Fire-Escape Farming

I thought I had found the smallest farm ever in the bed of a pick-up truck, but I was wrong. In England, farms are now as small as a box. A national campaign is encouraging people to turn the window boxes that they once used to grow a few flowers into produce-producing patches of farmland.

Got a couple windows with room for boxes? Why not cultivate lettuce, rainbow chard or maybe even a beetroot?

This "window food" initiative is the brainchild of the National Trust, an independent charity in the UK that protects and gives the public access to hundreds of historic houses, gardens, monuments and mills, as well as "forests, woods, fens, beaches, farmland, downs, moorland, islands, archaeological remains, castles, nature reserves, villages."

According to the Trust, the windowsills can collectively offer fertile area equivalent to 600 acres of farming land, a notable fact at a time when food prices and concern about sustainability are both high. It turns out that your windows can grow some delicious things to eat.

Food writer and TV personality Gizzi Erskine is helping the National Trust prove that last assertion by growing radishes, beetroots, rainbow chard, spinach, lettuce, potatoes, tomatoes, zucchini, cabbages and herbs off the window of her East London flat and cooking appetizing dishes from what she harvests.

You don't get ingredients much fresher than that.