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

What is Sustainable Gardening? My Test Case with Surprising Results

Replacing an old juniper hedge with a beautiful flowering, edible rosemary hedge that bees love is a good thing, right? In my sustainability analysis I'm surprised at my conclusions, but at peace with my decision.

Sustainability: What it is

What is meant by sustainable practices? At its core, it means taking into account the impacts of our actions on the environment, on people, and on economic concerns, so that we don't compromise the future. Deciding on whether to replace my standard- issue suburban juniper hedge with a rosemary hedge turned out to be a good test case. Here's why:

Sustainable gardening puts to use the principles of sustainability, and there is actually a document to point to for these so called Hannover Principles, also known as, a "Bill of Rights for the Planet", which are used as guidelines. They are credited to William McDonnell Architects and were developed for an  EXPO held in Hannover, Germany.

Recently I had a chance to apply these principles to my hedge replacement plan. I took a short course on  sustainable practices  through my horticultural program this summer and it was a good eye-opener that got me thinking deeper about my own approach to gardening. I have to give credit to instructor Frank Niccoli, a sustainable landscaper who teaches in my Environmental Horticulture and Design program.

My Test Case

We inherited the junipers when we bought our suburban home, and I've never found them attractive, in fact they irritate me.  They don't flower, they are prickly, and I don't like their odor. They are leftovers of gardening practices popular in the 50's and came with our house.  In contrast, rosemary is an attractive shrub with lovely sky blue to purple flowers that attract bees, has a wonderful fragrance, is useful in the kitchen and can be pruned into a hedge. It's also drought tolerant. On the surface it seems like an obvious decision to go ahead with my replacement scheme.

But I applied sustainable principles in analyzing my plan and I was surprised at my conclusions. See if you agree.

My Analysis

To remove the juniper hedge I would have to:

1. Pay someone to take out a row several feet long of these shrubs.

2. Pay to have the roots removed so that I could plant something in their place; leaving any roots means they might grow back.

3. Pay to have the waste from the shrubs be disposed of at the dump, because they cannot be used for mulch.

Additionally,

4. The energy use involved in removal and transportation to the dump are costs to the environment (pollution and use of petroleum based non-renewal energy).

5. The truckload of yard waste is needlessly adding to the landfill, which is a societal cost, since garbage keeps coming, but landfill space is limited.

The Benefits of Doing Nothing

Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing; here are the arguments for keeping the junipers:

1. The juniper shrubs have the advantage of being drought tolerant which is very important in my dry California climate.

2. There are currently no monetary or environmental costs to keeping the juniper hedge as is (I've been hand-pruning for the past several years).

My Conclusion

Sadly for my rosemary hedge fantasy, the resources required to replace the junipers with something I happen to like better far out weigh the benefits. Part of the equation is that I already have several rosemary bushes that provide herbs for my kitchen and flowers for bees. I also grow a profusion of other herbs and flowering plants that benefit my garden ecosystem.

Thinking in a New Way

“Sustainable design is not a reworking of conventional approaches, and technologies, but a fundamental change in thinking and in ways of operating–you cannot put spots on an elephant and call it a cheetah.”

- Carol Franklin, Andropogan Associates LTD.

A sustainable approach to gardening and to our lifestyles in general, means that we take a global approach to everything we do by weighing the impacts. For the gardener this means that we consider the inputs and the outputs of our home gardening practices. This simply means  that a minimum, we think carefully about the types of plants that we grow and landscape with, fertilizers we use, and what we do with garden waste.

In my test case the arguments in favor of replacing the juniper hedge with pollinator-attracting rosemary are weak when considered in the context of my particular garden.

Therefore, the junipers will live to see another day and having realized the real costs, it's a decision I can live with.

Photo: 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

Gardeners Teaching Gardeners: Plan an Edible Gardens Tour

This is my third year as a volunteer organizer for the annual Edible Landscaping Tour organized by Common Ground Organic Garden Supply and Education Center (Saturday July 21, in the SF Bay Area - register here ). Seasoned gardeners know that besides getting your hands in the dirt, the best way to learn about gardening is from other gardeners.

This summer consider going on an edible gardens tour, even if you have to organize it yourself.

Can't Find an Edible Gardens Tour Near You? DIY

Summer is the perfect season to visit local gardens and get tips and ideas directly from the gardeners themselves. The goal is to see a diversity of approaches to landscaping with edibles, and to come away with great ideas that you can adapt to your situation.

But if you can’t find a tour in your area consider organizing an informal garden tour in your neighborhood. Most avid gardeners love to show their gardens and share their experiences. All you have to do is ask.

Edible Landscaping in this suburban front yard

Ten Tips for Organizing an Edible Gardens Tour

1. Decide what features the gardens should have to make the cut for your tour: organic practices only? examples of wise water use, composting, etc? edibles in both the front and backyards?

