimenting with growing vegetables, raising chickens and even keeping bees.

Naidoo’s balcony vegie patch was an idea that could easily have withered on the vine. “A lot of people in apartments just automatically rule themselves out,” says Naidoo. “They just think, ‘Well, there’s nothing I can grow in an apartment so I won’t even think about it. I’ll fantasise about one day having a tree change or a sea change and having my little plot of land somewhere, but it’s not going to happen while I live in the city.’”

One of 261 people former US vice-president Al Gore trained in 2009 to educate the public on climate change, Naidoo is involved in communicating complex scientific and political concepts relating to climate change, carbon trading and consumer food miles.

Growing a few tomatoes on her 13th-storey balcony seemed like a simple way to reduce her own carbon footprint and put a little oxygen back into the atmosphere while waiting for politicians to agree on a carbon trading scheme. And how hard could it be? A hundred years ago, everyone grew and cooked their own food, she reasoned. The reality was both simpler and more complex than she imagined.

Naidoo quickly discovered that despite all the books, newspaper columns, lifestyle programs and websites devoted to gardening, little information existed about growing food on balconies.

She sought advice from horticulturalists, growers at farmers’ markets and inner-city gardeners before she decided to ring Peter Cundall, former presenter of ABC TV’s Gardening Australia, who told her to start small and share her successes and failures. “You’ll lose friends and you’ll make new friends,” he told her.

Naidoo began writing a blog, Saucy Onion, to document her nascent interest in DIY farming. It dawned on her that she could write a guide to balcony gardening, but when she mentioned it to her parents, they scoffed. “They didn’t think that anyone would want to know how to grow or cook things,” says Naidoo. “In their generation, everyone did it and everyone still does it. They didn’t think there was a book in it.”

The eldest of three daughters, Naidoo moved to Tasmania from South Africa (via Zambia and England) when she was six. “When we first came here in the ’70s, you couldn’t buy things like coriander in the shops. It was a necessity to grow some of those ingredients because you couldn’t get them.”

As a result, her parents grew most of the family’s vegetables, including okra, eggplant and “lots of different kinds of beans because they’re an important ingredient in South African-Indian cooking”, but Naidoo says her involvement was limited to raking leaves or picking ingredients for the evening meal. “As children, it wasn’t something we really connected with. It was more a chore that we had to just do because our parents told us to.”

Despite her parents’ scepticism, Naidoo approached Penguin Books. The project got the green light and before she knew it, she was elbow-deep in potting mix and organic cow manure.

The Edible Balcony charts her efforts to grow her own food using organic fertilisers and pest-control methods, and to use the produce in recipes.

Drawing up a spreadsheet to map seasonal vegetables and herbs, crop rotations and companion plants, Naidoo managed to grow tomatoes, capsicums, zucchini, eggplants, carrots, mushrooms, rocket, lettuce, all manner of herbs and even a curry leaf tree in pots on her 20-square-metre Potts Point balcony, which overlooks Sydney Harbour.

Along the way, she managed to convert her husband, TV producer Mark FitzGerald, who initially thought she’d lost a screw. “Towards the end, he became as involved as I did,” say Naidoo. “He’d ring me and say, ‘On the news they said there’s a storm coming from the south. Shall I bring all the plants in?’”

Friends, too, thought Naidoo had flipped.

“I had a winter dinner party and prepared eight or nine dishes. Every dish had at least one ingredient that came from the balcony. I did a special menu and I had a little discussion about each of the ingredients – it was all very nerdy – and you could tell they were all thinking, ‘Can we just eat now?’

“But I knew I’d made a breakthrough when, after they’d eaten the meal, they went, ‘That lettuce did taste different. Why did it taste so different?’ And I said because it was literally growing 10 minutes ago and that life energy is what you’re tasting.”

The project took two years of experimentation, research, recipe testing and photography (the lush images are by Alan Benson). As Peter Cundall predicted, there were some failures, including broccoli that went to seed and garlic that failed to produce bulbs – “easily the most devastating failure of the whole experiment”.

But Naidoo says she learnt a lot from her plants. “I set out to do a few things but I didn’t realise how it would actually change me. It made me much more aware of living in the moment. When you see things grow, you see how there’s a time and a place for everything.”

