Living Like Ed (27 page)

So there’s a lot to be said for having fresh, organic produce, even if your garden produces far more artichokes and broccoli than you’ll
ever
want to eat. And if you do have too much of a good thing, you can give the extra fruit and vegetables to your friends and neighbors, donate it to a local shelter, or maybe barter with other people for goods and services. Hey, if you grow enough of this stuff, you could maybe even sell it at a farmers’ market.

Rachelle’s right about the kind of bounty you can enjoy. A single semidwarf apple tree, for example, can produce up to five hundred apples in a season, and that one tree has a productive life of fifteen to twenty years. If you live in a temperate climate, like California, you can plant several trees with different harvest times—so one might produce fruit in March and April, and then another might produce in May and June. That way you can wind up putting fresh-picked fruit on your table for much of the year.

Wherever you live, make sure you choose trees that work well in your climate. For instance, in the far north, you can grow hardy apples and pears. A bit farther south, try sour cherries, plums, and apricots. And in the nation’s midsection, add regular cherries, nectarines, and peaches. Of course, citrus fruits can be grown in some areas of the South. Just bear in mind that most fruit trees require a dormant period, when temperatures remain below 45 degrees, so if you live in the Deep South, check with local nurseries for low-chill varieties.

Even if you’re unable to add a tree to your home, by getting rid of the lawn and adding native or climate-compatible plants that don’t require extra energy and water and fertilizer, you can reduce pollution and also absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen.

Also, whether or not you plant trees at your home, you can work with local and nationwide organizations to plant trees in local parks and literally all over the world—to beautify our land and to help the environment.

Drought-Tolerant Ornamentals

Not everything in my garden is edible. There are a few ornamentals, which are strictly decorative, but none of them really requires very much water. We live in a desert, so it doesn’t make sense to have it any other way.

Some people assume that means I have a cactus garden. Not at all. The drought-tolerant plants in my garden include

•
lavender, which smells wonderful

•
manzanita

•
toyon, which is also called Christmas berry

•
ceanothus, or California lilac

Rachelle also put in a succulent or two in the back.

         Does planting drought-tolerant natives mean you have to have an ugly garden? Well, when I first moved in, I used to tell people that our house was the one on the corner that looked like the Addams family’s. We had all these crazy-looking plants out in the garden and it looked sort of barren.

Now that things have grown in, it does look better. It’s no Sissinghurst, believe me. It’s not some gorgeous castle garden that people come from all over the world to tour. But I’d be willing to have people over for a garden party now.

Actually, the amazing thing is that people
do
want to come and tour our garden. People have actually paid money at auctions held during fund-raisers for different environmental charities to come and visit Ed. They actually pay money to see the house and tour the drought-tolerant garden that produces some of the food we eat. It’s absolutely unbelievable to me. I told Ed we should start charging admission at the gate.

Saving Water in the Garden

Even when you plant the right plants for your climate, you will occasionally have to water them; even drought-tolerant plants have their limits. So the idea is to avoid wasting water. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, “Home,” saving water also means saving energy—and saving money.

What are the best ways to save water in your garden? You’ll use a lot less water overall if you water early in the morning or later in the evening, so the hot midday sun doesn’t make that water evaporate. Also, try to water when it’s not windy so the water goes where you want and doesn’t simply blow around the garden or into a neighbor’s yard.

What else can you do? You can collect rainwater to irrigate your garden, literally capturing water off the large watershed that is your roof. Rain barrels make this easy, and they’re getting easier to find. Your roof has a large amount of surface area, and it’s focused in sometimes as few as four downspouts. Position a rain barrel under one or more of those downspouts and you can capture the rain as it comes down off your roof.

You’d be surprised how much water you can collect this way. If it’s raining hard, you’ll fill up a 55-gallon rain barrel—with 300 to 400 feet of surface area leading to one downspout—in just an hour or two. And you can certainly put up multiple barrels. I had to fight tooth and nail to get just one rain barrel, since my wife has aesthetic issues with it. And the only reason it’s still there is that it’s full of water and she can’t move it.

Ed rigged up this ugly rain barrel, but it is kind of handy for watering my ornamentals.

         Every time I leave the house, I risk coming back to some weird contraption. In this case, Ed had cut one of our rain gutters and installed this horrible, ugly orange barrel. I can live with some things. I can actually live with a lot of things. But they have to look good.

Ed tells me he’s found some more attractive rain barrels, even some made out of stone. I don’t know if the man can be trusted when it comes to aesthetics; he clearly has other priorities. But if he’s found an attractive rain barrel, I’m all for it. I don’t want to waste water out in the garden, especially when rainwater is free.

Of course I understand why Rachelle says that these orange rain barrels are ugly, but to me, the sight of the Owens Valley—about 250 miles from Los Angeles, where we’ve robbed the area of the water and the dust blowing around is giving the residents respiratory ailments—is much uglier. And if you put it that way, Rachelle would probably even agree.

If you can irrigate your ornamental plants with saved rainwater, you will cut your water bill considerably. And if your wife takes long showers, well, then you really need to look into this rain-barrel system.

The other thing you really should do, if you’re going to use rain barrels—or just as part of your regular home maintenance—is get up on the roof and clean the rain gutters. You want to make sure the water you collect in your rain barrels is as clean as possible, and cleaning the gutters of leaves and other detritus will definitely help. We’ve got four feral cats living on our roof, so God knows what else is up there. But getting rid of the leaves is a good first step.

You’ll want to position the rain barrel on some stones or even make a platform if you’re handy, but remember it has to be quite substantial; that barrel is going to get very, very heavy when it’s full of water. The idea is to position the rain barrel high enough so you can get a bucket underneath the spigot, which is down at the bottom.

When you’re ready to use that water in your garden—or if the barrel is nearly full and more rain is predicted—open the spigot and drain some of that collected rainwater into another container or two, or twenty.

It’s important to point out that this water shouldn’t be used for drinking. It’s not potable—and you might even want to put a sign on the barrel to this effect, so you don’t get sued by anyone. Certainly if you have cats living on the roof, as I have, you should be very careful. By the same token, unless you’re sure it’s very clean water, you wouldn’t want to use it on anything that will be eaten, so don’t water your vegetable garden with it. You’d have to have a very clean area to collect rainwater to use it on food. Instead, use it for watering your ornamentals or your lawn, if you still have one.

Other Ways to Garden

I’ve addressed a lot of things you can do in your own yard, but what if you don’t have a yard? Let’s say you have an apartment or a condo.

Well, many kinds of fruit trees, herbs, and vegetables can be grown very successfully in pots. If you have a balcony or a patio or even just a front step that gets some sun, you can grow a surprising amount of food.