Can you grow an abundance of nutritious organic vegetables without having a garden of your own? Yes! Wild food foraging is not a new idea, thanks to authors like Euell Gibbons and Richard Mabey, but farming the wilds certainly is.

Laws in the US and UK sensibly prevent one taking rare plants from either public places or the wilds. But the laws are unclear about one’s right to salvage common Thames Organic  vegetables and flowers that you planted there in the first place.

As a result, guerrilla farmers throughout the western world have now started to make urban wasteland beautiful and productive by sowing flowers and vegetables in abandoned plots, and even beside roads and waterways. Provided the volunteers didn’t trespass on private land, officialdom to date has rarely objected.

Your local laws may be stricter so I cannot prudently recommend that you Farm the Wilds. Instead, I will simply describe – by way of entertainment – what I did forty years ago.

I lived then in Richmond, England, near the Queen’s Deer Park – a public area. In March, I would stroll the park with a thick pointed walking stick, make holes in shadowed areas and drop in tubers of Jerusalem artichokes. By summer, the fronds had grown. They looked deceptively like hogweed. In fall, I returned at dusk and harvested many a pocketful of new tubers.

Once in the ground, Jerusalem artichokes are nearly impossible to get out. I returned there some ten years later and could still see the flowering fronds.

Lo, I had my own organic gardening eco village!

The river Thames flowed close to my house through common land. At its verges I planted kale seedlings and rhubarb roots. To non-gardeners, the plants look much like dock. Using the tip of my walking stick, I scattered chive seeds lavishly. When grown, chives cannot be distinguished, at a quick glance, from grass.

I also pressed in roots of Russian comfrey and I sowed the seeds of perennial herbs like Good King Henry and Fat Hen. These edible plants grow everywhere in England as weeds, so I was not disturbing the local ecology. I also sowed spearmint roots. (Ten years later, my mint was still growing vigorously.)

My potatoes would grow in the most unlikely places. One April, I tossed some chitted (pre-germinated) potatoes into a mound of rotten furze and leaves in the public woods behind my house. By fall, I was able to dig out a lot of tasty small potatoes. The big leaves had been visible all summer but nobody had disturbed the plants, probably because people don’t expect to see potatoes growing outside of a garden.

Secrets of farming the wilds

The secret of farming the wilds successfully, I found was to choose those parts of public land that were rarely visited and to have a plausible reason for my visit – even though, under English law, I was doing nothing illegal. I always took with my a wild flower guide in case a suspicious public official or water bailiff stopped me. (It never happened.)

It was also important to sow plants that could fight their own battles with weeds. I was not going to return and weed my plot! Indeed, the plants had to look like weeds, at least, to the uninitiated eye. So spinach, aragula (rocket), corn salad and such hardy perennials as thyme, marjoram and savory were fine. Beans were all too visible, unfortunately, although they laugh at weeds once Thames Organic  they’re well started.

Delicate root crops like beet, carrots and parsnips won’t grow in rough weedy land, I discovered. (That said, I once raised a fine crop of stub root carrots and kohl rabi in a sandy railway siding.)

I enjoyed many a furtive hour as an involuntary ‘land steward’ in my youth, until I was able to afford a house with a garden. Then I stopped farming the wilds and, with far more labour and expense, started to farm my own land.