Living Like Ed (26 page)

5

IN THE GARDEN AND KITCHEN

GROWING YOUR OWN FOOD, BUYING ORGANIC, AND SOLAR COOKING

If you have a patch of dirt to call your own, you can save money by growing your own produce. I grow about 25 percent of the food we eat on my property, and if I had a bigger property, I’d grow even more.

Gardening is great exercise, plus it gives you much more control over the food you eat. You
know
it’s fresh and you know it’s organic, because you’ve grown it that way.

There’s something about the flavor of produce eaten right off the vine, right off the tree, right out of the garden. Nothing can match a fresh-picked tomato that’s truly ripe, rather than one picked green for ease of shipping. The sugar that makes sweet corn so delicious turns to starch in a matter of hours, so even the corn you buy from a produce stand or a farmers’ market won’t be quite as delicious as fresh picked.

Even if you didn’t reap the rewards of your labor in terms of better-tasting food, it’s still worth growing your own. It’s simply a lot more energy efficient to grow food yourself than to have it shipped long distances.

Today, with supermarkets routinely offering such once-exotic foods as mussels from New Zealand and winter raspberries from Chile, it has become the norm to cook and serve food that has come hundreds, if not thousands, of miles every single day. Obviously, a certain amount of fuel is required to transport food over such long distances. If you can cut down on that, it’s a really good thing.

And when you grow your own food, you’re using water that’s already piped in at your home, not supporting the diversion of millions of gallons to commercial farms’ irrigation systems that are far from the water’s source. There’s an environmental cost to bringing water into your home, certainly, but that water is there in the pipes already. You can collect rainwater to use for watering some of the plants in your garden, too.

Even if you’re in a condo or an apartment, you may be able to grow some of your own food. And if you don’t have any space where you live, there’s another wonderful option: You can participate in a community garden.

You have other choices, too, when it comes to food. When you shop for food, choose food that’s organic and buy food that’s local. You can also choose to prepare food in an energy-efficient way.

So let’s start by looking at what you can grow at home, then get into what you eat and how you cook it.

Why I Garden

When I was a kid I had this thing about self-sufficiency that was born from a very unfortunate mind-set. I was twelve years old when the Bay of Pigs crisis took place and had a profound effect on everyone. We thought that the

Nothing tastes better than food that’s picked fresh from your own garden.

Russians wanted to kill us, that they were going to send nuclear weapons over to bomb us. We might have been able to stop them, but we might not. And it wasn’t just talk. We had duck-and-cover drills at school, and people actually built fallout shelters in their homes and backyards.

So I had a thing about survival and self-sufficiency from an early age. One day my father caught me digging into the foundation of the house. I was going to dig a series of tunnels, then bring down a generator that would run on fuel and that I was going to vent outside. I planned to store the amount of fuel that I thought would be sufficient to run it for a year. I was going to grow algae, which would produce oxygen and also be a food source. In this way I would enable my family to survive the nuclear blast, and it seemed totally sane and rational to think that way. Of course I knew that after the blast there wouldn’t be much food around. I’d have to grow it, harvest it, and store it. So I started a garden.

(As a side note, this was actually when I first got interested in solar panels, too. There was no talk about nuclear winter in those days, so I thought I might have some solar panels outside the fallout shelter to provide our power. Hopefully they wouldn’t get damaged by the blast—or I could pull them in and then put them out afterward. And I’d live. I’d survive.)

My love of gardening wasn’t solely about providing sustenance in the wake of a nuclear disaster, though; I simply liked the idea of the earth. I had been a Boy Scout—thrifty, brave, clean, reverent, resourceful. Gardening fit with all of that and I wanted to give it a try.

I started my first garden at my home on Magnolia Boulevard in Sherman Oaks when I was sixteen. And right after I put some seeds in the ground, my dad told me, “We’re going to New York for a visit, and we’re going to be back there awhile.” And then when we got to New York, he decided we were going to Europe. We took a whirlwind twenty-one-day tour of several countries in Europe. It was wonderful in every way.

