My food garden

Even though I write about gardening to make a (meager) living my garden isn’t all that impressive as yet, just a half-finished jumble of all of the things that interest me (impressing people has always been fairly low on my list of goals). However it already does what I want it to perfectly, which is to provide me with food, give me a place to experiment with plants, provide a place to relax, and to keep me entertained, exercised and inspired. I spend a lot of time out there, though not very much of it is really working, mostly I’m just doing whatever I feel like. The garden is essentially a motley collection of edible plants, which reflects the fact that using and growing food plants has been a passion for all of my adult life. If it’s edible I’ll try to grow it even if I know it won’t produce anything, just so I can see what it looks like. I’m particularly interested in food plants that grow themselves and don’t require a lot of effort on my part (though I’ve found it sometimes takes a while to get to know them before this happens). As a result of my experimentation and playing around, my garden contains hundreds of edibles. The exact number is hard to determine because gophers and other critters are always working to reduce it, and because I sometimes overlook things and forget about them for years. It includes every food plant I have been able to get my hands on and haven’t killed: most of the common fruits (trees, shrubs, vines) and vegetables, as well as many rarer food plants (annual, perennial, aquatic), wild edibles that pretty much grow themselves and of course the inevitable edible garden weeds.

My property (land as a human possession is a silly anthropomorphic conceit, but that’s what we say) consists of 2.4 acres in the Santa Cruz mountains, of which over a quarter is covered with a dense stand of Poison Oak and is rarely visited (I’m extremely allergic). The soil is deep and fairly fertile, the climate is fairly hot in summer and quite mild in winter (though at 2400 ft the winters are much colder than in Santa Cruz on the coast only 9 miles away). As a rule we have anywhere from 30-90 inches of rain, falling from November to May and essentially none at all from June to October (though this year has been weird with rain in June and July). The winters are mild enough to grow mandarins and lemons, allow tender perennials (such as Stevia, Taro and Tobacco) to survive in the ground and for many hardy vegetables to keep on growing. However they are also cold enough for apples, strawberries and blueberries to get enough winter rest and do well. Summer is hot enough for okra, melons and sweet tasting oranges. Trees in general grow like crazy, often putting on 6 – 8 ft of growth in the long growing season (which is somewhere around 240 days). Vegetable gardens are fairly thin on the ground in this relatively thinly settled area, so we are blessed with relatively few insect pests or diseases. To make up for this there is a host of animals: deer, rabbits, raccoons, mice, gophers, wood rats, quail, jays to stop us getting too complacent. When I read gardeners in other parts of the country talking about struggling to keep certain plants alive through the winter, or when attacked by plagues of insects and disease, I realize that this area is actually a plant lovers paradise. It allows me to grow an unusually wide range of edible plants, from almost tropical to almost arctic, and this is the reason why I still live in this very expensive, dog unfriendly, car choked area.  

Before I came to this area and bought my property I had created gardens in various parts of the country, but I left them all behind when I moved on. This has been the first time I have been able to create the kind of garden I have always wanted, secure in the knowledge that I can stay here until I want to leave it. I began working on the garden about 8 years ago after I finished building the house, but didn’t take it very seriously until about three years ago. It has been a slow, intermittent, trial and error process as I like to take my time, working when I feel like it and stopping when I don’t. I have a natural affinity with the late Masanobu Fukuoka and his philosophy of do nothing farming. I generally only do the minimum necessary and try to use natures processes to get things done (and try not to transgress her laws too much).

I look upon the garden as something that should be physically created by its owner and a measure of sweat and blood is required to bond you to the earth in that place. Simply paying someone to create a garden for you is not the same thing at all. Doing it yourself means that you spend extended periods of time in the garden thinking, which helps you to solve problems and learn about the site and how things work. It also gives you the opportunity to observe nature (while I was working on my patio I suddenly realized that jays were pecking my apples to see if they were ripe, this then attracts wasps who eat the fruit, when I thought it had just been the wasps by themselves). Of course doing it yourself also means that things take longer, because you have a life to live in between gardening. My garden is still nowhere near finished, I still have plants to move, things to build, improvements to make, areas to expand into. In fact I don’t expect to be finished until I move or die (creating a garden is a process and learning experience, not a race).

My garden is somewhat experimental in that I wanted to see what could be accomplished with little money and a minimum of resources (home and landscaping magazines are often filled with horrendous examples of how to waste natural resources and spend lots of money). I wanted to grow as much food as possible with the minimum of labor and resources and found that if you have enough energy and ingenuity (necessity being the mother of invention) you really don’t need very much money. Money actually isn’t all that relevant in the garden, it’s main value is in saving time (you can buy bigger plants and have materials delivered). If you have to grow plants from cuttings or seed, or go out foraging for materials, then things usually take quite a bit longer. I have accomplished a lot with very little money by doing all of the work myself, propagating my own plants and foraging for free or cheap materials. Being a carpenter for years meant I often got salvaged building materials, as well as the opportunity to borrow cuttings and seeds from other peoples’ gardens. I also made no effort to make my garden beautiful, because I wanted to see if it would come naturally and found that here is enough beauty in the plants themselves.

Though I love my garden and its plants I am not tremendously attached to it. Over the years I have developed a certain zen-like detachment and losing plants doesn’t usually disturb me for more than several bouts of cursing. I’m not sure this is where I will spend the rest of my life and sometimes think about moving again. Of course this would means abandoning the garden and starting all over again, but that doesn’t concern me, it would just means another challenge. I would just need time to collect seeds and root cuttings (these are much more mobile than larger plants) and would probably move more plants than furniture. A lot of my garden is actually within me, in the things I have learned from it.