You have a large family, including five kids — is that what motivated you to start gardening?
I heard a tornado warning in Calgary one day and I thought if I had to go somewhere in a rush with these little babies, how would I do it? Then I started thinking about emergency food supply, canning food and growing food and it kind of rolled from there I think. Then I started gardening and realized it was actually quite fun.
Are your kids into it too?
They don’t like doing the grunt work like hauling dirt and digging up potatoes very much, but they really like the chickens and playing with them, running around the yard.
You have backyard chickens?
Yeah, I have six chickens. They’re quite fun too.
Your neighbours don’t mind?
One neighbour, the closest one, she thought it was quite cool because one of them lays different coloured eggs. Most of the people that I know are asking me when I have surplus eggs so that I can give to them. They don’t seem to mind. The chickens stay in the yard, they’re quiet, they don’t smell. Nobody minds.
I guess roosters are the ones up at the crack of dawn squawking.
Yeah, they’ll crow at pretty much anything. And they’re pretty aggressive too. They’re the protector of the flock, so they’ll attack small children and other animals, so they’re harder to have. But you don’t need roosters to have the hens laying eggs. So you can just have chickens in the city and still have fresh eggs.
How many eggs do you get a day?
In the winter, it depends on the temperature. If it’s above zero, three to four, sometimes five. In the summer, it’s five or six a day. They need the energy to keep themselves warm and they don’t produce an egg as quickly if it’s really cold.
So are you sick of eggs yet?
No. I’m sure finding lots of uses though. My oldest daughter does a lot of baking, so she’s always going in and taking six eggs at a time to make muffins, cakes or whatever.
How much space do the chickens take up?
You don’t need very much space to have chickens. My chickens are in a coop that is two metres by three metres and it’s about 2.5 metres high. I do let them in the yard, they do like to wander around, but you don’t need much space.
Are you pretty much self-sustaining at this point? What’s your grocery bill look like?
In the summertime I have to make an effort to go, “Oh no, we need milk because we forgot because we were getting so much from our yard.” We still get meat, but I buy half a pig at a time, or a quarter of a cow, then I don’t have to go to the store very often. So in the summer we’re mostly living off of our garden. In the winter, I haven’t got the production of my vertical veggie farm up enough, so we’re just using the lettuce with that, but I’m experimenting with it. I’ve also done a lot of canning and started growing mushrooms inside too. I’m finding all these different things to try and grow your own food.
It all sounds quite time-consuming.
Well, some of the stuff is seasonal. I do square-foot gardening, so it doesn’t have as much demand on time as row gardening. I don’t have any cold frames yet, so I’m not starting in the spring and ending in late fall; so it’s a pretty short season. But I am a stay-at-home mom, I am taking care of five kids, so you’d think I’d have a lot of time, but actually taking care of the kids — just meal prep, feeding them, bedtime stories, baths and laundry — takes up quite a bit of my time. But I’m just really curious about how to do all this food production. Once I start something and get pretty good at it then I think, “OK, now what can I do?” So I just started mushrooms around Christmas time, and that will have a learning curve before I feel like I’ve mastered it and it’s producing a lot of food.
Ursula de Vries, founder of Vertical Veggie Farms
I think it was November or December when I started piecing together a hydroponic system. I think I really figured out this system last summer.
Was there a lot of trial and error to it?
Yeah. There are a bunch of different methods for hydroponics. It’s basically delivering a nutrient solution to the plant, but you can have a flood and drain system, a drip, a river that goes past the roots, there’s lots of different ways of doing it. But I wanted to have it in my window, so I could use the sunshine for free. I wanted it vertical so it didn’t take up much space.
I wanted to use materials that were easy to find, cheap and light.
It looks like you’re using everyday materials, such as used two-litre pop bottles.
I’d been hearing a lot about the poverty in the United States, tent villages going up, and then you hear about tsunamis and earthquakes in Haiti and stuff. I thought “There has to be some sort of quick solution for giving some sort of food growing system in a place that is devastated by flooding or rubble.” How do you feed people and maybe even teach them how to feed themselves year-round? Or how do you feed people that are in North America where it’s winter or too cold to grow anything year-round. Or people who are in apartments, who have no actual dirt that they can get into.
Does one of these systems fit well in an apartment?
It’s about a foot deep, three or four feet wide. I made it so it could fit into a patio window. A lot of apartments have a patio window and a little balcony or a big picture window, so I wanted something that would fit in front of a window like that and take advantage of the sunshine.
