Find out how to easily start growing food in your own backyard without fancy equipment or a lot of training beforehand. If she can do it, you can too!
This video about a woman named Asia, a single mother of two, has captivated my imagination because she is a lot like me, and her garden is such an inviting green oasis.
She started gardening in 2020, as a hobby. In just few years (3) she has created something magnificent in the middle of a city that sustains her family most of the year.
In the video Asia walks us through her backyard garden and it looked lovely, and to may amazement, it looks like something even I could do.
I think all single moms interested in finding easy ways to provide healthy food for their families could learn a lot from her story.
You don’t need to spend a lot of money to get started.
Asia’s story proves that you don’t need the special seed starter trays or special soil. You don’t don’t have to buy a lot of fertilizers and chemicals if you use the principals of companion gardening to keep the insects at bay and use cloth covered hoops to protect some vulnerable plants.
She used cinderblocks that she got for free from a person giving them away on Facebook Marketplace.
She has used fabric grocery bags to grow most of her food. She now uses 60 in her yard. She likes them because she can move them around as needed and they don’t take up much space.
She built up the garden gradually, as she had time.
You can be successful quickly even if you start very small.
Asia started with one rectangle area on the ground in her backyard. She stacked a single layer of cinderblocks around a patch of ground in a rectangular shape. Then she filled the cinderblock bordered rectangle with soil. That’s it.
She uses no dig beds too. She just put cardboard boxes down on the ground and then piled compost on top then mulch (straw).
Then she starting planting things.
She used a hoop garden idea to protect some of the plants, I noticed, and they looked like hula hoops that had been cut and stuck in the holes in the cinderblocks. Then she covered the hoops with a white fabric that looked like cheesecloth. It didn’t look complicated or like a special kit that she had bought. I realized that I could probably do that too. Greenhouse kits are expensive, but this is not.
The next year she added another rectangular bed. And then she started using fabric bags to grow different plant because they are so compact and easy to move around.
She also has planted some fruit trees to start a food forest.
She uses a cattle wire fence as an arched trellis for vines.
The different types of gardening in her yard fill up the space vertically as well as horizontally, and it makes her whole backyard look cozy, like a little garden oasis.
You can learn as you go.
Asia says she has watched a lot of YouTube videos and adapted the ideas she saw to her own backyard situation.
She has a composting system and composts her kitchen scraps in a big sack with a thermometer in it.
She collects rainwater using a nifty black collapsible water barrel placed under her water spout. The top is covered and has a mesh hole, which is an ingenious design to keep the water fairly clean and pests out of it.
She has learned how to can and preserve food, and how to dehydrate herbs since her basil plant and other herbs produced so much. She has started to use a greenhouse tent with a cheap shelf from Walmart inside as a air drying rack for herbs and to start seedlings.
She showed how she makes basil tea using fresh leaves and it lookes so delicious. I had not thought of making fresh basil tea before, but why not? Basil is very good to help manage high blood pressure and smells so amazing.
She has a few chickens too.
In just four years, after watching YouTube videos and trying things, she has created a whole urban homestead for herself and her family, and is living in food abundance, supplying 90% of her family’s needs.
You can recoup your expenses within the first year.
Asia says she doesn’t need to buy any vegetables or fruit in summertime anymore. She grows and harvests enough to feed herself and her children.
Although she didn’t start out with the motivation to grow food so that she had healthier choices to feed her family, she now really appreciates knowing where her food comes from, and knowing that it has not been sprayed with chemicals or harmful pesticidess.
Most of all, she has discovered a peaceful hobby she loves. She doesn’t know why she didn’t start sooner.
Tonight, inspired by this video and how simple and easy she made it seem to start a garden, my son and I went out and collected some rocks and sand and soil in fabric grocery bags, so start our own urban farming adventure.
I have been saving seeds for a few months and we are going to try to see how to make a hoop house, just a tiny one, made of a few hula hoops cut in half, wedged into cinderblocks or bricks we round up in the neighbourhood.
Insects are a problem here in Mexico, and they have eaten all my previous attempts at growing tomatoes and sunflowers.
But we are determined to make this work. We need an extremely cost effective food security solution. I love the idea of growing in fabric bags since we don’t own this house and may have to move.
I realized that there was no benefit to waiting, and the sooner we started, the sooner we might start to enjoy our own homegrown produce.
I’ll keep you posted to show you how it goes!
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