The might of tiny victory gardens
No yard? No problem. You can grow a surprising amount of food in pots and raised beds to feed yourself and your community, support pollinators, and cope with a warming world. Photo credit: Acadia Tucker
Driving across the country with a sprig of basil riding shotgun heralded the start of my love affair with container gardening. My long trip home to New England, after spending six years farming in Washington State, wasn’t the first time I’d grown food in pots. But the way it came about shifted how I thought about container gardening.
The day before I left, I’d spent most of my time cleaning up the greenhouses and saying goodbye to the two friends I’d teamed up with to turn a neglected, overgrown patch of dirt into a market farm that produced more than two hundred different fruits, vegetables, and herbs. On my last walk past the asparagus we’d worked so hard to grow and the lettuce our clients couldn’t get enough of, I swiped some basil, just because. As I was closing the farm gates for the last time, it occurred to me that I could take that basil with me. I picked up the first plastic pot I saw, transplanted the basil, and we hit the road.
“Once I saw how much food I could get out of a single pot, I was all in.”
I’m not going to tell you that little plant survived the trip across snow-covered mountains, flat, barren deserts, endless wide plains, and the long final stretch to the East Coast. But while it was with me, right up until I’d driven about halfway across Oklahoma, I still had a little bit of the farm with me, which was comforting.
The I-can-take-it-with-me benefit of growing food in planters has always appealed to me. I’m a longtime renter and that basil plant isn’t the only one I’ve packed up on my way to a new home. But the harsh New England winters, first in New Hampshire and then in Maine, where I eventually settled and now work as a grower, helped me appreciate container gardening anew.
Indoor container gardens are a way to keep harvesting food year round. There may be snow on the ground but I’ve got arugula, baby kale, and spinach seedlings growing in my windowsill. Photo credit: Acadia Tucker
At the end of my first growing season back East, after I’d turned the turf behind my Dad’s house into a garden, I started bringing home the vegetables I couldn’t bear leaving behind, like late-season cherry tomatoes and the potted up lettuce I didn’t want to lose to frost.
My collection of rehomed vegetables lived on the kitchen table for about a week— charming, but very impractical. In thinking about where to keep them long-term, or at least for as long as they’d continue to bear fruit, I found myself reimagining my indoor space as a climate-controlled mini-farm.
Among the first changes I made was to bring in a deep, wide container. I pushed it against a sliding glass door to take advantage of the southern light, filled it with an organic potting mix, and transplanted the tomatoes and lettuce. A week later, I brought in another big container and planted beets.
Over the course of that first winter, I lined my window sills with potted herbs including thyme, oregano, and rosemary, eventually slipping the generic plastic pots into patterned ceramic ones that accented my pale blue kitchen walls. I hung baskets on used curtain rods for the cascading mini cucumbers I like to pickle. And I realized a long-held dream of growing my own tropical fruit by potting a banana and a lime tree and tucking both into the dining room—the warmest room in the house.
But the moment I fully embraced container gardening was sometime in the spring, when I caught a glimpse of how much mightier it could be than I’d presumed. A friend dropped by with some cilantro and, since I was short on pots, I stuck it in with my beets. It was my first experience pairing up plants in a container, albeit on a micro scale, and it proved to be a turning point. I continued to experiment with various pairings, and once I saw how much food I could get out of a single pot, I was all in.
I’ve wanted to grow food for as long as I can remember, so the chance to farm in the Pacific Northwest was kind of a dream come true. It helped to be a little starry-eyed. Early on, we ran into all the usual challenges experienced by growers with big ambitions, very few resources, and a revenue model reliant on growing as many vegetables as possible in one short growing season. Our precarious situation was made more so when almost half of our first crop turned out to be too stunted and chewed up by pests to sell.
My dining room houses a number of fruits, including this young banana tree. I make it work with the help of grow lights. Photo credit: Acadia Tucker
But the setback changed the way I grow food, and within two years, we were harvesting thousands of pounds of food from just two acres— more than enough to feed our small community. Our plants developed sufficient resilience to help us better weather the droughts and near-violent rainstorms that are now part of the Pacific Northwest’s warming landscape. We were able to save money on watering, and on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides since we’d stopped using them.
The secret to our success was cultivating healthy soil by adopting regenerative growing practices, which mimic nature and allow organic matter to build up in the soil. We gave up tilling, planted cover crops to protect against soil erosion, and treated our land to big helpings of compost. In doing so, we fed the community of living creatures that thrive off organic matter, from microscopic bacteria to soil giants like worms and millipedes.
A happy byproduct of microbe-rich soil is its ability to capture and store carbon. This is the reason grasslands hold about 20 percent of global carbon stocks, and forests capture about one-quarter of global carbon emissions every year. (Though deforestation is undermining this effect.) It’s also how we turned our farm into a carbon sink.
The promise of building out a foodscape large enough to help cool our planet inspired my first two books, which focus on backyard gardening using regenerative practices. I’ve since learned that container gardening has environmental benefits as well. Admittedly, small potted gardens will never become carbon-sucking powerhouses. Even raised beds are a stretch. Soil expert Eric Toensmeier was able to offset the annual carbon emissions of one adult on only a tenth of an acre packed with deep-rooted perennial plants. Impressive, but that translates to something like 136 four-by-eight-foot raised beds.
