One of the biggest challenges for urban homesteaders is space…or more specifically, lack of space! Finding the best place to grow your fruits and veggies in any yard can be a challenge. Sometimes, just finding any place to plant can be a challenge! Take my backyard for example….I had to create space to plant what I really wanted to plant!
Finding Garden Space In A Small Yard
I live in a small urban housing development. My lot size is 8,276 sq ft ( just under 1/5 of an acre), and it’s approximately 65 feet wide by 128 feet deep. My house is 1,578 sq ft with a three car attached garage. The footprint of the house is roughly 40 feet wide by 60 feet deep. The house sits right smack dab in the middle of the lot. The yard is decent sized for most suburban houses, but most of the back yard is concrete.
According to my neighbor, the back yard was originally a hill which levelled out into a lawn, leaving around 6 feet of lawn from the bottom of the hill to the edge of the patio. The original owner made the flat area bigger by cutting out most of the hill, securing the remaining hill by putting in a 5ft retaining wall which runs the width of the back of the property.
At the same time, the original owner put in two large in-ground planter beds, one in each back corner in front of the retaining wall. The one on the right is around 15ft by 20ft, and the one on the left is around 8 ft x 10 ft. He also put in an 18 inch wide raised planter bed which runs 65 ft along the right fence line. It was planted with boxwood shrubs.
Imagining what I could do with those large planters is what sold me on the house! I would be able to plant a huge vegetable garden and fruit trees quickly and easily. They were the perfect beds for what I wanted to plant. Or so I thought!
After bringing in a dump truck load of organic compost to amend the soil, I bought and planted my young trees. After a few months, my avocado tree, which was previously thriving, suddenly died. I thought it was a fluke, so I went and bought a new one and planted it. A few weeks later, my lemon tree died. Then my orange tree. And then the new avocado.
Why Are My Trees Dying?
So I went and bought another avocado tree, but this one from a different nursery. This time, I decided to dig the hole a bit deeper to give the roots looser soil. I dug about four inches deeper than I had previously, and heard a clunk coming from the ground under the shovel. Oh, no, it’s a big rock, I thought.
I started to dig out around the rock so that I could pry it up. I dug wider and wider, but what I originally thought was a ‘rock’ didn’t seem to have an edge. It suddenly became obvious to me why all of my trees had died; the entire in-ground garden bed was only about two feet deep and lined with concrete!
The only bare ground space where I could readily plant was unusable for planting anything with a deep root system. A solid 65 ft long boxwood hedge was growing in the raised bed. To top it off, the area above the retaining wall was a steep slope. My dream yard was suddenly turning into a nightmare! I had to do something, but what?
I Can’t Plant A Garden On Concrete, So Now What?
After a few days of brainstorming, I came to the conclusion that the boxwoods had to go. I couldn’t eat them, so I certainly wasn’t going to water them! My husband came home from work that day to find me in the back yard with the hedge clippers and reciprocal saw, cutting away at the boxwoods. It took a few weeks to remove all of the hedges. Removing them gave me space to plant a small, very basic vegetable garden, but it wasn’t what I really wanted to plant.
At least I got to plant something, but it wasn’t enough space for what I really wanted to plant. I wanted to plant as many varieties of fruit trees as I could so that they would have time to mature and be fruit bearing before my husband and I were ready to retire. Having mature fruit trees in the back yard would really help minimize our food bills in retirement. How could I do that if I had no place to plant trees? So back to the think tank I went.
Brainstorming And Creativity
After a bit of brainstorming, I decided to terrace the hill above the retaining wall. It took a little convincing to get my husband on board with that idea, but I eventually did. The dirt on the hill was so hard that it required a pick axe to break it up, and so it took a bit longer than we anticipated. We worked on small sections at a time, and were able to complete the project in about two months.
With a little sweat equity, we successfully turned an unusable dirt slope into a five-level tiered garden! We amended the soil and planted our fruit trees, and we’ve been enjoying the fruits of our labor (no pun intended) ever since!
This is how we did it…
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