Living Like Ed

by Ed Begley, Jr.

  Gardening is also a great way to meet your neighbors. Hang out in the front yard for a while and soon you’ll find you are experiencing a real sense of community.

  I’ve also come to see that gardening is a wonderful way for parents to connect with kids (even grown children). I learned a lot about the cycle of life by gardening as a child, and you can teach your kids about everything from delayed gratification to the benefits of cleaning your tools and putting them away properly every time.

  So why wouldn’t you take a little time to create your own sanctuary that just so happens to have the benefits of providing delicious fresh food and reducing our energy needs?

  Gardening for the Environment

  I’ve touched on the environmental drawbacks of having to ship food an average of 1,300 miles. Clearly, a lot of fuel is burned and a lot of emissions are created in that process. But there are other environmental reasons to start your own garden, particularly if you choose native plants. Gardens make the air healthier for everyone, humans and animals, in your neighborhood, and they keep the ecology of the area in better balance.

  Inviting birds and other animals into your garden not only provides valuable habitat for these creatures—who are often getting crowded by continuing development in our cities and suburbs—but also enables nature to provide its own form of pest control.

  Beneficial insects will do the work of pesticides, so you don’t need to introduce poisons into your garden. Praying mantises are a perfect example. They won’t eat your plants, but they will eat the small insects that do, including beetles, caterpillars, and aphids. You can buy them as well as ladybugs for your garden. A single ladybug can eat as many as five thousand aphids in its lifetime, which is about a year.

  Yet another environmentally friendly way to control small pests, like white flies, black flies, and aphids, is to mix up some soapy water and spray it directly on these bugs. Even a good, hard stream from the hose can shake these pests loose and discourage them from attacking plants in your garden.

  If you’ve got snails and slugs, there’s still no need to get out the poison. Instead of using pesticides, you can find snail traps at your local home and garden shop. You might even try experimenting with beer traps. And then when it’s time to dispose of these slimy creatures, you can simply submerge them in salty water.

  Of course, insecticides aren’t the only poisons you’ll want to avoid. It’s also important to avoid herbicides—that is, poisons that are designed to kill plants. Rather than poisoning the weeds in your garden, take a few minutes and pull them out by hand or with simple garden tools.

  Also, you can use mulch—or plant drought-tolerant groundcovers—to reduce the number of weeds that come up in the first place. Many people have a habit of raking up every single leaf that falls in their yard. Leave some of those leaves to turn into mulch. You can even use grass clippings in your flower and vegetable beds to help hold in water and reduce weeds. Then, as these clippings and leaves break down, they provide nutrients to the soil, so you’ll need less fertilizer, too.

  Silent Gardening

  I’ve touched on the problems associated with gasoline-powered lawn equipment, but you may not be willing or ready to give up on the lawn entirely. I do keep a small lawn area along my parkway—that access strip by the curb, where people have to walk and kids cut through on their way to school. If you want to keep at least a small patch of lawn, or if your spouse insists on it, is there another way to maintain those small lawns—and the rest of your yard—without using gasoline-powered equipment? Absolutely.

  • Use electric equipment. Electric mowers, electric trimmers, and electric blowers are more energy efficient than gas-powered equipment. They require less handling of gasoline and they create less pollution. If you have a solar-powered house, or you’re buying green power from the many utilities that offer green power, you’ll be creating a lot less pollution than if you were using that horrible two-stroke engine that most lawn mowers use. Electric equipment also makes less noise, so there’s less noise pollution.

  • Use rechargeable equipment. Battery-powered leaf blowers are much quieter than two-stroke equipment yet are still quite effective.

  • Use manual tools. Even better than electric or battery-operated tools—for small yards or small jobs—are hand tools. The only energy they need is the energy you expend while using them. This includes push mowers and—dare I suggest it?—good old-fashioned rakes.

  • Reduce mowing time. If you replace regular turf grass with another type of grass that’s designed to grow long, like mondograss, you can reduce the need to mow—maybe even as infrequently as once or twice a year. The same goes for planting a prairie-style meadow instead of a lawn. You just mow it once at the end of the season and wait for it to come up again on its own in the springtime.

  I’m really lucky to have found a gardener who understands this stuff. While I’d love to do all my own gardening, I’ve gotten so busy lately that I need help taking care of all my plants and trees and shrubs. Fortunately, my friend and gardener Chris Houchin owns a company called Quiet Garden Landscaping. I’ll let him explain how he has reduced wasted energy and water—as well as noise—in my garden.

  * * *

  Ed’s Green Friend: Quiet Garden Landscaping

  I first met Ed at the local hardware store, where he was delivering a shipment of his Begley’s Best natural cleaning solution. He hired me on the spot to maintain his property after learning that I use only conventional manual, electric, and battery-powered gardening tools. These tools include a rake, a 24-volt cordless lawn mower, a rechargeable weed whacker, an electric weed whacker, and yes, two different kinds of noncombustion leaf blowers.

