“We moved here in 1974, and caring for our garden has been an extended learning experience for someone who grew up in the suburbs of New York City. I knew right at the start that I didn’t want to use herbicides or pesticides or artificial fertilizers. Now we have a food forest and native plant garden. The gophers seemed to be good at getting into raised beds, so now most of our veggies are in half wine barrels. We have two rotating composters and they still get filled too quickly, since we are now vegan. Where most of the lawn was, is now a rain garden, with an apple tree at one edge. I plant in groups according to need for water and need for light. We now have lots of sages and we have other drought tolerant natives like coffeeberry and manzanita. We put fruit trees on the south side of the house, which has only a strip about 3-4 feet wide, so we treat them like a lazy espalier – removing the branches that grow toward the house or too far into the neighbor’s yard.
We are fortunate in that we have a high water table, so we don’t have to water mature trees! There was already an old orange tree and walnut tree there when we moved in, and now we also have hazelnut, pineapple guava, persimmon, pomegranate, almonds, cherries; Golden Delicious, Fuji, and Gravenstein apples; and Clementine, Mandarinquat, Santa Teresa Lemon, and one little Bearss Lime. All on a city lot of about 6800 square feet! Along the curb strip we have planted native California fuschia and ruby buckwheat and we have some Warriner Lytle Buckwheat and seaside daisy in the backyard. The ash tree drops copious amounts of leaves in the fall, and I am so happy to have them as mulch. When the arborist came to trim the branches of that tree away from our roof, we asked him to leave the chips for us to use as mulch.
I have learned a lot from Daily Acts. Went to several workshops in the “old days,” which gave me a lot of ideas. Our garden is totally transformed from a grassy weedy lot with a few trees to a wonderful wild food forest with lots of natives and a rain garden that filled up for the first time in years with this year’s rains!” -Beverly Alexander
