Sundari Kraft is as down-to-earth a gardener as you’ll ever meet. She raises vegetables as well as bees and various animals in her backyard and teaches gardening classes at the Denver Botanic Gardens. The Northglenn native penned “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Urban Homesteading” (Alpha Books, 2011), has operated a neighborhood farm and is a sustainable food activist. If you like the sound of clucking, quacking and bleating in the neighborhood, thank Kraft for leading the effort to pass a Denver ordinance that allows chickens, ducks, and dwarf goats in urban backyards.
Kraft sounds like the protypical earth mother until the subject concerns a certain fuzzy-tailed garden intruder. “When I get out my BB gun, people look at me as if I’m crazy, but the squirrels are just horrible,” she said with an audible snarl as she described how they chew on everything in sight.
The squirrel situation is “heinous,” she said, because of a local squirrel baby boom this year plus an invasion of ravenous rabbits who eat tender plants when they’re not chewing on car wires at DIA.
You can surround plants with fencing, or “you can buy coyote urine on Amazon,” she said, but you may end up just wasting money.
Who can blame Kraft for so fiercely defending her home turf?
She knows exactly how much blood, sweat, tears, time and money we gardeners invest in these vegetables, herbs and berries.
Her mission is to arm backyard farmers with the know-how to be successful despite the challenges facing metro gardeners.
The first step, Kraft said, is to have a sense of place. This is not a touchie-feelie cosmic question. You need to stand in your yard, survey the lay of the land and ask the big questions.
First, in which direction does your garden face? If it looks south, there will be lots of sun. Kraft doesn’t recommend planting on the north or “dark” side of the house — you know, the place where the snow never melts.
“The most important thing is observing the sun and where it shines on your garden,” Kraft said. “You can manufacture shade. You can add water. You can’t create more sun.”
Most vegetables need at least six hours of direct sun daily, she added. Tomatoes and corn like more.
In partial shade you can cultivate perennial plants and herbs such as rosemary, and it’s an ideal place for strawberries. During mid-summer, lettuce, spinach, radishes, turnips and the kale family are happier with some shade, she said.
In laying out your garden, Kraft recommends planting vegetables in the place where water tends to pool.
The reality, Kraft said, is that we live on the Front Range. “We’re trying to grow in almost a desert,” she said. Heavy mulching is critical to slowing the loss of moisture.
The soil is very “clay-y” so working in compost is almost essential for improving the soil and adding nutrients. However, compost can be expensive, so Kraft recommends a return to the original soil improver. “The less expensive alternative is to use aged animal manure, which works very well,” she said, emphasizing the “aged” part to reduce any aroma and surprise things growing from what the animal recently ate.
In deciding what to plant, you can choose between growing from seeds or starter seedlings. “If you’re more of a newish gardener, it’s safer to buy plants,” Kraft said. She recommends buying seedlings at farmer markets, farm stands or on craigslist.
“The nice thing about buying from a gardener or farmer is that you’re generally buying from a local person who’s knowledgeable about growing it here. It’s more likely to be successfully transplanted,” she said.
Next, you may have a choice of heirloom and hybrid plants. “The imperfect analogy I make is that it’s like the difference between a purebred dog and a mutt,” Kraft said. “With the heirloom varieties you get unique qualities like red and green stripes, but they can be difficult to cultivate,” she said. “The hybrids are stronger and a more dependable crop.”
Other important considerations are spacing — leaving enough room for plants to expand — and succession, meaning planning a series of crops from May to October. “Challenge the assumption that you only plant one crop,” she said. “You can do two or three rounds in the same patch of dirt.”
In other words, before you put in your tomato plants, you can grow lettuce or other salad greens in the tomato bed.
Kraft encourages gardeners to be practical in choosing what to plant. “Nothing is technically impossible, but lots of plants just don’t thrive here,” she said. Most melons, including watermelons, are hard to grow in local yards because they require tons of sun and heat. The same goes for okra. We have the wrong soil for sweet potatoes and blueberries. Kraft discourages growing corn mostly because the ears will almost inevitably be chewed on by squirrels and others before they mature.
Gardening can also be expensive. The biggest way to save money in the garden is to minimize construction, Kraft said. “Most people don’t need to build raised beds. In fact, raised beds drain so they require more water.”
While squirrels may be her nemeses, Kraft’s No. 1 garden enemy is always the climate. Her worst single disaster came the first year that Kraft ran her neighborhood farm, in 2009, when a hailstorm completely wiped out one of her gardens. “But the hardest gardening event so far was the extreme heat and lack of moisture throughout the spring and summer of 2012,” she said.
“It was very hard on our little farm, and hard on other farms in the region. Grant Family Farms went bankrupt.”
Location does matter in gardening and sometimes front yards get better sun than backyards. You may be tempted to rip out the sod and replace it with rutabagas, artichokes and raspberry bushes. Just make sure vegetable gardens are not banned by zoning code or by your friendly neighborhood HOA.
Finally, gardeners, know thyself. Besides adjusting your expectations to the reality of your location, you need to be honest about your commitment to the garden. How much time will you really have available to sow, water, weed and harvest? No, really.
Kraft’s urge to grow didn’t come naturally as she grew up in Northglenn. “We didn’t have a garden or chickens, or anything else like that,” she said. “I became interested in growing food when I graduated from college.”
Ela, her young daughter with her photographer husband, Brian, is growing up quite differently. “Gardening can be a great parenting tool. It’s a wonderful lesson for kids to watch how food grows and help,” she said. Plus, it pulls kids away from their devices and into the outdoors.
Ultimately, she said, it’s worth it to contend with Aurora’s relatively short growing season, late spring and early fall frosts, hard soil and pests for the homegrown dinners.
“You have control over your food; you know where it came from and that it wasn’t sprayed with anything,” she said. “You know there’s no E. Coli on the spinach. No fuel was burned to transport it here from 3,000 miles away.”
And while Kraft always starts her urban gardening classes with talk about the benefits to health, kids, the planet and the pocketbook, “what it really comes down to is that the food you grow yourself tastes better. It’s hedonistic. That’s the motivation for the hard work. Once you taste it, you’re hooked.”
GARDEN WARRIORS — April’s Cover Package
GARDEN WARRIORS: The Growing War in Aurora
GARDEN WARRIORS: Oh Yes You Can
GARDEN WARRIORS: Putting Down Roots
GARDEN WARRIORS: Grow, Grow, Grow Your Own
GARDEN WARRIORS: Something Old is Something New
GARDEN WARRIORS: Think Inside the Box
GARDEN WARRIORS: Five Garden Inventions That You Will Root For