{A Backyard Garden Gone Wild}|
By Stacie Boschma
Photo by Anthony-Masterson Photography
Backyard gardeners who struggle with bad light, bad soil, or any of the other obstacles that make plantophiles crazy every summer, meet urban-suburban farmer Lorri Mason of Douglasville’s Stems n Roots Farm.
Mason has been tending her suburban yard for sixteen years. “My challenge is that the backyard has a significant slope,” she says, by way of explaining how she adapted and evolved her garden into 64 raised beds, numerous containers, a small greenhouse, eight chickens, and beehives for pollination. She’s created one of the metro area’s most impressive mini-farms, producing mountains of food on a mere 1,600 square feet of space.
“Consumers have lost trust in the large farmer industry,” she says. “They want to know their farmer, have the ability to visit their farm, and most of all feel safe eating our product.” To that end, Stems n Roots reaches out to friends and customers through Facebook, maintains a presence at three weekly farmers markets, and Mason welcomes weekday “walk-ups.”
Her planting preferences run to the unusual -- recent experiments involve seeds gifted to her by soldiers returning from the Middle East -- and, especially, to the small. She cultivates dwarf varieties of grape and peach, and maximizes her available space with intensive planting and small-scale trellises to support climbers. "
When she isn’t at market, working at Stems n Roots, or tending to her family, Mason occasionally hosts educational workshops for urban gardeners at Stems n Roots on topics like raised beds and backyard chickens. Her experience makes her a treasure trove of tips and suggestions for home gardeners(Mann hosted a training site for Georgia Organics Urban Agriculture program.) For instance, she says, to encourage bees in a garden, turn it blue. “In order to direct them through the garden, I plant blue blooming plants such as rosemary, lavender, borage and dwarf sunflowers selectively throughout.”
And for the home gardener with dreams of fruit trees in the yard? “Dwarf grape, cherry, and plum trees are the easiest,” she says. “All others will require a little more maintenance.”
Those of us who struggle to find to time to handle that “maintenance” portion of gardening can take heart. Mason’s Stems n Roots is proof positive that any space can produce bounty as well as beauty, and that all of us can play some small role in bringing the production of food back home again.