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Peek Inside Three of Denver’s Compact Urban Farms

City Yard Gardens supplies a pair of farmers’ markets from one-tenth of an acre. Laura Shunk

Small-scale agriculture is not only commercially viable, but is already having an impact on us, by supplying the farmers’ markets where we shop and the restaurants where we eat.

By Laura Shunk
Westward
July 17, 2017

Excerpt:

Pass through the gates of an unassuming property on a residential street and you’ll quickly find yourself on a real farm, miniaturized and plunked into a sizable back yard. A chicken coop sits near the entrance, hoop houses protect tomato plants, and greens shoot up from fifty-foot rows. This is City Yard Farms, a commercial production nestled into a property that is less than one-third of an acre, and whose planting space is about 4,000 square feet — one-tenth of an acre. “I saw the yard and said, ‘This is it,'” says James Thole, who owns City Yard Gardens with his wife, Anna.

The pair had explored farming for four years while living in Korea, Anna’s home country, before returning to the States and enlisting in an agricultural apprenticeship program in Texas. There they learned about handling livestock — not exactly a blueprint for what they’d eventually plant in Denver. When they picked up this piece of property, they spent several months shaping up the clay-like soil (an endeavor they hope to continue this winter with cover crops) before planting their first beds in March of this year according to organic practices.

Read the complete article here.