Just Grow Food

Grow food. Just do it. It's easier than most folks think. The beauty of growing food is it can be as simple or as complex as you want to make it. Producing food can be the profession of Botanists with master’s degrees, or the stress reliever of soccer moms with a packet of lettuce seeds and a flowerpot.

My name is Zach Brown, owner of Brown's Greens Urban Agriculture. I live in Colorado Springs, CO, USA and I have been gardening/farming for four years. I moulded my gardening into an official business just this year with the help of my friend and co-owner Blake Maloney. Brown’s Greens is still in its baby stages, but we’re working constantly to get more food growing in this city. Our basic two operations are helping folks turn their backyards into food gardens, and converting unused/neglected space around the city into food gardens of our own and selling the produce to local restaurants. Take a look at our website: http://www.brownsgreens.net/ and give our facebook page a like!

The local food movement has become a huge trend in many parts of America in the past decade. People who have tasted the wholesome freshness of local produce and animal products are growing tired of frozen/shipped/processed supermarket foods. I don’t consider myself to be a food snob or a very outspoken activist for the local food movement, but I cannot deny that a ripe pepper or a fresh egg from my backyard garden and chickens is tastier, generally healthier, and way more fun to partake in than a pepper or egg from Safeway down the street.

I first started thinking about growing food five years ago when I worked on a farm in Iowa baling hay. Every night I dined with this farm family and on their table was sweet corn from their fields, veggies from Mrs. Dahl’s garden, and pork or chicken from their livestock. It inspired me, and when my traveling days ended and I moved back to my hometown Colorado Springs, I started growing vegetables. I was shocked at how easy it was to grow food, not huge, beautiful, luscious produce right at first, but edible and delicious food. I was also shocked by how much space all over the city was just sitting unused (friends’ backyards, community garden beds, unlandscaped street corners or medians, etc), and how easy it was for me to start accumulating space, borrowed for free mostly, to start building gardens. Over the years I continued to accumulate gardens around town, worked on landscaping teams and in a garden center, read many gardening and horticulture books, started selling my produce, and now have gained enough confidence and knowledge to launch Brown’s Greens. My co-worker and I now manage about 3500 square feet of garden space around town and are continually helping other folks get their gardens started. This kind of urban agriculture goes by many names: foodscaping, earthscaping, urban farming, etc. It is not my invention, there are food gardening businesses across the nation. But in my area, it is a growing new notion that despite the harsh weather and cold winters of Colorado, growing food is possible.

My next article will give gardening newbies a few free pieces of knowledge that are very helpful to have before you grow food in your garden site. Whether you read it or not, I encourage you to try to grow some food, even if it’s just a little. I could go on for pages about the benefits of growing your own food, especially in urban environments, but most of all I believe it’s so good for the soul and body to get your hands in the dirt and eat your own creation. Please check out our website, get some ideas, look up foodscaping businesses in your own area, and find some dirt to put some seeds in and see what happens.

P.S. your upvotes would help us buy an extremely needed work truck :)