When I was a lonely farm girl in rural Illinois, I couldn’t wait to leave the country and live near friends. Now, a resident of central Albuquerque, I’ve lost the isolation of country life but still hold on to the slow pleasures of farm living. As our current social structure decays, backyard farming seems the clarifying answer to future thriving communities and my utopia of farm life but with friends. Urban farming: its farming, but cool.
What luck, then, that I should meet Melanie Rubin, a business coach with a dream to create an urban farm and make it a center for backyard farming education. Melanie and I began to work with each other for trade. I consulted her on how to turn her backyard into a beautiful and highly functioning food production area. Melanie in turn consulted Bard and I on how to develop our business and gave me confidence to project my experience in this type of living.
Melanie wants to put on a series of workshops that will transform her backyard publicly into a backyard farm. She is interested in fruit, vegetable, flower, and herb production, as well as chickens, bees, and even fish production! With Melanie’s admirable enthusiasm and my experience, we got to work developing and advertising for the series and collecting materials for the first workshop. The series would run through the summer and fall and begin with garden design.
Zoe teaching Backyard Farm Design
On May 3rd, thanks to Melanie’s marketing skills, 65 people gathered in her backyard for a three hour workshop. We discuss how to evalute your property as it is, daydream about what you want it to become, and blend those two things, along with Permaculture principles, into a beautiful design and realistic action plan. After instruction and plenty of group activities to engage the audience and to personalize the information, we began installing the design I created for Melanie.
Garden installation
The next workshop is schedualed for May 31st. Long seasoned New Mexican gardener, Yvonne Scott, will discuss all the how-tos of annual planting including soil building techniques, planting scheduals, planting in communities, and the best techniques to water. View Melanie’s website at www.abqbackyardfarms.com and join us in the Green Revolution!
Tags: backyard farm, city farming, community garden project, garden workshops, growing vegetables, permaculture, permaculture design, permaculture gardening, start a backyard farm, start a garden, urban farming, Victory Gardens
