8th Annual Edible Landscaping Tour

Common Ground's 8th ANNUAL EDIBLE LANDSCAPING TOUR 

is coming right up! 

Saturday, July 19th, 2014 10 am -4pm

Palo Alto, CA

Register Now

If you enjoy touring gardens or need clever ideas for your garden, then you don't want to miss this annual event! 

This is a critical fundraiser for my friends at Common Ground, a 501(c)3 nonprofit project of Ecology Action. Enjoy a memorable and educational day and show your support too!

Besides visiting ten beautiful gardens all with an edible landscape theme, you'll also see how these suburban residents practice organic and sustainable methods. 

For descriptions of the gardens on this year's tour go here

Veggies and flowers thrive together in this edible landscape

Tour Highlights

• Water saving and efficiency techniques, including "Laundry to Landscape" (gray water system) 
• Fruit trees, raised beds, and lots of vegetables
• Chickens & coops, bees and beehives
• Herb, flower & California native plantings, 
• Composting 
• Examples of edible front yard gardens
• Tour the Common Ground education garden

Common Ground's Patricia Becker (right) with a garden tour host

This year the Edible Landscaping Tour is featuring lots of front yard edible gardens.  Gone are the days when vegetable gardens were considered inappropriate for the front yard. Come see a variety of gardens demonstrating that growing food is not just practical, but beautiful!

Veggie harvest, complete with fresh artichokes

Photos: Patricia Larenas, Urban Artichoke

Creating Sustainability in Suburbia with Neighborhood Foodsheds

I've had this on my list to write about for several months - the neighborhood foodshed. I met a sustainable landscaper that has mapped out all the details on how to organize a food-growing cooperative with your neighbors, as he has done in Santa Barbara California:

Recognizing the Role of Suburbia in Sustainable Living

You don’t have to have a survivalist attitude to build a neighborhood foodshed, says Owen Dell.  All it takes is coordinating and sharing the growing of food with your neighbors. 

Dell has a visionary idea about the future of food growing. He believes we can use suburbs to build sustainability in the sense that suburbs can harnessed as local food sources for neighborhoods.  Growing food where it will be consumed and distributed means breaking free of dependence on fossil fuel for our produce.

Suburban areas are a valuable resource: homes are surrounded by garden spaces and are often built on former agricultural lands. It doesn’t take a lot of space to grow an impressive amount of food, especially if you organize your neighborhood to cooperate in growing a diversity of vegetables, fruit, and keeping chickens for eggs. 

There are also social benefits to growing and sharing food. In a neighborhood foodshed there is shared knowledge, and shared responsibility - the result is building community and enabling healthy diets.

The CAFO That is Suburbia 

According to Dell there is only a three-day supply of food in any given city: what happens on the fourth day when there is a natural disaster or some kind of disruption that stops the food supply chain? Most of us don’t realize how dependent we are on the unseen "food system"  for our daily meals. He says that cities are like a CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, aka, a feed lot) for human beings: we are separated, dependent, and caged. 

Building relationships with our neighbors by sharing a fundamental activity such as growing food is a way to reconnect to the earth that feeds us, together as the human family.

Organizing Your Neighborhood Foodshed 

You can download his excellent flyer packed with background information on foodsheds and ideas for getting started here.

Here are some pointers from the flyer-

After appointing a leader and a dedicated core team, consider the following:

1. The foodshed area should be small enough to be walkable while carrying a load of produce.

2. It should be large enough to grow food for the participants.

3. Different crops are assigned to those willing to grow them and share.

4. Designate regular times for food swapping- perhaps a weekend produce market in someone’s driveway.

5. Share knowledge and provide ongoing assistance with gardening issues.

6. Those who cannot or don’t want to grow food may want to offer their gardens for others to use.

Owen Dell is one of the engaging speakers that I heard at the EcoFarm conference last February.  Dell is the author of Sustainable Landscaping for Dummies, (read a review here) and has a sustainable landscaping design business in Santa Barbara, Califonia.

Do you belong to a foodshed, formal or informal? I'd like to know more...

A version of this post was published on Eat Drink Better

Photos: Patricia Larenas, Urban Artichoke

Urban Artichoke on Earth911 and Huff Po

Good job Alexis! 

Last week Alexis Petru interviewed me for her article 5 Simple Ways to Start Growing Edibles for Earth911 and the post got picked up by the Huffington Post.

I love to see that people are excited about growing their own beautiful food to share with family and friends.  And it's not that we have to grow everything we eat to feel good about edible gardening - I still love my weekly trip to the farmer's market and I know that our small local growers value my support.

So take advantage of the season and go get dirty!

Gorgeous Violetto artichokes

Photo: Patricia Larenas

Edible Landscaping: Growing and Transplanting Seedlings

So you’ve started your seeds indoors to get a jump on spring, and like magic they are beginning to grow. Now you’ve got seedlings. The excitement of having grown your own starts for your vegetable garden can turn into panic if it is still too cold to plant them in the garden. Here are my tips and "how tos" for managing seedlings for your edible landscape.

What is too cold?