Outdoor gardens, however small, can be a lifeline for beneficial insects. In addition to supporting bees, bugs, and butterflies, pollinator magnets can help fend off troublesome pests from your crops. Marigolds, pictured here, repel nasty root nematodes from my tomatoes. Photo credit: Acadia Tucker.
Still, filling your planter with compost-rich potting mix, alive with beneficial soil organisms, means your plants will likely be easier to tend to and more nutritious. At the very least, you can spend less time watering and ditch the fertilizers and insecticides that do far more harm than good.
Growing food in containers is also an excellent way to support pollinators, which have taken a big hit in recent years thanks in part to our warming planet and overuse of pesticides. Planting flowers and food in pots creates a safe zone for pollinators in urban environments where food is already scarce, as well as in suburban areas rolling in manicured lawns, which are biological wastelands.
Many pollinators are small and can’t fly very far. As their habitats shrink, they become isolated from food and each other. Planting a cross-country corridor of balcony crops, rooftop oases, and backyard container gardens can help these beneficial insects find enough food to survive so that they, in turn, can pollinate our food.
The fact that container gardening allows just about anyone to grow a decent amount of food, no backyard required, leads to another benefit: While growing food in pots may not do much to mitigate climate change, it can help us adapt to it.
“Growing food in containers is an excellent way to support pollinators, which have taken a big hit in recent years.”
In two recent reports, scientists on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that climate change, combined with the “unprecedented rate” of exploitation of the world’s land and water resources, is putting an immense strain on crop production. The researchers ticked off the various ways fast-rising temperatures are threatening the productivity of farmland, among them, record-setting hurricanes and flooding in the Southeast, blistering heat waves and torrential rains in the Midwest, and extended periods of drought and intense heat in California, which is being incinerated by multiplying and ever-widening wildfires.
My friend in California grew his first container garden this year. He ended up with so many cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash he gave away bushels of surplus food to his neighbors. Photo Credit: Vince Giannotti
This is scary stuff, and just about everyone knows we have to act faster to head off the worst of it. In the meantime, it’s not a bad idea to prepare for an increasingly uncertain world by learning how to grow food. Cultivating your own food source is a meaningful way to promote resilience in your household and, by sharing your knowledge with neighbors—along with the fruits and vegetables of your labors— it can do the same for your community. This is already happening in areas that often struggle economically, like Detroit and the Bronx, where community gardening, which provides an affordable source of fresh food for many locals, is thriving.
My own small farm in Point Roberts, Washington, became an example of food resilience when the pandemic closed the Canadian border, blocking off the town’s primary source of food and support. Fortunately, the residents had taken ownership of The Coop, as we called it, and kept it going. The raised beds, mended greenhouses, and planted fields we’d left behind produced enough fresh food to generously supplement what the town’s single grocery store could supply.
“The ultimate in food security may be the ability to grow at least some of our food indoors.”
The ultimate in food security —and I may be getting ahead of myself here—may be the ability to grow at least some of our food indoors. Big swaths of the country already experience smoky air and extreme heat on a regular basis. Setting up a climate-controlled indoor farm that buffers against weather swings isn’t all that crazy. I’m already doing it to an extent myself. Adding to the appeal is that all those plants can make stuffy interiors a little fresher, thanks to the upcycling of oxygen and carbon dioxide that’s part of the ordinary process of photosynthesis.
In chaotic times, it’s easy to become nostalgic for the last time US citizens came together in force to grow food. During World Wars I and II, the government pitched victory gardening as a way for Americans to do their patriotic duty, and leaned on slogans like “Food is Fighting,” and “Be a Soldier of the Soil.” Eager to do something, anything, to help the cause, people rallied. They planted vegetables in yards, abandoned city lots, and schoolyards; in pots on stoops, rooftops, and fire escapes. By 1943, the nearly 20 million victory gardens across the country were growing 40 percent, or 80 billion pounds, of the nation’s food.
In this book, you’ll find the tools and instructions needed to grow your own tiny victory garden. One that can supply you with as much, or as little, food as you’d like, grown in a way that helps the planet. All you really need to grow food in containers is a patch of sun. This book will teach you how to make the most of that light, and build more resilience into your life.
I take heart from visionaries like Paul Hawken, co-founder of Project Drawdown, a nonprofit that tracks climate solutions. He sees enormous potential in the food sector’s ability to mitigate climate change. The keys will include reducing food waste, adopting plant-rich diets, and changing how we grow food, and as Hawken says, “farmers, urban growers, backyard gardeners, and all of us eaters can, and will, lead the way.”
Excerpted from the book Tiny Victory Gardens: Growing food without a yard by Acadia Tucker (Stone Pier Press, 2021). Acadia Tucker is an author, regenerative farmer, and climate activist. Tiny Victory Gardens is her third book in Stone Pier Press’s citizen gardening series, which highlights how to grow food in a way that’s good for the planet. Acadia has also written Growing Perennial Foods and Growing Good Food. She is a Rodale Institute Ambassador for regenerative agriculture, and lives in Maine with her farm dog Nimbus.
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