My Little Urban Garden Experiment

So, like I mentioned previously, I’m S-L-O-W-L-Y trying to begin living a more sustainable lifestyle these days. I’ve been influenced by a combination of things that has driven me to adopt these habits– including:

• L.A.’s earth-loving culture (from the uber-fit hikers and bikers, to the judgemental Wholefoods employees who give me the stink eye when I don’t bring in my re-usable shopping bags);
• My good friend, Mia, who is earning her Masters Degree in Urban Sustainability and constantly enlightening me on all sorts of frightening statistics about human waste, toxins and the like;
• The sudden interest in doomsday documentaries that my boyfriend and I have been recently obsessed (have you seen Food, Inc.? – good GAWD, you’ll be disturbed about the food you eat).

OK, so sustainability is a massively huge topic, that touches all sorts of areas of the modern-day human– from the food you eat, to the things you buy, to how you commute and basically LIVE, using tons of water, resources and man-made everything in our cozy urban lifestyles. Lifestyles that, I’ve been convinced, are leading to some pretty scary stuff. Yeesh– overwhelming,right? Even if we, say, never run out of food– the way we live our urban lives is definitely widening the gap between mankind and a precious little thing I’d like to call nature, which is a total bummer.

Alright, so a house wasn’t built in a day, as they say (or you know, my boss says). Making huge lifestyle changes is not easy and can be completely overwhelming. You can’t just magically begin living a -Earth-loving-and-recycling-and-natural-food-eating-and-biking-to-work, “sustainable” lifestyle overnight. Plus, first you need to learn about all of these issues, right? OMG, more work. Who has TIME for all of this nonsense? Not I.

And yet, here I am, growing a garden on my patio in one of the biggest cities on the planet. Actually, my boyfriend really is the one who started does everything there is to do with the garden (but, you know… I water the plants and then write about it). We are lucky to have a rather large patio that gets lost of sunlight, and to date we have managed to keep tomatoes, carrots, peppers, broccoli, lettuce and flowers alive for the past several weeks. We haven’t been able to actually eat of the yummy fruits of our labor yet– but they are smelling great! And honestly, it’s kind of amazing to watch these plants grow.

I was thinking about how rad it would be if our apartment complex had a central garden where residents can rent a plot of soil and grow their own veggies. Maybe it’s wishful thinking… but why not?

Well, this is really all I have time to dedicate to this Blog post today, but I hope to incorporate some more fancy statistics that will blow your mind about sustainability, and write about the teeny, tiny things I’m doing to be more sustainable. I’m definitely not there yet– (still buying and eating lots of processed foods that have been shipped here from all over the world, for example)– but you gotta take one day at a time.

All for now!

P.S. There are a couple of great Websites dedicated to this topic like Fashioning Change (for those fashionistas trying to make more responsible buying decisions) and articles out there (I particularly love this article Easy Ways to be More Green) on this wide-ranging topic. I’ll definitely have to ask Mia about some additional sites that she knows of to do some more exploring.