Urban Gardening
Urban gardens offer an escape from the concrete jungle you call home. Explore a range of urban garden and community garden opportunities, find advice for gardening newbies and discover useful techniques.
Expand All Guide SectionsStarting an Urban Garden
If you’ve shied away from all things green and growing due to your urban home base, get on board! Use the introductory advice and techniques on the sites below to start and maintain a thriving urban garden.
Top Sites for Starting an Urban Garden
Planet Green
offers an introduction to urban gardening, explaining composting, what to plant first and working with what you’ve got, as in no backyard.
Time Out London
garden editors answer a string of essential urban gardening questions, including how to grow specific types of plants and establish a unique atmosphere in your garden.
Urban Gardens
provides timely information and inspiration for urban gardeners, with trendy how-to projects, stories about innovative urban gardeners, and the chicest products for small garden spaces.
Types of Urban Gardens
Even if you lack a yard or a lot of space, there are several ways to grow a garden in a city. The methods described on the sites below can be implemented indoors or outdoors, with a group or alone.
Top Sites for Types of Urban Gardens
Urban Garden Casual
explains how to create a thriving container garden—grown solely in pots. Learn what size pots to buy and how best to fertilize and water your plants.
Container Gardening
, a blog by a professor from Belgium, has a range of unique and basic container ideas with photos and instructions.
GuerillaGardening.org
explains the practice of sprucing up urban spaces with plants, and gives advice for those who want to get involved.
Inside Urban Green
has several examples of living walls, captured in videos, photographs and snippets of articles, located everywhere from New York City to Barcelona.
Composting and Rainwater Collection
Composting your food scraps and collecting rainwater are simple ways to improve the health of your garden. In the process, you’ll be contributing to a greener city. Use these sites to learn how.
Top Sites for Composting and Rainwater Collection
The New York City Compost Project
has a tutorial for indoor composting with a worm bin, complete with photos that lead you step-by-step through the process of setting up a bin.
Urban Gardening Help
explains the benefits of rain barrels for city-dwelling gardeners. Reducing your use of municipal water is good for your wallet and the environment.
Rain Barrel Guide
lists several different rain barrels, with descriptions and photos, and links to a Web site called Clean Air Gardening for purchase.
Brooklyn Botanic Garden
published an article on the benefits of rain gardens, with advice for constructing an urban rain garden, including which plants to use.
Community Gardens
If you prefer a group setting, there are lots of ways to get involved in community gardens and support local farms.
Top Sites for Community Gardens
American Community Garden Association
helps you find a community garden where you live, and helps you get involved in gardening advocacy. Become a member to get a free subscription to Organic Gardening magazine.
Local Harvest
explains how Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) works, and has a tool to help you find a CSA farm or farmer’s market near you.
Green Roofs for Healthy Cities
explains how green roofs work, and their numerous private, public and social benefits. Photos depict different variations on roof gardens.
Green Roof Growers
is a dynamic Chicago-based blog that documents its heirloom vegetable roof garden in photos and how-to entries.
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