Nothing tastes better than food that’s picked fresh from your own garden.
Russians wanted to kill us, that they were going to send nuclear weapons over to bomb us. We might have been able to stop them, but we might not. And it wasn’t just talk. We had duck-and-cover drills at school, and people actually built fallout shelters in their homes and backyards.
So I had a thing about survival and self-sufficiency from an early age. One day my father caught me digging into the foundation of the house. I was going to dig a series of tunnels, then bring down a generator that would run on fuel and that I was going to vent outside. I planned to store the amount of fuel that I thought would be sufficient to run it for a year. I was going to grow algae, which would produce oxygen and also be a food source. In this way I would enable my family to survive the nuclear blast, and it seemed totally sane and rational to think that way. Of course I knew that after the blast there wouldn’t be much food around. I’d have to grow it, harvest it, and store it. So I started a garden.
(As a side note, this was actually when I first got interested in solar panels, too. There was no talk about nuclear winter in those days, so I thought I might have some solar panels outside the fallout shelter to provide our power. Hopefully they wouldn’t get damaged by the blast—or I could pull them in and then put them out afterward. And I’d live. I’d survive.)
My love of gardening wasn’t solely about providing sustenance in the wake of a nuclear disaster, though; I simply liked the idea of the earth. I had been a Boy Scout—thrifty, brave, clean, reverent, resourceful. Gardening fit with all of that and I wanted to give it a try.
I started my first garden at my home on Magnolia Boulevard in Sherman Oaks when I was sixteen. And right after I put some seeds in the ground, my dad told me, “We’re going to New York for a visit, and we’re going to be back there awhile.” And then when we got to New York, he decided we were going to Europe. We took a whirlwind twenty-one-day tour of several countries in Europe. It was wonderful in every way.
When I came back, though, I thought, “Oh, my God! My garden!” I had been gone maybe six weeks.
But miraculously, several of the plants had survived. They weren’t in great shape, but some water overspray from the neighbor had been enough to take care of a few radish plants, and the radishes were kinda edible. I was impressed beyond description. Those seeds I had put in the ground, and tended to only briefly, had endured absolute neglect for six weeks and still produced radishes.
I vowed that I would again have a garden when I had a patch of dirt to call my own. So the number one thing I wanted for this house when I bought it was room for a vegetable garden, and it has turned out I am good at gardening.
Eco-Friendly Gardening
You know, when I first bought this house, the garden was quite different. I knew enough to take the lawn out right away. It just didn’t make sense to have a lawn in Southern California. If I lived in Seattle or Indianapolis—any part of the country that gets a certain amount of rainfall—then I might have been comfortable having a lawn, but certainly wouldn’t have one in a place like Southern California, where water comes at such a high environmental cost.
Getting rid of a lawn can also do wonders for the environment. First of all, you could entirely eliminate the need for gasoline-powered lawn equipment at your home. By that I mean things like lawn mowers, edgers, and string trimmers. These machines emit all kinds of pollutants, including
• carbon monoxide
• carbon dioxide
• oxides of nitrogen (NOx)
• sulfur dioxide
• VOCs (volatile organic compounds)
• toxins, such as benzene
There’s also gasoline evaporation whenever you refill your gas can and whenever you use that gas can to refill your mower or edger. And if you don’t maintain your equipment properly, it can burn oil, too.
One of the keys that I’ve learned over the years to having a successful, energy-efficient garden is choosing plants that are suited to my site. If you live in the desert, as I do, plants that thrive in moist, tropical climates are not going to be happy unless you give them lots of water and lots of special fertilizers and generally try to adapt your site to suit the plants. This is virtually never an environmentally enlightened way to approach your garden.
Plants that have adapted to your climate and conditions are better able to grow without a lot of attention or input. In my case, that means native plants from this region as well as plants that are classified as Mediterranean.
You can check with your local garden center or your local county extension office to find out which plants will work best in your climate and conditions. If you’re in California, you can go online to the California Native Plant Society’s website (www.cnps.org) and find lots of good stuff. Odds are there’s a native plant society in your state or region, too
Over the years I’ve developed a list of produce that grows well for me and that I plant year in, year out:
• corn
• tomatoes
• lettuce
• broccoli
• cauliflower
• peas
• artichokes
• chile peppers
• onions
• herbs like cilantro, basil, and sage
I also have a little fruit orchard at the front, back, and side of my house where I have these trees:
• 2 avocado trees
• 1 lemon tree
• 2 semidwarf tangerine trees
• 1 Valencia orange tree and 1 semidwarf navel orange
• 3 fig trees
• 2 olive trees (I cure my own olives)
• 1 large apple tree and 2 semidwarf ones
• 1 plum tree
With many of these plants, the more you cut, the more you get. Broccoli is like that. Sometimes I can’t even cut it quick enough, ’cause you can only eat so much broccoli.