When I came back, though, I thought, “Oh, my God! My garden!” I had been gone maybe six weeks.

But miraculously, several of the plants had survived. They weren’t in great shape, but some water overspray from the neighbor had been enough to take care of a few radish plants, and the radishes were kinda edible. I was impressed beyond description. Those seeds I had put in the ground, and tended to only briefly, had endured absolute neglect for six weeks and still produced radishes.

I vowed that I would again have a garden when I had a patch of dirt to call my own. So the number one thing I wanted for this house when I bought it was room for a vegetable garden, and it has turned out I am good at gardening.

Eco-Friendly Gardening

You know, when I first bought this house, the garden was quite different. I knew enough to take the lawn out right away. It just didn’t make sense to have a lawn in Southern California. If I lived in Seattle or Indianapolis—any part of the country that gets a certain amount of rainfall—then I might have been comfortable having a lawn, but certainly wouldn’t have one in a place like Southern California, where water comes at such a high environmental cost.

Getting rid of a lawn can also do wonders for the environment. First of all, you could entirely eliminate the need for gasoline-powered lawn equipment at your home. By that I mean things like lawn mowers, edgers, and string trimmers. These machines emit all kinds of pollutants, including

•
carbon monoxide

•
carbon dioxide

•
oxides of nitrogen (NOx)

•
sulfur dioxide

•
VOCs (volatile organic compounds)

•
toxins, such as benzene

There’s also gasoline evaporation whenever you refill your gas can and whenever you use that gas can to refill your mower or edger. And if you don’t maintain your equipment properly, it can burn oil, too.

One of the keys that I’ve learned over the years to having a successful, energy-efficient garden is choosing plants that are suited to my site. If you live in the desert, as I do, plants that thrive in moist, tropical climates are not going to be happy unless you give them lots of water and lots of special fertilizers and generally try to adapt your site to suit the plants. This is virtually never an environmentally enlightened way to approach your garden.

Plants that have adapted to your climate and conditions are better able to grow without a lot of attention or input. In my case, that means native plants from this region as well as plants that are classified as Mediterranean.

You can check with your local garden center or your local county extension office to find out which plants will work best in your climate and conditions. If you’re in California, you can go online to the California Native Plant Society’s website (
www.cnps.org
) and find lots of good stuff. Odds are there’s a native plant society in your state or region, too

Over the years I’ve developed a list of produce that grows well for me and that I plant year in, year out:

•
corn

•
tomatoes

•
lettuce

•
broccoli

•
cauliflower

•
peas

•
artichokes

•
chile peppers

•
onions

•
herbs like cilantro, basil, and sage

I also have a little fruit orchard at the front, back, and side of my house where I have these trees:

•
2 avocado trees

•
1 lemon tree

•
2 semidwarf tangerine trees

•
1 Valencia orange tree and 1 semidwarf navel orange

•
3 fig trees

•
2 olive trees (I cure my own olives)

•
1 large apple tree and 2 semidwarf ones

•
1 plum tree

With many of these plants, the more you cut, the more you get. Broccoli is like that. Sometimes I can’t even cut it quick enough, ’cause you can only eat so much broccoli.

It’s not like I have a huge amount of space. I have three raised beds, and the whole area where those three raised beds sit is only about 25 feet by 35 feet, including the walkways in between. There’s another little area that adjoins it that’s maybe 3 feet by 6 feet. So, obviously, you don’t need a lot of space to have a thriving fruit and vegetable garden. You just need to use the space efficiently, and to choose plants that will thrive in your climate.

One Tree Goes a Long Way

         Ed’s always telling me we could live off the land, and I guess it’s true. If there’s a little space, he wants to put in a fruit tree. I didn’t exactly plan to live on a farm when I moved to California—that wasn’t my big, glamorous dream—but I do have to admit I can tell the difference between our fresh vegetables and that bland, tasteless stuff. My dad and my grandfather had a garden when I was growing up in the South and it was incredible. Fresh collard greens. What a fresh tomato tasted like, not having been sprayed with pesticides and not having had all the flavor mutated out of it. It’s a beautiful thing.