Are you relying solely on sunshine, or supplementing with artificial lighting?
I supplement. I have compact light fluorescents that are daylight spectrum. They’re low-wattage. They do make LED full-spectrum lights for hydroponics, but they’re really expensive, about $300 for one bulb.
These ones are about $10 or $20 for a bulb. The compact light fluorescents are something that is new with hydroponics. Before with hydroponics, you needed a flat surface and a big ballast lighting system. It was mostly done by commercial greenhouses or by illicit indoor thing.
Do you get a higher yield using the hydroponic system rather than soil?
I think it depends on what kind of seed and a bunch of other factors actually. The seeds that I’m using right now are heritage seed and I’m not sure they’re suitable to the Calgary climate. I haven’t compared them to the daytime use in the winter versus soil use in the summer.
What are heritage seeds?
There are different seed manufacturers — you’ve heard of Monsanto and how they are a mega corporation and how they make a lot of genetically modified seeds. Something like 90 per cent of seeds that are sold in the United States come from three companies, Monsanto being one of them. So the seeds are modified so they are profit producing, not necessarily good food quality nutritionally or taste. It’s more shelf life, shipping suitability and the looks.
When you get a heritage seed, that is from a plant that grows well, tastes good, has great nutrition and it’s a lot of variety amongst those plants. If you bought a seed at a regular gardening store, it might come from Monsanto, it might be genetically modified, you just don’t know unless you do some intense research into it.
You don’t know what kind of food you’re actually growing, whereas heritage seeds are unadulterated plants.
Where do you buy them?
There are lots of places online that sell them. There are places in Calgary that sell them, such as Community Natural Foods. There will be lots at the Seedy Saturday Sale in March, I think. They usually produce them organically as well so they don’t have weird things happening to them.
Do the chemicals leech out of the pop bottles?
No. Plastic from pop bottles doesn’t leech. I did some research into that to find out if they were food safe. Since the controversy with BPA and the general idea of leeching of plastics we found that water bottles will leech into the water and some plants will take up those chemicals and then when you ingest them you are actually eating them.
Some plants are OK, in that the leaves will soak up contaminants, but the actual fruit won’t. Tomato you can grow in soil that has lead in it, so the tomatoes will be fine, but the leaves you can’t eat.
Plants are kind of cool that way. There are even some plants that will absorb the toxins. So you can use a hydroponic system to clean your grey water. There are a lot of nifty designers that are doing interior walls of greenery as a grey water remediation to turn it into drinking water.
Is that your next project?
I don’t think so. Once you start getting into something like that you need to do some major plumbing. Well, you don’t need to, you could scoop out bath water and clean it, but I’m not there yet.
There seems to be a growing interest in permaculture.
Permaculture is really cool because it’s looking at basic human needs and thinking how can we do this efficiently without destroying the planet in the meantime. So it’s a really efficient way of doing things. Even something like having chickens, they’re right in my backyard; I don’t have to pay for refrigeration or delivery, I don’t have to worry about a farmer not taking good care of his chickens because I’m the one doing it so I know what condition they are in. They’re close by; I have them daily. I’m not worried about any disruptions in our delivery system because I have the stuff right here.
Do the city’s bylaw officers bother you about the chickens?
No. I sent them an invitation to come and check it out. I started getting into chickens specifically when the end of fall came around and I thought, “This is terrible, I have no food that’s coming in every day.” Then I saw an ad to win a chicken coop and started looking into it because it looked really small for this amount of chickens. Then I realized it takes up very little space.
As soon as I got the chickens in — this happened with gardening too — I looked at my yard not as something that was consuming my time and money. It was something that was actually paying me back. I turned from being a consumer to being a producer and literally putting food on the table for my family. That was so cool and I totally understand now that basic impulse for providing for your family. When you can see the direct line it’s very satisfying as a parent.
Why hasn’t the city cracked down on you for having chickens, but has on others such as Paul Hughes?
I think they will only investigate if there is a complaint. They know that I’ve got chickens, they have my address, but they don’t come around because I’ve never had a complaint about it.
Did you talk to your neighbours beforehand about it?
No, I didn’t. I just did it and one neighbour came over because I got her mail in my mailbox and when I gave it to her one of my kids said, “We have chickens!” Then she knew. I wasn’t going to tell her. I was just going to wait for somebody to say what is going on there.
article source: Fast Forward Weekly
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