June 7, 2008
Brenda Barnes, President, Home Grown Food Network, Inc.
This morning I went out early to sing to the tomatoes and rest of the perennial food garden. This is the garden we determined to experiment with, to see what perennial food plants would grow in the desert with no work, from just putting free overripe produce we found, in or on soil, mulching it, and giving it a bare minimum of water from soaker hoses at root level. We planted in a style sort of crossing Permaculture and natural-farming with doing nothing, starting last June, so parts of it are now almost a full year old. I have written about mainly the tomatoes three times before, on Feb 3, Mar 2 and Mar 8
It’s amazing how well the whole garden is still doing, and especially the tomatoes because people act like they are hard to grow, and they should be because they are so expensive, especially in the winter, when we had plenty for the two of us and friends and family. In fact, it’s doing better in the hot weather than it did in the winter, and that was incredible. The tomato plants on both sides are over four feet high and all lush with leaves and flowers. We have now eaten at least 40 tomatoes and given away that many, and, as the picture
shows, there are that many more ripening on the vines.
I know there are ways to pinch them back to get more or bigger tomatoes, but to learn how I’d have to do too much research for these lazy summer weekends, and unfortunately I have litigation to work on during the week. The way I have been doing this gardening this whole year, I am doing nothing. Except singing, pulling a little weed now and then and throwing it under the nearest vine to add to the mulch, and tying vines up on recycled supports like bird cages and broken metal and plastic shelving. And taking pictures. And eating lots and lots of tomatoes. And squashing ones that fall so maybe they will grow and we will have tomato plants all the time by doing nothing much but enjoying.
Peter and I did work a little on providing shade to the east vines—the ones that get afternoon sun—a few weeks ago when it got hot for awhile, over 100 degrees about four days in a row. I also turned the soaker hose control from almost not on to barely on. The shade we provided was a metal mesh taken down from the gazebo in the other side yard last year when the owner of the land (we own the house) was complaining about it, stapled to the top side of the frame of our outside wall, and attached with twisty-ties to posts pounded into the middle of the walkway. That way we figured it wouldn’t shade the west side, which gets only morning sun as it is and was doing great, but it would shade the east side, which was getting puny. That worked for maybe two hours until the wind blew the ties off the posts. Then the shade cloth was just hanging down by the house.
In the meantime, it has gotten later and hotter, so now we’re going to not worry about the west side being too shaded. We’ll put the posts on the far side of the west vines and attach a long wide row of the shade cloth that has a hem on each side, so we can use a grommet kit and attach a wire to the entire length of each side and keep it up in the wind by winding the end of the wire around screws on our fences. Peter was a sailor in his youth in Ireland, and he suggested since the wind treated our shade cloth like a sail, we do so too. We’ll see how that works, and make adjustments as necessary.
The winds have been Wind Advisory strength lately for days on end. Everyone I talk to says it’s making us crazy. There was a TORNADO that knocked over a semi truck in Riverside a few weeks ago. In California. We don’t have tornadoes here. That’s why my parents came back from Arkansas when I was 10 years old and they had packed up the family and moved back to Arkansas after a big earthquake at the beginning of the summer destroyed lots of downtown Bakersfield and scared them. One night in the tornado shelter reminded them why they had left Arkansas. They picked earthquakes once every 10 or 20 years over tornadoes every year, and we were back in California before school started again. The younger children in my family probably don’t even remember we ever lived in Arkansas. So I was totally shocked to hear a few weeks ago that my granddaughter and her mother had to turn back from going right through where the tornado was to hit when they heard a warning on the radio on their way to basketball practice in Riverside. People are actually believing in global warming causing climate change here now. Al Gore said there would be lots more wind. People who have lived here 35 years say they remember winds like this, though, so there is always someone saying it is cyclical. I guess we’ll see about that, too, just as we’ll see about all our garden experiments.
The other food plants we planted last year are also turning out to be naturalized or perennial. The only one that didn’t come back is chayote squash, which died while we were gone to New Orleans last June for two weeks. Since all the leaves and limbs that can be reached are stripped off our jacaranda trees next to the neighbor’s house in that same area of the back yard, I have my suspicions about what happened to the chayote vines, which were all over the south side of the house when we left but had turned brown and withered up when we got back two weeks later. However, the sweet potato vines that completely covered the arbor we put there last year later in the summer and shaded all that south side of our house have come back and are shading it again, so I don’t care about the chayotes. I’m attaching a picture of the vines green again.
(When we are here things don’t mysteriously die. Funny about that. They said in Master Gardener class that the worst animals interfering with growing food are two-legged ones. I can’t say for sure, but I think we have learned that from experience.)
Those sweet potatoes turned out to be a total dud as far as easy food to grow. We didn’t get one sweet potato, or if we did we didn’t know how to harvest it, or even where to look for it, and sweet potatoes are too cheap to bother with. The vines, though, were a big bonus for shading our house, our dog, us, and all the other foods that grew in the back yard. They grew all over a 10′ x 35′ overhead space and two fences, starting with eyes of two overripe sweet potatoes I found. Onions, garlic, four colors of bell peppers and many varieties of hot peppers, green beans, chives, and parsley are all I can think of now that have grown in the shade and supplied us with all we needed all last summer and winter. The sweet potato vines got brown and withered up in the winter, so, like deciduous trees, they let the plants have sun when there was little, and shaded and are shading them again when there is too much. Talk about easy. And cheap. I mean free, except for $30 for the arbors. This year we are making even arbors free, from thrown away tree limbs Peter brings home from people illegally dumping them in the desert. The flimsy ones we used last year fell down from the wind and the weight of the sweet potato vines anyway. The strong tree limbs look like they’ll work better.