2. Location and scope: will it be restricted to walking or biking distance only? carpooling? Who will attend?

3. Send out a call for gardens through your neighborhood newsletter or community bulletin boards (both virtual and actual) and social media. Do a walk-around or bike ride to spot gardens with edibles in the front yard. Chances are good that they have more in the backyard.

4. When you've found eligible gardens and willing hosts, visit each garden to make sure it fits your expectations for your tour.

5. Be clear on what the garden hosts are expected to do, such as answering questions and explaining their approach to growing food. Of course, they must be willing to have a certain number of people traipsing though their garden on the appointed day, and commit to being available at the time of the tour.

 Thompson Seedless grapes in abundance on our grape arbor

 6. Organize your tour as far in advance as possible. Enthusiastic gardeners will want to showcase their gardens in the best possible manner so having lead-time to plan is appreciated, plus you'll need time to get the word out to recruit attendees.

7.  For an informal tour you can visit the gardens as a group within a neighborhood, one garden at a time. Make sure everyone knows ahead of time how much time will be allotted at each stop.  It’s easy to get carried away and spend too much time at one garden and not have enough left for the others!

8. If your tour is larger in scope and you have lots of attendees planned, arrange to have a pre-tour in advance for the gardeners showing their gardens, so that they’ll have a chance to visit each other’s gardens.

9. For a neighborhood tour a potluck or tomato tasting is the perfect way to end the event and have more time to socialize.

10. Plan for next's year's tour: keep a list of the current participants and another list for gardens for the following years' tour. Gardeners who couldn't participate this time may be willing and ready next year. Create an online photo album to share and encourage the participants to post their photos and comments.

The 6th annual Edible Landscaping Tour organized by Common Ground Organic Garden Supply and Education Center takes place on Saturday July 21st,  from 11am to 4pm.

You can register now online.

This tour is located on the San Francisco Peninsula and is a  fantastic one day tour of ten local gardens that feature landscaping with edibles and gardening by sustainable methods, including: composting, wise water use, and even raising chickens for eggs and manure. This popular event attracts hundreds of attendees each year.

Photos: Patricia Larenas, Urban Artichoke

Heirloom Bean Project Wrap Up

Growing Heirloom Beans

Last summer I grew several bean varieties for my self-designed heirloom bean trial; my goal was to see which grew best and to choose a few to expand in the next season. I want to grow enough to have dry beans for cooking over the winter. Why the excitement? I think it's fantastic to be able to grow a tasty and healthy protein source in my own suburban back and front yards. Besides that, I love the versatility of cooking with beans, and the varieties are endless if you venture beyond the grocery store.

Home grown: Good Mother Stallard, Cranberry, and Italian Butter beans (left to right)

Bean Trial Results

Now that it’s fall the results are in: a total yield of almost four pounds of beautiful dry beans of several types. That's more than I expected since I didn't grow very many of any one type for my trial. In all I tested seven runner beans and five varieties of common beans.

Runner bean varieties: Scarlet Runner, Ayocote Morado, Ayocote Negro, Alubia Criollo, Cannelini Runner, and Gigandes.

Common beans: Cranberry, Hutterite Soup, Good Mother Stallard, Tiger's Eye, and Hidatsa Shield Figure. 

The seeds came from three sources, Rancho Gordo, Iacopi Farms, or Seed Savers Exchange.

Another motivation for growing some of these is that they are not widely commercially available. You won’t find most of these, if any, in your supermarket. It’s extremely satisfying to be able to propagate them on a small amount of land, my suburban garden for example. I highly value being part of the grassroots movement to grow lesser known food plants to keep them from extinction.

A trellis of  Italian Butter beans attracted many types of pollinators

Favorite Beans to Grow

It's going to be hard to choose only a few types to grow in quantity next summer, but I do have some favorites. We loved the Italian Butter Bean from Iacopi Farms in Half Moon Bay, near the SF Bay Area. Iacopi Farms sell at our farmer’s market every Sunday, and they are the only vendor with dried beans for sale. I grew about 18 plants around two trellises in our front yard, which attracted a lot of bees. It turns out that the vines are beautiful, vigorous, and produce an abundance of long lasting cascading white flowers. I enjoyed telling admiring passersby that these lovely vines were actually bean plants! I harvested almost a pound of dry beans.

Italian Butter beans sauteed in olive oil with fresh corn and garden basil

The cooked beans are creamy and luscious when sauteed in olive oil with freshly cut sweet corn off the cob and fresh garden basil or tarragon. Other favorites are the Hidatsa Shield Figure and Tiger's Eye. These beautiful rare beans have intriguing histories. The Hidatsa Shield Figure bean was grown by the Hidatsa tribe in the Great Plains region, and Tiger's Eye is a new world bean that originated in Argentina or Chile. It's worth expanding the small amount of seeds I got into a bigger crop next year.

But for now, I look forward to enjoying my dry beans well into the winter with tasty satisfying dishes.

