Brenda Barnes, President
Home-Grown Food Network, Inc.
North Palm Springs-Joshua Tree, California
This week we made a lot of progress in our under-$20,000, easy, fast, cheap, self-made housing, edible landscaping, and renewable energy project.
We had updated my research from a few years ago last week and discovered in the county anything allowed in the zone can still be put in without a permit. Home Grown Food Network owns 2.5 acres there in a lovely location to demonstrate under $20,000 gracious, large, wonderful housing, edible landscaping, and renewable energy. All of that, and a 10,000 square foot agricultural building and produce selling, are allowed in the zone, which is rural living.
It took me several trips to three different planning offices in the county a few years ago to finally get someone to tell me how to establish crop cultivation use on land. And I had 20 years as a real estate lawyer, so I thought I knew the right questions to ask. One planner told me we needed a conditional use permit! So Desert Hot Springs is not alone in making things difficult for people. Governments are governments.
It turns out you need 10 trees and some kind of watering system for them. We could do that with our self-watering planters made from recycled 55-gallon plastic food drums within a day, without even having any water onsite. Each planter takes 20 gallons of water to water itself for five months, so a few trips in a pickup with water and we’d have it. If we wanted onsite watering, we could just buy a water tank, put it on a wooden tower to gravity-feed, and have some water delivered.
So now I told you how to do it, without any trips to any planning offices. And not even any permits required, much less a conditional use permit, which would take thousands of dollars and years for an ordinary person to get approved, so it was just ridiculous to say that was necessary. Governments are—you fill in the blank. I’m the President of a 501(c)(3) charity, so I have to be careful not to be too political.
Anyway, the Home Grown Food Network land is less than a block from the main highway through the area, and a courthouse with a large parking lot not used on Saturdays and Sundays when we will be having most of our events. The front of the lot on the Palm Springs side is where the street that goes to the courthouse from the highway, Whitefeather Road, would go if it extended the other way from the highway. We are going to put in broken concrete pieces and spray-paint them yellow for a “yellow brick road” to the site, about 800 feet to the edge of our lot, which is another about 300 feet in front. If the county ever extends the road in that direction, we’ll already have a sidewalk.
Peter and I went there late one day this week, when it was almost dusk, to walk that route from the courthouse and lots of other parking along the highway. It’s just sand and creosote bushes now, and two tiny washes a foot or so wide and deep, but it will be easy to cover with the broken concrete. Goodness knows there’s plenty of that to recycle in the world. I think the interesting thing about reusing it broken is that it is permeable then, so rain percolates down into the aquifer instead of running off into gutters and flooding roads, then becoming a dirty mess at the wastewater treatment center.
Walking there we were so blown away as we always are by how beautiful the view is all around. You can see the rocks of Joshua Tree National Park to the East, San Gregonio mountain in Palm Springs in the far distance about 25 miles away to the North, the Chocolate Mountains, I think they’re called, to the South before 29 Palms, and a huge mesa with more mountains in the distance to the West. In this part of the county everyone calls the distances something else—Palm Springs is called West, 29 Palms East, the mesa North, and the Park South, but my compass has them closer to what I said. Whatever, the views in all directions are so magnificent. People say there is a 360 degree view, but even more so, the sky—always blue during our 360 days per year of sunshine–goes up and away in all directions for miles, and once you start to love it as we do, the desert earth is colorful and beautiful. So it is a three-dimensional 360 degree view, is that 720 degrees?
When you’re there at night it is in a way even more awesome. The sky is black and it seems like the stars are just hundreds of feet away. We see falling and shooting stars every hour or so. There are billions of stars and planets, of course, and here it seems as if we can see all of them. Our grandchildren learned the galaxies and planets at young ages because they are so easy to see with your naked eyes.
So what a place to build demonstration houses and landscaping! I would have preferred to start in Desert Hot Springs because it is more accessible for the millions of people surrounding us within 300 miles (Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix-Tucson, and San Diego-Yuma-Baja California, Mexico). It also is five acres of commercial land so we will make millions for the charity developing it some day. However, today it is much easier to start in San Bernardino County, where there are no permits required, and it is just as beautiful.
I made a drawing of how we’re going to begin, and Peter will use CAD to put it on the website. In the meantime since we started work on this our Board member Jim Shupe has built a misting system for rooting cuttings that has a sensor for controlling water use, unlike ones available commercially for the same cost of about $200, which just use timers. We will need thousands of plants. We’ll buy the first bunch to establish the crop cultivation use of the land and provide some privacy at the first demonstration site until we have something we want people to see. Then we’ll be able to root our own cuttings for virtually nothing, just the water cost and our labor, taking cuttings from plants in the area where people are already growing good-tasting, productive food.
Peter is going to move the welded-wire fence he put up in Desert Hot Springs, and we decided to make this first space bigger and put in a very large demonstration house and areas for WWOOFERS and other volunteers who want to camp out and learn and help on the farm. So we’re going to add more welded wire fencing. The land in Desert Hot Springs is called a “boulder patch,” whereas the land here is sandy with no rocks to speak of in it, so it will be much easier to build the fence here. I feel bad about having to have him move the fence within a month of building it, but he says he’s OK with that.
We bought a small old motor home for $500 and the $100 cost of getting the registration and smog permit up to date, so we’ll stay out on the land in that some if we want to while we’re building. We also are going to buy at least one 19′ diameter “yome” from Red Sky [link]. It’s in North Carolina, and my dad and mom are not well in the New Orleans area, so since shipping costs $220 and we can make the trip for that one way, we’ll combine going there to pick it up with a trip in our Toyota pickup to see Mom and Dad. We loved traveling around the South for two weeks instead of flying when my niece Allison got married a few years ago. That trip—and especially the Smokey Mountains where we’ll go back again to pick up the yome—has been punctuation of our lives (as the late Dr. David Viscott says vacations are) for both of us, so we really look forward to going back. Savannah, Charleston, the Outer Banks. Lovely places, especially after our favorite of all, New Orleans. This time we thought we’d start with the west coast of Florida after New Orleans and not go so far north but go to the Bahamas, different places Peter has never been and I love. It sounds so good the whole family wants to come, so if it can be fit in with year-round basketball practice for our budding pro 14-year old six-foot granddaughter, who’s on the Santa Monica High basketball team as of three weeks ago, they will fly and meet us there. My parents are in their late 80s, so we should not put it off.
In the meantime, this week we’ll get more done on the land. It’s work, but the inspiration of the mission fuels us. What an exciting life!
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