Abstract
AbstractIn the United States, interest in urban farms and community gardens is flourishing, yet the urban home food garden (UHFG) and its contributions to urban systems have been overlooked and understudied. To begin to address this gap, we are conducting a mixed methods study of African American, Chinese-origin and Mexican-origin households with home gardens in Chicago, IL. Study methods include in-depth interviews, participant observation, ethnobotanical surveys and analysis of the chemical and physical properties of garden soils. As of this writing, findings indicate that home gardening has an array of beneficial effects, contributing to household food budgets and community food systems, the reproduction of cultural identity and urban biodiversity. The majority of informants in the study were internal or international migrants. For these individuals, gardening, culture-specific food plant assemblages and the foodways they support represent a continuation of cultural practices and traditional agroecological knowledge associated with their place of origin. The gardens of some migrant households also harbor urban agrobiodiversity with roots in the Global South. At the same time, gardens may have less salubrious effects on urban systems and populations. A lack of knowledge of safe gardening practices may expose vulnerable populations to environmental hazards such as soil contaminants. Gardeners in this study reported using synthetic chemical fertilizers and pesticides, sometimes indiscriminately, and the repeated application of synthetic fertilizers and compost may contribute to the nutrient loading of urban stormwater runoff. These effects may be moderated by the relatively low bulk density and high porosity of garden soils due to tillage and the application of organic matter, which can be expected to enhance stormwater infiltration. While the UHFG's potential contributions to urban systems are significant, outreach and research are needed to help gardeners grow food safely and sustainably in ways that contribute to overall ecosystem health.
Highlights
The home food garden represents a major lacuna in the rapidly expanding academic literature on urban agriculture in the developed world
The socio-demographic characteristics of the 31 gardeners (10 Mexican-origin, Chinese-origin and African American) recruited for the study varied across ethnic groups (Table 2)
African American and Chinese-origin gardeners were older than Mexican-origin gardeners, who were more likely to have young children at home than the other two groups
Summary
The home food garden represents a major lacuna in the rapidly expanding academic literature on urban agriculture in the developed world. A recent review of the peerreviewed literature on community gardens, for example, identified 46 studies of such gardens in the United States[1]. What do we know about home food gardens suggests they make a substantially larger contribution to the total area of urban food production than the public sites of urban agriculture, e.g., community gardens, farms and school gardens, that have garnered more attention[2,3]. Taylor and Lovell[2], for example, found that the total area of larger home gardens in Chicago visible in aerial images in Google Earth exceeded that of all other urban agriculture sites combined (158,876 versus 105,305 m2). With the addition of smaller gardens not visible in aerial images, this number can be expected to be much higher
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