Growing your own food when you rent

For a very long time as a renter I didn't want to waste time or money creating a garden space as the chances of us moving on fairly quickly was a high probability. I've since changed my mindset around that and now I can't live somewhere unless there is some form of garden available to me to grow my own food. Here are my tips to help you get over that hurdle.

Create temporary gardens

Using raised beds in your garden will save you loads on garden preparation as you can add in good quality soil and start right away. You can try moveable systems such as pots, Vegepods or even home made containers using shipping crates. We have mostly used what was freely available to us and that's some corrugated iron raised beds. When we have to move we just pull down the bed and scatter the soil around the garden. You can read about our moving story here to one of my favourite garden setups here. You'll also be super surprised about what you can grow in a pot. We have all our fruit trees in pots and all of our herbs.

A post shared by Nicki💗Love of Dirt (@loveofdirt) on Oct 1, 2017 at 9:04pm PDT

Be mindful if you do destroy a good quality lawn you may have to replace the turf when you leave. We have found that in most cases rental lawns are full of weeds and not very well looked after, but we always try to place our raised beds in spaces where the gardens we're anyway.

A post shared by Nicki💗Love of Dirt (@loveofdirt) on Jul 1, 2017 at 6:02pm PDT

You have more time than you think

If you sign a 12 month lease, you have 4 seasons to grow food. That's 4 chances to grow a new crop and harvest abundantly. If you setup your beds using the right soil combinations you'll be ready to hit the ground running.

Try Aquaponics

We have found aquaponics to be great for our situation in terms of being able to move and keep our plants growing. There is no down time for getting the soil right as all the microbes stay in the growing material. You do still have to move it, and moving fish is risky, but it was a hell of a lot easier than moving a couple of trailer loads of soil (yes we know from experience).

A post shared by Nicki💗Love of Dirt (@loveofdirt) on Sep 25, 2017 at 12:51am PDT

Change your mindset

How would it feel to move into a rental where there was an awesome looking vegetable garden already growing? Well for me it would be pretty amazing. If you look at your garden being passed onto the next tenants rather than being turned into the ground it puts a whole new perspective on things. Yes not everyone likes to garden and it may just whither and die, but you may also be giving someone inspiration to grow their own food by leaving it behind. Have you ever created a garden only to have to leave it behind?