Even a garden in the middle of a parking lot canhave a problem with rabbits. They were coming through part of the gate, said a rather amazed Joe Kovach, an Ohio State University scientist who has set up a lushly growingand ostensibly Wire Netting Fence-off fruit and vegetable test garden on an oldasphalt parking lot in Wooster in northeast Ohio. I actually saw one leave (the garden), Kovach said. It pushedits way right out.
They were using the wire on the gate as a trapdoor. He fixed the hole with some Plexiglass. The rest of the Wire Netting Fence,meantime, is working, he said. Deer and woodchucks, too, havelately been spotted around but not inside the garden.
Video (1:21): Joe Kovach discusses his urban farming parking lot research. As Kovach talks, a wren sings from a tree nearby. A robin chirps inapparent alarm from somewhere deep in the garden. The animals are just a few examples of the biological diversity,both helpful to a garden and less so, that Kovach is cultivating.Some of that diversity has to do with the crops themselves, interms of their types, genes, sizes and fruiting seasons. And some of the diversity has to do with what, exactly, comes tolive in the garden, especially the small things, such as insects,spiders, bacteria and fungi, that often can actually benefit crops.
The goal, ideally, is creating a stable ecosystem, which in agarden can maximize food production while minimizing costs andlosses from pests, Kovach said. All the same ecological principles apply no matter what ecosystemyou re in, he said. Even in one rising from blacktop. Among those principles: greaterdiversity means greater stability.
The garden, which covers an eighth of an acre, grows in and on theparking lot of an obsolete, closed dormitory at Ohio State s Agricultural Technical Institute on U.S. 250, about a mile south of downtown Wooster. It s part ofa wider Ohio State effort to learn about and improve urban farming. We have a lot of abandoned parking lots in the big cities ofOhio, including Cleveland, Columbus, Youngstown and Dayton, saidKovach, who s an associate professor of entomology with the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, which is also part of Ohio State and is located next to ATI. Sowe re trying to figure out ways to make that land more productive,and one of the options is to try to grow fruits and vegetablesthere.
Photo: Blueberry bushes (with orange ribbons), apple trees, peachtrees and more grow in part of Kovach's parking lot garden. Thebeds in the foreground lie in trenches of stripped-away asphalt,one of the study's three "treatments." High tunnels rise in thebackground. The paint lines that once marked parking spaces remainvisible. (K.D.
Chamberlain image.) He s testing three growing methods: in pots and in raised beds seton top of the asphalt, and in beds created by taking out strips ofthe paving. Kovach is also trying all three methods under high tunnels, whichare inexpensive plastic structures that resemble greenhouses andthat protect crops from wind and cold. He s growing kale, apples, peaches, basil, strawberries,raspberries and blueberries, among other crops, with all of themwatered by drip irrigation, which Kovach calls cheap insurance against drought. The idea is to compare how all three methods work, how much foodthey produce, and the costs and labor involved, and then to sharethe results with urban farmers, said Kovach, who also has anappointment with Ohio State University Extension. In the end, he said, the work can help people in cities grow fresh,healthy produce in the cheapest, simplest and best way possible --on otherwise wasted old parking lots.
But we re also looking at more than that, he said. We relooking at the implications that growing in a parking lot has oninsects and diseases and how the environment there is changedcompared to traditional agricultural settings. The peaches growing in high tunnels on the asphalt, for example,survived this spring s frost without damage. The other peachesdidn t, including both the control peaches growing on unpavedground and the ones on the asphalt but not in the tunnels. Theasphalt, it seems, captured daytime heat, while the tunnels held itin at night.
I thought there would be some protection (from thecombination), but I didn t think it would be this great, Kovachsaid. However, a common peach disease called peach leaf curl hasappeared. It causes a peach tree to lose its leaves, but then togrow new ones. This weakens the tree but isn t fatal. Typically,farmers prevent it by spraying a fungicide.
But I m trying notto do anything to control diseases and pests, Kovach said, because I m trying to see what happens for the sake of theresearch. Photo: Kovach checks a peach tree in his garden. Some of his peachtrees -- the ones growing over asphalt and under high tunnels --survived this spring's frost without damage. (K.D. Chamberlainimage.) The strawberries in the high tunnels, on the other hand, were readyto pick earlier than Kovach has ever seen.
In his previous studieswith strawberries, the earliest start of harvest was May 10. Thisyear we picked on May 2, which is pretty darn early, he said. Part of that was due to the high tunnels, and part of that wasdue to the early spring. He s also using a system called plasticulture with the strawberries. As part of it, the plants are planted inSeptember, not May, yet still bear fruit the next spring.
Yousave yourself four months but get the same yields, he explained. His raspberries, however, have had a harder time. The establishedplants that were transplanted into the garden last fall didn toverwinter well, he said. We lost a lot to winterkill. Plus this spring, in a windstorm, the plastic covering blew off thehigh tunnels and really beat the hell out of the plants, Kovachsaid.
Meanwhile, some plant-sucking mites are a more recent problem forthe raspberries. They're not uncommon in the greenhouse-likeenvironment of a high tunnel, Kovach noted. But he said he santicipating the arrival of some different, friendlier mites --predatory ones that eat pests, not plants. The blueberries, for their part, are booming, with good pollinationand harvest having started two weeks ago.
Yields so far are impressive, Kovach said. But birds, which generally are good tohave in a garden because many kinds eat pests, have taken to eatingthe blueberries, too. I haven t had any bird issues in my blueberry plots in otherstudies in other locations, Kovach said. This year we would comeout to harvest, and every morning the birds would fly out (of thebushes). I m not sure why there s a difference, he said, but a nearbyline of bird-friendly trees may be part of it.
He recentlyinstalled bird netting over the bushes to stop the losses. But we re going to have tons of berries either way, he said. And this is on a parking lot, right? And look at the size ofthose apples already. Photo: A strawberry ripens in one of Kovach's plantings. The plantsshown here are growing in tray-like metal boxes attached to wiremesh fencing.
Three levels of trays are stacked like bookshelves onthe fencing, a kind of space-saving "vertical gardening." (K.D.Chamberlain image.) What happens the rest of the summer, which will be the project ssecond full growing season, and its first with all of its cylindersfiring, will really be more sensitive for teasing out anydifferences between the (three) treatments in terms of yields andpests, Kovach said. We ll be sampling for insects to see whatsort of difference the asphalt makes, and obviously we ll belooking at diseases. Otherwise, though, We ll just be letting things balance. Right now everything seems to be looking pretty good, he said.
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