A Permanent Demonstration
Watch out, San Luis Obispo County — there's a demonstration happening on the lawn of Centennial Park! However, you'll find no hollering people with signs and costumes, no riot police, tear gas, or rubber bullets here. You'd have a hard time telling that it's a demonstration at all — there's nothing except 3,500 square feet of Edenic garden behind a fence. But for the last three years the Paso Robles Demonstration Garden has been innocuously demonstrating better uses for the ubiquitous American lawn.
The garden was conceived in 2008 by Transition Towns, a group that promotes solutions to deal simultaneously with climate change, economic instability, and fossil fuel depletion. Lawns hog water, demand mowing, fertilizing, aeration, and irrigation maintenance, sucking money and resources. While some lawn is vital for baseball games and picnics, we Americans tend a lot more lawn than we actually use. The garden's founders had a goal in mind: demonstrate that lawns (a resource sinkhole) could be converted into food yielding gardens. While the garden as originally intended included community allotments, questions over water usage shifted their focus to creating a smaller demo garden. The demo garden would embody practices that anyone could use to save water and grow food in the home landscape. After three years of work, the garden is approaching it's culmination. Not only does it save water, it yields fresh produce, and has become a community resource, educating and providing some food to the Food Bank Coalition of San Luis Obispo.
What Gardens Really Want
Male Chestnut-backed
Chickadee
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I met at the demo garden with a few of the founders one fine Friday in May to discuss their project. Terri Knowlton, Rosalie Wolff and Carolyn Fergoda told me that they have drawn inspiration from Toby Hemenway and his seminal book Gaia's Garden, in which he says "gardens want to become forests." Hemenway advocates for the planting of what he calls "food forests."
Conventional gardening resists the tendency of the garden to grow wild, suppressing it by intensively working soils, planting, weeding, pruning, adding fertilizers. Food forests, on the other hand, harness plant growth habits and relationships to the gardener's advantage, requiring fewer material inputs and — once established — less labor. And food forests are duel purpose, providing food for the gardener, but also food and shelter for birds, bugs, and critters of all sorts. A pair of mating Chestnut-backed Chickadees interrupted our interview, acting well at home in the food forest.
Make Your Plants Do the Work
Food forests cross landscaping with gardening and rely on a mix of intentional planting and the wild needs and impulses of the plants to create their effect. One technique of food forest plantings is to utilize vertical space by planting trees, shrubs, and low-lying plants close together. Of course, the gardener must be attuned to the needs of plants — particularly sun and water requirements — so that the plants exist in harmony, not competition. Plants that get along are known as companion plants.
For example, at the demo garden chard is planted beneath an almond tree, as it can tolerate some shade, and has shallower roots than the almond, so won't compete for water. The chard will further shade and mulch soil around the almond, conserving water. Marigolds planted around the chard on the outer sunny edges secrete compounds that kill nematodes and repel insect pests. A sage on the sunny outer periphery needs little water and attracts bees which help pollinate the almond tree. The chard reseeds on it's own giving the spring garden a colorful flare without work on the gardener's part. This is a food forest!
Fennel Leaves
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The demo garden utilizes ground covers, such as thyme, oregano, California fuchsia and yarrow to suppress weeds, abiding by the philosophy: if you're not growing something you want, you're growing something you don't want. These perennial, drought tolerant, naturally spreading plants smother out weeds by and large.
There are plenty of flowers to attract bees here and ensure pollination of the small garden's more than twenty fruit trees. A conventional orchard might pay hundreds of dollars to import bee hives for this purpose.
Marigolds, onions, fennel, yarrow, and other herbs and flowers attract beneficial insects, repelling harmful ones and replacing insecticides
A tall, linear planting of sunflowers create a windscreen for broccoli and Brussel sprouts and a lovely border to the garden.
Secrets of the Forest
Compost Bin from Recycled Pallets
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The demo garden was founded on a strict ethic of organic, natural methods for the health of the people and critters who would work there and eat the food. Affirming this ethic, none of the lawn originally covering the site was sprayed. Instead, a method called sheet mulching, or, more poetically, 'lasagna gardening' was used.
This method involves alternately layering compost, cardboard, and newspaper several inches thick. The 'lasagna' blocks light and grass growth, eliminating the lawn. After a few months, with the help of water, the 'lasagna' composts into rich soil, ready for planting.
Weeds and pests in the garden are controlled holistically or by hand. I asked the gardeners what their secret was to controlling the rampant Bermuda grass I had seen earlier in the year. That got a laugh — no secrets here, they said, flexing their muscles. Although contentious among some of the gardeners, they stood by their ethics and opted for hand removal over resorting to Roundup. Fertilization relies entirely on natural composts and manures, mostly trucked in. Eventually the garden hopes to generate enough compost on site — through the natural wastes of the plants — to provide for all of it's needs.
Even the fence around the garden, which keeps out critters, is put to use: grapes and blackberries grow up it's face. Fences are natural attractors of birds, providing many perches, and it is a confirmed fact that where birds sit, birds . . . poop. A closer look at the fence reveals white streaking along the wires. What's the white stuff in bird poop? That's bird poop too, of course, but it's also made of nitrogen, one of the limiting nutrients in most gardens. Planting along a fence takes advantage of the fences structure, and of its interaction with birds.
Tee-'Pea'
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Herb Spiral from
Recycled Concrete
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This spring, the garden added several new structures. First, a tee-'pea' was built as part of a children's workshop. A fun playhouse, it's also a jungle gym for peas, beans, squash, and other vining plants. Eventually curly willows will be trained in its shape to provide permanent summer shade.
A newly completed herb spiral creates micro-climates of sun and water so that a variety of herbs can be grown in a small space. Because the spiral creates sloping surfaces as it rises vertically, it creates extra growing space (the hypotenuse of a triangle is always longer than it's base).
The demo garden was also One Cool Earth's first customer for the GreenWorks Nursery's hedgerows. The garden purchased plants form OCE's student-run nursery and Liberty High School students helped to plant as a service-learning project. A short hedgerow dedicated to natives will provide a windbreak, year-round blossoms for pollinators and predatory wasps, and wildlife habitat.
Find Yourself in the Food Forest
A Few of the Garden Corps
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The garden won a Community Involvement Award in 2010 from the Parks and Recreation for their efforts involving: the MultiFlora Garden Club, YMCA, California Conservation Corps, California Rare Fruit Growers, Liberty Continuation High School, Master Gardeners and many more. While the idea of food forests may seem radical, it is gaining popularity. Seattle has devoted seven acres near downtown to planting one. Mt. Olive Organic Farm of Paso Robles is experimenting with converting some of it's organic orchards to food forests where veggies, berries, and beneficial, non-food bearing plants grow between the rows of fruit trees.
While the demo garden has a devoted corps of members, they are constantly looking for more volunteer support—not only good ol' fashioned laborers, but also willing presenters, workshop facilitators, publicists, and fund raisers.
For more info about getting involved, events, and regular work days check out their website. There's a place in this food forest for everyone!
Photos by Greg Ellis