The pepper plants from seeds thrown on the ground from inside peppers we ate all had fruit and flowers all winter and still do. Small ones are also growing from seeds naturalizing. Three coriander plants that grew from one cilantro plant I planted have now gone to seed and turned brown and dropped hundreds of seeds in the area, so hundreds of new cilantro plants are growing. We’ll thin those by eating the cilantro. Like all our other herbs, this came from planting the plant from a thrown-away plastic package found behind a grocery store, too dried up to sell in the produce section, or from a potted plant that also was thrown away because it was too dried up to sell in the gift plant section.
The most exciting thing to me is the scarlet runner beans have come into full bloom. I’m attaching a picture. Last year we got three beans and a total of about 10 flowers one at a time, so it wasn’t pretty and no one could survive on crops like that. This year, though, it is growing looking like it might have a serving of beans, at least. I planted those last year from a seed packet I bought at a hardware store in London the year before when we were there on vacation. That’s the only money I have spent on plants, but I figure we were tourists and had to buy something in Notting Hill.
Also, a mango appears to be growing, about two feet high, from a seed we put in composting in situ mulch. What a thrill!
The grape vines by the back door near the parking spaces we made have also come back in full force. There are about 40 bunches of grapes. Picture attached. Last year I lost all of maybe half that many to birds, so I’m going to work on bird netting this weekend. The birds around here are not good sharers. I didn’t take out old growth there last winter, so I’m surprised it is doing so well. I intended to. I wasn’t going to be such a purist about doing nothing as to not do that. I even had plans to make wreaths for Christmas out of the grape vines. I just didn’t get to it. These grape vines all came from one little tiny foot-long vine I found and watered two years ago. I was weeding and putting up a retaining wall made of trailer supports to make an herb planting bed under where prior owners had an old rotted wooden deck out in the sun, separated from the house, in full view, where no one would ever want to go. Now we have used all the salvageable wood from that, and the grape vine, which may have been a volunteer, is big enough to shade a car and provide a whole season’s worth of grapes. There also were old used bricks and rocks in the soil, and we used those for walkways and fence supports.
Our tangerine tree in that same area came back this winter with at least 20 GREAT tangerines. They are so sweet and easy to peel. When we first moved here four years ago this December, that tree was tiny, about two feet high with two thin short limbs, and it never got anything but small green fruits that never ripened, so for two years I thought it was a stunted lime. Our landlord trimmed the trees then, chopping off everything all the way down to the central trunk, and doing it during the growing season, so little wonder all the trees were stunted or died. Nonetheless, I learned in my Master Gardening class that no pruning at all except getting rid of dangerous limbs, ones that grow over others, and ones that keep sun from the central part of a tree, is better than the too-severe pruning I see everywhere, even when people leave a lot more than our apparently tree-hating landlord did. It’s a wonder trees even survive, but Nature is resilient. Our garden shows that about neglect, and the tangerine and jacaranda trees show it about mistreatment.
All the herbs under the grapevines are flourishing. Chocolate and strawberry mints, peppermint and spearmint will grow anywhere here, like most places, and take over, so I put in rubber barriers, to keep them in back. We have far more marjoram, oregano, thyme, basil, and lavender than we need.
We plant all the gourmet potatoes we find. Golden Yukon, Fingerlings, Purple whatevers. They are so amazing growing. Pretty little white flowers and green plants. They would be worth growing for the beauty even if they didn’t have food beneath the soil. We do go so far as to keep piling composted soil on the plant as it grows so more potatoes will grow. That’s not too much work, for the great harvest. We plant them willy-nilly all over, wherever there is room. Russet potatoes are so cheap anyway that we have more than we should eat of those, although baked russets are still my favorite because they are so easy to microwave and so flaky with no-fat cottage cheese and our chives, or sun-dried tomatoes and either cottage cheese or olive oil. Yum. The little gourmet potatoes are great steamed in their jackets in a little broth or sauteed in garlic and olive oil for just a minute. We don’t have enough of those yet, so we’ll keep planting.
In general, everything we have planted does well here with just a bare minimum of water to the roots under the soil from soaker hoses. None evaporates, of course, since it’s under ground level, so everyplace I use double cut-off valves to keep water flowing at the very lowest volume. Aloe veras and flower plants are doing great in the front yard. Miniature roses, a China bush, azaleas, and other miscellaneous things I found thrown away and didn’t know (or care) what they even were, are doing great in the one little three by ten bed I let “useless” flowers grow in to attract butterflies and bees. Aloes are not useless, of course, so I have them also in between the landlord’s oleanders (why do some people grow poison plants where humans and animals live?), and in pots in front of the house.
I have done absolutely nothing I would call work, and spent maybe five minutes a day on all this food and beauty, while I enjoy calming myself and communing with Nature. Everything other than my English scarlet runner beans came from overripe fruit, vegetables, and herbs thrown away. It’s not enough to feed a family, of course, but it sure is better than nothing, which is what we would have had if we had let that “waste” go to the landfill. If we keep at it, eventually in this tiny desert yard, 40′ x 65′ with most of it covered with housing, we will have enough growing for all our food. I’ll let you know how we do with lettuces and other fast-growing plants in the greenhouse I’m starting this week using the former gazebo frame. All of this is so fun. In fact, easy, fun, interesting, beautiful, and energy-saving. And free. How can you beat that?
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