Photos by Urban Artichoke

This post published @: EAT, DRINK, BETTER

 

Teen Gardener's Passion: Save the Planet

My Aunt first introduced me to gardening when she showed me her vegetable garden. After helping her, my passion about plants and the health of the planet grew. I was inspired to create my own garden; first a vegetable garden, and then of California native plants. I'm starting a tradition for my family of growing native plants, and of following in the Native American's footsteps. I am helping to keep their knowledge of medicinal plants alive by sharing it with others, by collecting seeds, and by giving seeds to my friend Zach to sow. I introduced Zach in 3^rd grade to gardening. Even though he moved away in 4^th grade, he took his passion with him. We both don't know anyone but each other who garden like we do. Last month I let the flowers on my native plants dry, then collected the seeds, and sent them in the mail to him. Now we both have native plant gardens...

Sophia's Lavender Bee Balm

Continue reading Sophia's story at our new "MV Green Gardener's" web site

Our Flowering Native Californians

One of the greatest joys of our garden transformation is the diversity and abundance of wildlife it has attracted to our home. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we are fortunate to be surrounded by beautiful hills and low mountains with lots of preserved open space. The wildlife trickles down into the urban and suburban areas, especially where the right habitat exists. Growing plants native to our area is a sure invitation to the local fauna: different types of wild bees (plus honey bees), butterflies, many species of birds, lizards, and even salamanders. One of my special joys is the nesting pair of California Thrashers that moved in after we took out the lawn in the backyard. Bay Area residents all seem have their favorite stories about close encounters with raccoons, opossums, skunks. and deer (like the time we had a large fluffy raccoon walk into our house, and the possum living in our garage....).

But for the gardener, there are sound arguments for nurturing a diverse garden, instead of a monoculture of lawns (assumes no harmful sprays or other such chemical measures are used).  In our garden we are still in the process of bringing more natives in. The flowers are often spectacular, as shown below (our Matilija poppy shoots flowers skyward ten feet high!) and many of them require very little water or special care, so those attributes are a big incentive.

One of my new favorites we planted last year is a Fremontia bush, from the Los Altos Nursery. Here it is revving up with a profusion of lemon yellow blooms that last into the summer. The bumble and carpenter bees go nuts!

The growing instructions are music to a Californian's ears: don't give extra water in the summer- you'll kill it. Of course for this young bush we gave some additional water last summer, we'll back off this summer. Another newcomer is the ceanothus, "Dark Star", from the Yerba Buena Nursery in Woodside (they sell only native California plants). Here it is covered with blue flowers- a favorite of bees of different types.

Our beautiful California poppies are a "must have". They seem to find their way into the garden on their own and they will reseed, but this year I bought some seeds to encourage them to spread.

This photo shows our classic gold poppies from my backyard, but in my front yard I have yellow and red variants coming in, (sown from seed, below) truly lovely in the sunlight! I saw a pink variety in a garden recently for the first time; I'd love to get some of those.

These wonderful reddish types have really taken to our front yard, much to my delight!

We also have two California Buckeye trees, one in the front yard and one in the backyard. Here is our biggest one bursting into flower in the front yard:

The showy white flowers in spikes have a wonderful perfume. These trees bud out in February, and by late April-early May burst with flowers. They lose their leaves early in the fall, and have beautifully graceful silvery branches for fall and winter.

 As I mentioned, one of the best sources for California natives is the Yerba Buena Nursery.  You can't beat the variety and sheer number of selections, and they have a knowledgeable staff to help. It's a bit of an excursion to get there as they are up on Skyline Blvd. in Woodside, but it makes for a nice outing. When we go up we often stop for breakfast or lunch at the cozy and quirky Alice's Restaurant, right up top where Woodside Road meets Skyline:

The food is good, it's surrounded by redwood trees and it's a mecca for the weekend biker crowd- a must!


The nursery is south of the restaurant, so you take Skyline Blvd. south about a mile or more and look for their sign on the right. Then it's a good mile or two down the narrow road to reach the nursery.

Besides the nursery offerings, they have a garden shop with lots of great books, items for the garden and gifts. They also have a tea shop and host "Farmhouse Teas"on selected dates.

Above: Yerba Buena's extensive selection of California native plants.

Another big plus is the extensive demonstration garden- here you can see the natives in action. They have different areas of established plantings that showcase different habitat types. Check out the beautiful large manzinitas on the hillside (I wonder how old they are?). There is also a pretty pond near a patch of irises. We bought a couple of these to put in our front yard. I was surprised at the many colors to choose from. I am often pleasantly surprised that there are perfectly gorgeous alternatives to non-native plants for the garden! Although gardening with non-natives is not a terrible thing as long as they are not invasive (spread to wild areas via wind or birds) and water hungry, by gardening with species native to our area we provide much needed habitat and nourishment for local wildlife, and for

 

Pacific Coast Hybrid Iris

 

                                                     A patch of shade-loving Trillum.

that we are repaid a thousand-fold by being enriched by their presence around our homes, and by creating balance in the garden ecosystem. The garden then becomes truly alive and thriving!