Eat Your Landscape!

Our Organic Yard Features Edible Landscape  

Over the time that we've lived in our Santa Barbara home we've worked to create beautiful and edible landscape.  The climate (and drip irrigation) allow us to grow a variety of plants that produce food and beauty.  In this post I'll continue our tour of the edible landscape around our home.

The bench under our avocado tree creates a private space where Susan and I meet at the end of every day.

 

The fig tree is just outside our kitchen window. It produces sweet figs that fruit eating birds love.  We see a variety of birds including western tanagers and hooded orioles.

These are loquats, an Asian fruit distantly related to apples.  They were imported here from southeastern China.  Local history suggests they may have first have been brought across the pacific by the Spanish during our colonial period.   

We have two macadamia nut trees. This particular tree is very healthy and a heavy producer.  Imagine - macadamia chocolate chip cookies!  Yummmmm.

This dwarf navel orange tree in the front yard is a fine producer of nice large, sweet, eating oranges.     
Citrus does well here. We have a blood orange tree, mandarin orange, bearss lime, bearss lemon and...

tangerines!  This dwarf tree is a crazy producer.  It lives happily near our backyard compost corral and has been the beneficiary of lots of mulch over the years.

 

Our compost corral is where we put the yard trimming and kitchen waste we generate to work feeding worms and bugs. We water and turn the pile while adding to it.  In the winter, when the yard goes dormant and the rain comes, we find the pile works quickly and by spring we're ready to harvest almost a cubic yard of fine compost and worm castings.  After years off application in the yard we can really see how the compost corral feeds nutrients and biological benefits into the yard.  Compost can create a problem with mice and rats.  Our cats do a fine job of eliminating that problem.

 

We'll be offering our home for long term rental this year and would like to have a family that would enjoy living in the garden and would continue to enjoy the benefits of a yard that's healthy and good enough to eat.     

Goodbye God...

This story comes from the California gold rush and a young girl in San Fransisco. Her family was moving to the eastern slopes of the high Sierra Mountains on the Nevada border and the rough mining town of Bodie.

On the day she left, the little girl walked about her home and said, "Goodbye grass, I'm going to Bodie.  Goodbye sky, I'm going to Bodie.  Goodbye God, I'm going to Bodie."  Well some people say that's not what she said at all.  Some people believe she said, "Good, by God, I'm going to Bodie!"

It's spring in California. Our edible landscape lives in a yard of less than a quarter acre.  The above photo is of the blossoms on our apricot tree, a 20 year old tree that is surviving an oak root fungus attack with pruning, natural mineral fertilizer and compost.

We've lived here since 1993.  And in that time we've replaced the ornamental shrubs and trees with a wide variety of edible and food bearing plants. Our goal was to limit the irrigation and labor required by plants that produce work, but not food.

Here are our "wild" artichokes, which live in a mix of ground cover under a Mexican Fan palm tree that was planted by a scrub bluejay some years ago.  We preserved the tree and continued to compost mulch the garden beds.  You'll see ginger plants in the foreground mixed with the artichokes that are about to produce  edible flower buds. 

These are avocados on the tree.  If you buy avocados in North America, chances are they are from California, Mexico or Chile during the winter.  Imported avocados are pumped full of water and picked early for shipping.  These early avocados turn bad as they ripen, and even if you get a "good one" the flesh is hard, watery and bitter.

Our avocados, when ripe, are the texture of warm butter with a mild, nutty flavor.  Raccoons will break into our yard this time of year and get fat on these "alligator pears".  Not everyone is a fan of guacamole, but I can tell you that fresh guac. is about as good as food gets. You should try adding slices of avocado to your bacon, lettuce and ripe tomato sandwich.  Here in California, you can even get bacon and avocado on your cheeseburger...that's something you won't forget!

Now if you are making guacamole, drinking a cold lager beer, or craving a marguerita, you need fresh limes.  Most people don't know that ripe limes are yellow.  Green limes are bitter. The picture here is of our Bearss lime tree,  which provides limes for the foods we love.

This tree is tucked into a bed near our dwarf navel orange and our Jerusalem artichokes.

Every region has it's own special benefits.  Our yard in PEI produces pears, cherries and sweet apples that we love to harvest.  The point is to use your yard to feed your family the expensive fresh delicacies you love in the climate where you live.  These plants are beautiful and nurturing. The idea of decorative shrubbery is a luxury that many of us can't really  afford.  You'll either spend all your time in the yard trimming shrubs and bushes or you'll harvest supper for your family.

I'll have more photos from our edible yard in Santa Barbara and share how that influenced us to plant our kitchen garden at the farm in PEI,  a place where we can walk a few steps out the kitchen door and harvest fresh, organic food for supper.

And We're Back...

Happy to say that the website is repaired and the links to the podcasts are working.
Please do visit and enjoy the pictures and the weekly podcasts from PEI.

I'm continuing to use our urban exposure in Santa Barbara to harvest more knowledge and technique in communications technology.

In the next two weeks I'll be "planting" seeds for new business based in part on what I learned from producing content for this blog. One project, based on our summer podcasts, has already become a commercial radio campaign.

But most interesting will be the opportunity to take you on podcast tours of our edible landscape at home and wanderings in Santa Barbara and Southern California.

So, now I have to get to work on all that!

Farming - What a Concept!

My production colleague, Bryan and I talked about it a few years ago. Last year he bought a few acres in the Pacific Northwest.

Another friend, former radio broadcaster Courtney, just emailed that she and her husband are talking about it.

Farming. It's becoming a dream and a reality for more and more people. The numbers of professionals and urbanites moving to the land are going to change the popular idea of the word.

The 5,000 acre factory farms crank out food we buy in the supermarket. But what about the micro farms of just a few acres? What about "farming" your suburban lawn or backyard garden? Edible landscape makes a lot more sense than ornamental shrubbery in areas with scarce resources like land and water. So what if you're only farming 1000 square feet? If you're growing food for your family and neighbors and feeding yourself from your land - you are farming.

When we teach our children what a farm is, we start with story books that show the small, mixed crop, family farms - typical of the 19th and early 20th century. Why don't we show little Savannah and Trout the endless mega farm that grew their breakfast cereal? Maybe because it's a cold image of industrial resource management that isn't very appealing.

There's a certain amount of anxiety driving all of this. We know WE didn't grow any food for ourselves this year, we're assuming that someone else will. But we know from seeing the aftermath of war and disaster that it doesn't take long for society to collapse when the food trucks stop rolling. So we are left to hope that nothing will ever break down in our food chain.

As I wrote to Courtney, "stop talking about farming and do it. You'll only regret that you didn't start sooner." If that's not a choice you can make, plant a "victory garden" this year. Declare your independence from anxiety and the supermarket - even if it's just for a few meals. Bringing food to the table from your land is an experience that makes you feel better about your chances in a changing world.

These photos of our organic navel orange crop were taken last week in Santa Barbara.