Fabian Capomolla and Mat Pember run The Little Veggie Patch Co, designing, installing and maintaining chemical-free vegetable gardens for Melbourne homes, schools and cafes. Most clients are complete novices, says Capomolla. “They’re scared by a punnet of seedlings. Quite often they don’t understand the basics: that a seed turns into a plant, which will have flowers that turn into fruit.”

Many urban gardeners decide to pick up a trowel after watching television cooking shows such as MasterChef, which encourage people to use fresh ingredients. “You’ve also got mums with young kids wanting to educate them about healthy eating and where their food comes from, and they’re particularly concerned about having organic food. And then you’ve got baby boomers, who probably have a little more time on their hands. They didn’t grow food in their younger years but they remember growing up with it in their own backyards.”

The pair have written a book, The Little Veggie Patch: How to Grow Food in Small Spaces ($45, Pan Macmillan), aimed at such beginners. Released in September, it’s already being reprinted.

So what advice would they give a newbie gardener? After considering the available space, light and growing conditions, Capomolla encourages people to think about the plants they like eating. “It’s not about becoming self-sufficient. It’s about subsidising your grocery bill and growing things you really enjoy having fresh. Herbs are a great start, particularly if you haven’t grown anything before, because they’re pretty hardy.”

In a long, skinny backyard in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray, chickens are scratching about under Bianca Moore’s lemon tree. Her children, Ziggy, 4, and Anika, 3, play with the small, placid pekin bantams daily, taking them for rides on the handlebars of their trikes, bouncing with them on the trampoline and feeding them pellets by hand.

“They’re such beautiful pets and it’s almost a bonus that they lay eggs,” says Moore, community engagement consultant at wealth management company JBWere. “The chook poo’s fantastic in the soil and after we’ve harvested, we’ll bring in the chooks and they can clean everything up. We’ve got a worm farm, so between the worms and the chickens there’s hardly any waste.”

Moore and her partner, Dennis Matotek, bought their single-fronted weatherboard four years ago but only recently built the raised beds, now filled with heirloom vegetables such as purple carrots, dragon’s tongue beans and tigerella tomatoes, which they’ve raised from seed. “If we’d put vegie beds in when we first got here, we’d have put them all in the wrong spot,” says Matotek. “The chicken coop’s moved four or five times.”

Moore says their plan is to grow as much edible stuff as they can. “It’s funny how, for years, edible plants were not considered beautiful to look at and everyone grew cottage plants and hid the vegies down the back. I’m trying to grow things the kids will really love to eat and enjoy aesthetically, too.”

For people undecided about keeping chickens, there’s always a try-before-you-buy option. Companies such as Rentachook in Sydney and Book A Chook in Melbourne supply coops, hens, food, straw and containers for food and water to people who want to see whether keeping chooks is all it’s cracked up to be.

Rentachook’s Dave Ingham says even people with tiny courtyards can keep a couple of chickens, although it takes more work to manage the shared space. “If you’ve got a quarter-acre backyard, other than locking them up at night and feeding them every day, you wouldn’t even know they were there. But if you’re sharing a small space, you’re more aware of their presence, although it can easily be managed.”

Margot Leighton and Tim Nikolsky work full-time as teachers and play music at weekends but still find time to look after a large, productive garden in Alphington, in Melbourne’s north-east.

It’s an idyllic set-up near the Yarra River, with fruit trees, neat rows of vegetables, water tanks and a courtyard pizza oven they made themselves.

A beehive, tucked between the chicken coop and the greenhouse, is a recent addition, installed and maintained by Melbourne City Rooftop Honey.

Vanessa Kwiatkowski and Mat Lumalasi launched Melbourne City Rooftop Honey after learning that beekeepers in cities such as London, New York and Paris were reintroducing bees to urban areas. Since then, they’ve installed hives on the rooftops of more than 15 CBD and inner-city businesses, mainly cafes and restaurants, and half a dozen suburban gardens. More than 100 people have joined their waiting list.

Nikolsky’s grandfather was a commercial beekeeper and he has strong memories of people coming to his grandparents’ door to buy honey. When Nikolsky read a small newspaper article about Melbourne City Rooftop Honey last year, he offered to host a hive.

For a $250 annual fee, Kwiatkowski and Lumalasi visit fortnightly to check on the hives. In return, the Alphington couple gets a share of the honey and, thanks to the busy bees, a measurable improvement in garden productivity.

“It’s good for us because we like to grow our own vegies and try to be as sustainable as we can,” says Nikolsky. “We’re not talking food miles here. We’re talking food metres.”