Before he starts his day during the summer, Peter Schertz ventures out his back door with an empty colander in hand. He peruses the chicken coop, weaves between beds of dark green lettuce and chard and browses through the spindling snowpea vines. Somewhere along the way, he will fill the colander. Then again. And again.

“I will fill it to the brim, three to four times a day some days,” Schertz said.

The bounty he gets from the three terraced gardens climbing up his backyard has almost erased any need to visit the farmers market, he said, and fresh eggs, their rich yellow yolks unmatched by their grocery store counterparts, are an almost daily occurrence.

Throughout Durango, increasing numbers of people are turning their backyards, rooftops and unused outdoor space into urban mini-farms, complete with fruit trees, expansive gardens, chickens and even bees.

Termed urban homesteading, the movement is catching hold nationwide for its alluring combination of local foodism, environmentalism and do-it-yourself individualism.

In Durango, urban homesteaders touted the practice for those reasons and more. They see backyard farming as a way to create community, connect to their food, eat in season and nourish their stomachs and their souls.

“That’s what roots me in a place is to try to grow stuff there,” said Schertz, who co-owns Maria’s Bookshop. “It seems like most people have that in there somewhere, getting satisfaction from putting seeds in the ground and seeing if it will grow. Most people are connected to that in some way.”

Cycles of life

“I was an urban kid, and the thought of growing my own food appealed to me,” said Lynn Coburn, whose rows of corn, peas, squash, tomatoes, onions and greens cover the backyard of her West Third Avenue home. More than 20 years after starting her garden, it’s still rewarding to watch her as her labors bear fruit, Coburn said.

“There is something pleasing about the cycle, putting the seeds I saved in the ground and watching them come up,” she said. “I like the produce, but I also like the process.”

Other local urban homesteaders share the sentiment.

Rachel Turiel said her dedication to the task also is driven by the opportunity for her children to see where their food comes from. Turiel raises chickens, bees and 14 beds of fruits and vegetables in her backyard. She chronicles the experience on her blog, 6512 and Growing, and also writes a Herald column about motherhood.

“My kids are my main harvesters, and that’s really gratifying for me to see them take part in the cycle of food and the cycle of life,” she said. “It’s restructuring our perspective on food.”

Community, food security and romance

Locals also have found that their über-local farming habits help build community, locally and beyond.

Coburn gives extra cherry tomatoes to her neighbors, Turiel trades her friend greens for beer, and Schertz recently contributed a dozen eggs to a local auction. Leanne Vallejos said starting a shared backyard garden allowed her to connect with neighbors she wouldn’t have spoken with otherwise. As people grow more of their own food, dependence on supermarket chains and imported food declines, said Erik Kutzen, co-author of The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City.

“It builds healthy, sustainable communities when we have more sources of food and know where it comes from,” Kutzen said.

And there are certainly practical reasons for producing your own food, Kutzen said.

“The obvious ones are there have been a lot of scandals with food recently, and people want to know where their food comes from. People want to know that livestock was raised ethically,” he said. “The only way to be certain about these things is to grow your own.”

Plus, animals will devour plant waste, provide pest control and fertilize, said Dean Mullen, who owns rabbits, ducks and chickens and taught an urban chicken-keeping class at Fort Lewis College.

They close the waste cycle by turning waste back into useful soil, Mullen said.

The trend

Local organizations have abundant evidence that backyard gardens are on the rise.

Darrin Parmenter, director and horticulture agent at the La Plata County Extension Office, said he gets hundreds of calls from people asking for food-growing advice. And classes offered through the extension office on backyard food production have reached maximum capacity for at least the last three years.

“This is a trend, and it has become somewhat romantic,” Parmenter said. But the movement also furthers food security, health and community, he said, all central initiatives to the office’s work.

Workshops on raising backyard bees and chickens at the Four Corners Green Living Expo in April went so well that organizers are looking to expand into greenhouses, gardening and composting, said Carol Clark, owner of Ecologic Events, organizer of the expo.

The Tour de Farm, a bicycle tour of local gardens and farms entering its fifth year, aims to inspire others to start similar creations, said Darcy Craig, an organizer. Craig said she has already spotted lots of potential sites for this year’s event.

On the Front Range as well, the concept of creating backyard food havens has taken root. Denver Urban Homesteading, an urban agriculture center near downtown Denver, holds gardening, cooking and food-preservation classes, hosts chicken swaps, runs a local farmers market and organized an inaugural chicken coop tour in October 2010. Denver will host its first urban agricultural and homesteading festival, the Denver Country Fair, at the end of July.

The trend doesn’t stop with vegetables. An increasing number of cities, responding to public pressure, have reworked their codes to accommodate backyard livestock. Durango passed an ordinance in 2009 allowing city residents to keep up to six hens, and in June, the Denver City Council voted to make it easier and cheaper for residents to legally own chickens, ducks and goats in the city. The Steamboat Springs Planning Commission on Thursday is scheduled to consider an ordinance that would allow homeowners to raise dairy goats for personal use.

“(The trend) is out of necessity – we all eat,” Craig said. “But another appealing part is that you can really help sustain lifestyle and family. In a small space, there’s a lot you can do to sustain yourself.”

ecowan@durangoherald.com