It’s not like I have a huge amount of space. I have three raised beds, and the whole area where those three raised beds sit is only about 25 feet by 35 feet, including the walkways in between. There’s another little area that adjoins it that’s maybe 3 feet by 6 feet. So, obviously, you don’t need a lot of space to have a thriving fruit and vegetable garden. You just need to use the space efficiently, and to choose plants that will thrive in your climate.
One Tree Goes a Long Way
Ed’s always telling me we could live off the land, and I guess it’s true. If there’s a little space, he wants to put in a fruit tree. I didn’t exactly plan to live on a farm when I moved to California—that wasn’t my big, glamorous dream—but I do have to admit I can tell the difference between our fresh vegetables and that bland, tasteless stuff. My dad and my grandfather had a garden when I was growing up in the South and it was incredible. Fresh collard greens. What a fresh tomato tasted like, not having been sprayed with pesticides and not having had all the flavor mutated out of it. It’s a beautiful thing.
So there’s a lot to be said for having fresh, organic produce, even if your garden produces far more artichokes and broccoli than you’ll ever want to eat. And if you do have too much of a good thing, you can give the extra fruit and vegetables to your friends and neighbors, donate it to a local shelter, or maybe barter with other people for goods and services. Hey, if you grow enough of this stuff, you could maybe even sell it at a farmers’ market.
Rachelle’s right about the kind of bounty you can enjoy. A single semidwarf apple tree, for example, can produce up to five hundred apples in a season, and that one tree has a productive life of fifteen to twenty years. If you live in a temperate climate, like California, you can plant several trees with different harvest times—so one might produce fruit in March and April, and then another might produce in May and June. That way you can wind up putting fresh-picked fruit on your table for much of the year.
Wherever you live, make sure you choose trees that work well in your climate. For instance, in the far north, yo
u can grow hardy apples and pears. A bit farther south, try sour cherries, plums, and apricots. And in the nation’s midsection, add regular cherries, nectarines, and peaches. Of course, citrus fruits can be grown in some areas of the South. Just bear in mind that most fruit trees require a dormant period, when temperatures remain below 45 degrees, so if you live in the Deep South, check with local nurseries for low-chill varieties.
Even if you’re unable to add a tree to your home, by getting rid of the lawn and adding native or climate-compatible plants that don’t require extra energy and water and fertilizer, you can reduce pollution and also absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen.
Also, whether or not you plant trees at your home, you can work with local and nationwide organizations to plant trees in local parks and literally all over the world—to beautify our land and to help the environment.
Drought-Tolerant Ornamentals
Not everything in my garden is edible. There are a few ornamentals, which are strictly decorative, but none of them really requires very much water. We live in a desert, so it doesn’t make sense to have it any other way.
Some people assume that means I have a cactus garden. Not at all. The drought-tolerant plants in my garden include
• lavender, which smells wonderful
• manzanita
• toyon, which is also called Christmas berry
• ceanothus, or California lilac
Rachelle also put in a succulent or two in the back.
Does planting drought-tolerant natives mean you have to have an ugly garden? Well, when I first moved in, I used to tell people that our house was the one on the corner that looked like the Addams family’s. We had all these crazy-looking plants out in the garden and it looked sort of barren.
Now that things have grown in, it does look better. It’s no Sissinghurst, believe me. It’s not some gorgeous castle garden that people come from all over the world to tour. But I’d be willing to have people over for a garden party now.
Actually, the amazing thing is that people do want to come and tour our garden. People have actually paid money at auctions held during fund-raisers for different environmental charities to come and visit Ed. They actually pay money to see the house and tour the drought-tolerant garden that produces some of the food we eat. It’s absolutely unbelievable to me. I told Ed we should start charging admission at the gate.
Saving Water in the Garden
Even when you plant the right plants for your climate, you will occasionally have to water them; even drought-tolerant plants have their limits. So the idea is to avoid wasting water. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, “Home,” saving water also means saving energy—and saving money.
What are the best ways to save water in your garden? You’ll use a lot less water overall if you water early in the morning or later in the evening, so the hot midday sun doesn’t make that water evaporate. Also, try to water when it’s not windy so the water goes where you want and doesn’t simply blow around the garden or into a neighbor’s yard.
What else can you do? You can collect rainwater to irrigate your garden, literally capturing water off the large watershed that is your roof. Rain barrels make this easy, and they’re getting easier to find. Your roof has a large amount of surface area, and it’s focused in sometimes as few as four downspouts. Position a rain barrel under one or more of those downspouts and you can capture the rain as it comes down off your roof.
You’d be surprised how much water you can collect this way. If it’s raining hard, you’ll fill up a 55-gallon rain barrel—with 300 to 400 feet of surface area leading to one downspout—in just an hour or two. And you can certainly put up multiple barrels. I had to fight tooth and nail to get just one rain barrel, since my wife has aesthetic issues with it. And the only reason it’s still there is that it’s full of water and she can’t move it.