It’s still too early to plant warm season vegetables into your garden if:

1. Frost is still a possibility in your area (check for the last expected frost date).

2. Nighttime temperatures are still below 50° F.

3. The ground hasn’t warmed up enough.

Growing Your Seedlings

The young seedlings will grow fast indoors and if you don’t give them the right conditions they’ll become weak and spindly. If you plant them in this condition they’ll under-perform and it will be disappointing.

As I wrote in my How to Grow From Seeds post, to raise strong seedlings you need to meet three basic requirements in addition to moisture: light, nutrients and temperature.

Seedlings in my backyard cold frame

Light:

Once the seeds start to grow they'll need either direct sunlight, or exposure to lights indoors. Your options are to hang lights over the seedlings if they’re indoors (12 hours daily), or to move them outside into a cold frame in the sun. The cold frame works well if outside temperatures are at least 40° F. If nighttime temperatures are too cold, bring them back inside for the night.

Nutrients:

Feed the young plants with liquid fertilizer.  I use an organic dry fertilizer mix, such as Dr. Earth.  Soak it overnight in water (read the directions- it will be about 1 cup dry fertilizer to a gallon of water). Then use the liquid half strength to feed your plants weekly, and put the solids into your garden bed. You can also use a cup of mature compost from your compost pile to make a compost tea. Put the compost into a piece of cheese cloth to make a big tea bag and soak it for about fours days before you use it. It may not be as nutrient-rich as the fertilizer mix, but it’s good for the seedlings (remember: fertilizer is not necessary until the leaves begin to grow).

Temperature:

Protect from frost and temperatures below 50° F for warm season vegetables. I germinate seeds indoors, then keep the seedlings out in my backyard cold frame. I remove the cold frame lids on sunny days so it doesn’t get too warm, and close it up at night. Warm season veggies include: tomatoes, beans, squash, cucumbers, peppers, and eggplant. Spinach, lettuce, chard, kale, peas broccoli and cauliflower,

are all cool season veggies and have some degree of resistance to frost and prefer cool temperatures.

Transplanting Seedlings Into Containers

If your seedlings are in a flat, or getting crowded in their containers, transplant them individually into six packs or small pots to give them a chance to develop a healthy root system while you wait for the season to warm up.

Handle the seedling carefully to avoid damaging the roots or stem

1. Plant seedlings into damp potting soil (it has good drainage). Alternatively, a friend of mine uses his own mature compost and this seems to work.

2. Make sure your seedlings are in damp soil before you transfer them to the new pots.

3. Handle the seedlings by the leaves- avoid damaging the delicate stem or roots. Gently tease apart tangled roots and plant immediately.

4. Water well after transplanting and begin using liquid fertilizer.

For small seedlings, make a hole in the potting soil with a chopstick then gently push the root inside

Last but not least, after growing your plants indoors remember to acclimate them first before you plant them into the garden. Do this by bringing them out during the day to expose them gradually to direct sunlight (in a protected porch or cold frame) then bring them back inside for the night for about a week. This is called “hardening off”. It toughens them up for the outdoors.

Newly potted seedlings with room to grow

Enjoy nurturing your seedlings and watching them grow. You'll have the pleasure of starting your edible garden with the vegetable varieties you really want instead of having to grow whatever is available. But best of all, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you can grow your own food from start to finish.

Photos: Urban Artichoke

Edible Landscaping in Silicon Valley: Reviving the Valley of Heart's Delight

Technology companies, sprawl and suburbia may have replaced the fields of prune, apricot, cherry and walnut tree orchards that once graced what is now my neighborhood, but local food production is beginning to slowly return to our region. 


Silicon Valley may again one day be referred to as the "Valley of Heart’s Delight”, its former nickname from back when the area's local landscape was dominated by rich, diverse food production and stunning natural beauty.

(To learn more about gardening with edibles see my Gardening Index page, and my Recipe Index page)

 

Edible Landscaping by Example

Last weekend Common Ground's 5th Annual Edible Landscaping Tour featured 10 beautiful and creative home gardens from Menlo Park to Mountain View on the SF Peninsula, all with an emphasis on organically grown vegetables and fruit. 


This popular event continues to attract a growing number of eager attendees ready to learn how to transform their suburban gardens and grow their own food.

Chez TJ's Chef Joey Elenterio and Louise Christy, Master Gardener

Read the full post

Soil Magic with Sandwich Composting

It might seem highly improbable that just a pile of cardboard, newspaper and grass clippings will magically turn into beautiful rich soil, but that is indeed what actually happens. I saw it with my very own eyes. In our quest to find more space to plant vegetables in our ever expanding garden, we did a trial sandwich composting project on the sunny, but weedy side of our house last October.
Now in spring, our simple compost sandwich has really turned out beautifully. This low-labor compost making method appealed to me instantly. I used  Chris McLaughlin's system as a guide:

• You don't have to pull up the weeds or other foliage first or dig the soil in anyway, just knock down any plants and leave them in place.
• Next you will add layers of flattened cardboard (about 2 inches thick), then
• Sheets of newspaper printed with soy-based ink (about 10 sheets thick)
• Add green materials such as grass clippings, plant material, or kitchen vegetable waste (about 4 inches worth, 2 inches if using grass clippings)
• Finish by covering with topsoil or compost

It is very important to sprinkle everything with water between layers, and adding topsoil or compost between layers helps speed up the process. Then leave it alone for a few months and let the de-composers go to work.

Read the full post