  * * *

  The Cordless Broom, which I use instead of a gasoline-powered leaf blower, can run 10 to 13 minutes on one fully charged 18-volt battery. It’s more than adequate for clearing walkways, porches, and similar surfaces of dust and debris. It creates zero emissions and creates about as much noise as your hair dryer.

  The electric weed whacker requires an extension cord and a standard 110-volt outlet. It has quite a bit more power—and unfortunately makes more noise—than the cordless variety, but is still much quieter than any two-stroke engine. Yes, running an extension cord can be a bit of a “drag,” but once you get your system down, it’s not that big a deal. Besides, I mostly use it in the autumn when there is a tremendous amount of organic debris to collect.

  I could go on and on about the ill effects of gas-powered leaf blowers on mothers, newborns, elderly people, people with asthma, and night workers—and the stress they cause to our friends in the animal world. On top of that, many communities now have city ordinances banning the two-cycle leaf blower, which gives off as much smog as seventeen cars. The bottom line: Blowers are bad!

  Other tips: If one plant or one area needs some extra water, there’s no need to water everything around it. Just bring a hose to hand water that particular plant, or set up a drip line so water is concentrated directly on the root system.

  New plants also need more water than plants that have become established. You’ll find that established drought-tolerant plants may need only one or two good soakings each summer.

  —Chris Houchin

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  What Is Compost?

  Every good gardener sings the praises of compost, but what exactly is it? At the most basic level, it’s an organic material that contains humus—dark brown or black material that looks like superrich soil and has a pleasant, earthy smell.

  Creating compost really is mimicking what occurs in nature, where bio-logical decomposition happens all the time. As leaves fall off a tree and plants die, they slowly decay. That decomposed plant matter is full of nutrients and minerals, and it feeds the soil beneath it, helping to continue the cycle of life.

  You can re-create the same process in your own backyard—and you can make it happen faster than it does in nature.

  WHY COMPOST?

  Composting is g
ood on so many levels:

  • Landfills. Composting keeps organic materials out of landfills, reducing the rate at which landfills reach their capacities. So it reduces the need for more landfills.

  • Energy and pollution. Composting also reduces the amount of trash that needs to be picked up and transported to landfills, so it saves energy and reduces pollution from all those garbage trucks driving through our cities.

  • Methane gas. Composting reduces the production of methane gas in landfills, so it also reduces pollution in that way. In other words, composting is a very good thing for the environment and for the world as a whole.

  • Saving money. On a more personal level, in your own garden, composting is wonderful, too. Composting will save you money in a lot of ways. For one, you won’t need to go out and buy fertilizer—or at least not nearly as much.

  • Weeds. You won’t need to worry as much about weeds and plant diseases, since applying compost to your beds is beneficial for your plants and your soil, and it suppresses the growth of weeds.

  • Higher yields. You also will get more from your plants—more fruit, more vegetables—since composting adds nutrients to your soil.

  • Saving water. Using compost helps to keep moisture in the ground, which means you can water less.

  • Cleaning your soil. Composting has been used on a large scale to help remediate contamination at all kinds of cleanup sites. Studies have shown that compost will bind to contaminants (including heavy metals) in the soil, preventing them from running off into the water supply—and preventing them from being absorbed by your plants, and therefore the fruits and vegetables you’re going to eat. If a former resident did something nasty, like dump used motor oil out in the yard, compost can help make that area usable again.

  How’s that for reaping a lot of benefits from stuff you were going to throw out anyway?

  HOW TO START YOUR OWN COMPOST PILE

  The first step in getting a compost heap going is accumulating material to be composted. I keep a 5-gallon pail with a lid on it just outside the back door. You can keep it in the kitchen if you want, but make sure the lid has a good seal; you don’t want to attract cockroaches or ants or other pests.

  I use that pail to collect all my day-to-day kitchen scraps that are not animal based—that is, things that are not meat or dairy. I include things like

  • breakfast: banana peel, coffee grounds, tea bags

  • lunch: scraps left over from the salad or whatever you were making

  • dinner: those scraps and ends from vegetables, all of the ends from broccoli stems, all the ends from any onions chopped up or any vegetable, the brownish outer leaves, the wilted part of anything

  I collect all that stuff in a big bowl as I cook and take it outside to the pail. Then, once a day, I empty that bucket into the next container, which is my large compost container. These come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. It can be a compost bin. I have a large bin that’s 50 gallons or more. But it could also be a com-post drum that you turn with a handle, or even just a pile in your backyard.

  I love turning kitchen scraps—trash—into rich, nutritious compost for my garden.

  The important note: If you do decide to start a compost pile in your back-yard and you don’t have a lid on your compost, you must cover it with dirt regularly. You can’t have raw melon rinds out there and different scraps in plain view, uncovered, or you will attract lots of pests that you don’t want, including cockroaches, raccoons, maybe even rats.