Ed rigged up this ugly rain barrel, but it is kind of handy for watering my ornamentals.
Every time I leave the house, I risk coming back to some weird contraption. In this case, Ed had cut one of our rain gutters and installed this horrible, ugly orange barrel. I can live with some things. I can actually live with a lot of things. But they have to look good.
Ed tells me he’s found some more attractive rain barrels, even some made out of stone. I don’t know if the man can be trusted when it comes to aesthetics; he clearly has other priorities. But if he’s found an attractive rain barrel, I’m all for it. I don’t want to waste water out in the garden, especially when rainwater is free.
Of course I understand why Rachelle says that these orange rain barrels are ugly, but to me, the sight of the Owens Valley—about 250 miles from Los Angeles, where we’ve robbed the area of the water and the dust blowing around is giving the residents respiratory ailments—is much uglier. And if you put it that way, Rachelle would probably even agree.
If you can irrigate your ornamental plants with saved rainwater, you will cut your water bill considerably. And if your wife takes long showers, well, then you really need to look into this rain-barrel system.
The other thing you really should do, if you’re going to use rain barrels—or just as part of your regular home maintenance—is get up on the roof and clean the rain gutters. You want to make sure the water you collect in your rain barrels is as clean as possible, and cleaning the gutters of leaves and other detritus will definitely help. We’ve got four feral cats living on our roof, so God knows what else is up there. But getting rid of the leaves is a good first step.
You’ll want to position the rain barrel on some stones or even make a platform if you’re handy, but remember it has to be quite substantial; that barrel is going to get very, very heavy when it’s full of water. The idea is to position the rain barrel high enough so you can get a bucket underneath the spigot, which is down at the bottom.
When you’re ready to use that water in your garden—or if the barrel is nearly full and more rain is predicted—open the spigot and drain some of that collected rainwater into another container or two, or twenty.
It’s important to point out that this water shouldn’t be used for drinking. It’s not potable—and you might even want to put a sign on the barrel to this effect, so you don’t get sued by anyone. Certainly if you have cats living on the roof, as I have, you should be very careful. By the same token, unless you’re sure it’s very clean water, you wouldn’t want to use it on anything that will be eaten, so don’t water your vegetable garden with it. You’d have to have a very clean area to collect rainwater to use it on food. Instead, use it for watering your ornamentals or your lawn, if you still have one.
Other Ways to Garden
I’ve addressed a lot of things you can do in your own yard, but what if you don’t have a yard? Let’s say you have an apartment or a condo.
Well, many kinds of fruit trees, herbs, and vegetables can be grown very successfully in pots. If you have a balcony or a patio or even just a front step that gets some sun, you can grow a surprising amount of food.
If you’ve got a south-facing window, you can also grow some cherry tomatoes indoors, as well as some types of herbs.
A lot of people have rooftop gardens, too. That’s another great way for city dwellers to grow food.
And if you want to garden on a larger scale, you can become part of a community garden. They’ve got them all over. There are community gardens in cities including
• New York
• L.A.
• Fresno, California
• Chicago
• Fairbanks, Alaska
• Huntsville, Alabama
• Boulder, Colorado
• Hartford, Connecticut
• Atlanta
• Gainesville, Florida
• Indianapolis
• Des Moines
And if there isn’t one near you, start your own. A group called Urban Farming (www.urbanfarming.org) helps people around the nation start community gardens.
Here’s how a community g
arden works. Essentially, the city donates the plot of land, usually an unused lot in a developed area. They may say, “This is an old Department of Water and Power lot that we don’t use anymore. We’re going to give this to people to grow food.” There’s a ribbon-cutting ceremony and a whole big thing.
Everyone who signs up for an allotment is given an area that’s maybe 20 feet by 30 feet to tend and plant in whatever way they choose. You can grow food there or flowers or whatever you want. There’s water available to you, but you do have to bring in your own soil amendments. You can make compost at home or on-site.
Gardening for Health
I do want to mention that gardening isn’t just good for my pocketbook. And it isn’t just good for my taste buds. It’s also good for my health:
• Gardening provides both a strength-training and a cardiovascular workout. Anyone who’s ever carried a couple of full watering cans or pushed a wheelbarrow knows this.
• Gardening increases flexibility.
• Gardening provides exactly the kind of exercise recommended for the prevention of heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, and adult-onset diabetes.
• Gardening helps prevent osteoporosis.
• Gardening relieves stress and helps you to live in the moment.
• Gardening also allows you to express your creativity, and that’s good for your brain and your spirit.
The healing benefits of simply being in a garden are well documented, too. For years, hospitals have had healing gardens.
Gardening has even been used as a type of physical therapy for people with special needs or for those who are recovering from injuries. It’s been shown to improve eye-to-hand coordination, range of motion, motor skills, and even self-esteem.
Living Like Ed Page 16