  What you do want to invite into your compost are beneficial critters: earthworms, grub worms, friendly bacteria, and fungi. They’re going to break down the matter that you put out there in your compost pile or bin or drum.

  And you do that by getting the right combination of nitrogen and carbon. Fortunately for me and everybody else, you don’t need to know the exact ratio of nitrogen to carbon. The way to achieve that ratio without remembering the number is simply to have your compost be half green and half brown, and to keep it wet. Just put in layers, half green and half brown.

  What do I mean by green? By green I mean:

  • green grass clippings

  • green plant matter from the garden, things you trim off while doing your gardening activities

  • green weeds you’ve pulled

  • green table scraps, like the ends of broccoli and lettuce

  • seaweed and pond algae count as green materials too, if you have a pond

  By brown I mean:

  • grass that has wilted or gone brown

  • plants that have gone brown and wilted and died

  • brown leaves

  • pine needles

  • shredded twigs

  • straw or sawdust (though you’ll need to avoid sawdust from wood that has been treated with chemicals)

  • shredded paper—it can be good to add some shredded newspaper to your compost from time to time

  Keep your compost moist, but not soaking wet, and turn it occasionally. If your composter is a drum, you just turn the handle. If it’s a bin or a pile, get out the shovel and turn over the materials manually.

  Over time, by some miracle of nature, you will have roughly the right ratio of nitrogen to carbon, and you’ll have great compost.

  Remember that when we’re talking about kitchen scraps, you can’t compost meat or any bones. You also can’t compost most animal waste, at least not from carnivores, because it contains pathogens and stuff you don’t want around your food.

  On the other hand, if you have herbivores, like bunnies, you can add their waste to your compost pile. In fact, animal waste from herbivores can be a great way to get your compost really hot right away—in other words, to get that matter decomposing quickly. It’s like starting a yogurt with a specific culture. To start compost, to get it really hot right away, go to a pony ride and get some horse manure and put that in. Boom! Your compost gets fired up right away. Cow manure and chicken manure work, too.

  The funny thing is, there won’t be any smell from this stuff, because you’ll cover the animal waste right away. It’ll be in the center—at the core—of your compost pile, making everything start decomposing really quickly. And you’ll have usable compost for your garden in as little as a month.

  Eat Organic

  If you follow all the steps and suggestions in this chapter, and don’t use any chemical fertilizers or other products on your plants, you’ll be an organic gardener. But what about the food you buy? As I said earlier, I grow only about 25 percent of the food I eat, so when I’m out shopping for that other 75 percent, I buy organic whenever it’s available.

  At one time, the term organic was quite loosey-goosey. Organic could be just a marketing phrase that a company decided to put on its packaging. That ended when the USDA introduced a stricter definition of the term and regulations for its use.

  In 1990, the Farm Bill made it possible for the USDA to develop a national set of standards and certification criteria, and it also allowed the agency to come up with some labeling directives for organic foods. Those standards were released in April 2001, so now the USDA essentially has control over what is or is not called organic, and it can enforce those standards.

  There are many, many reasons to opt for organic foods, but perhaps the most compelling one is that organic food naturally tastes better. That’s because flavor is the result of lots of different and complex molecules. Healthy, living soil provides a constant and more complex mixture of these molecules, which results in more flavor. It’s like how wine-makers are always talking about the importance of terroir, about the soil and the climate and the general environment in which the grapes are grown. Well, it doesn’t only matter with grapes. It matters with all food.

  Clearly, over time, organically grown food is best for us, the environment, and future generations. And it’s big business now, too.

  So I buy organic. The other thing I seek out are non-GMO foods, foods that have not been genetically modified. I think tha
t that’s a very dangerous experiment. The possibility of allergic reactions, toxins, and digestive problems that can develop make me quite leery of things that are genetically modified. I avoid them at all costs.

  Opt for Foods that Are Produced Locally

  I also make every effort to support local farmers. After growing your own food, buying food grown locally is the next best choice. If you live in a more rural area, you know that local farmers often sell fresh produce from stands on their property.

  Since I’m in a more urban area, I visit my local farmers’ market just about every weekend. There’s probably one near you, too.

  Farmers’ markets gather local vendors with a variety of products in one place at a regular time, such as every Saturday from 8 A.M. to noon. You can pick up all the fruits and vegetables that you can’t grow in your own garden, as well as things like organic meat and eggs, nuts and dried fruits, and freshly baked bread. Some markets also offer things like beeswax candles, organic yarn, and beauty products. Farmers’ markets are also a great place to get ideas of what to plant yourself, since these fruits and vegetables are grown locally—which means there’s a good chance these plants would thrive in your garden.

  By purchasing from a local vendor,

  • you’re helping reduce the energy used to truck food from faraway places to your local grocery store, as well as the need for packing materials

  • you’re getting food that’s much fresher—often picked the same day (In contrast, produce in the grocery store may have spent one or even two weeks in transit.)