Pasadena Paradise: The Perfect Garden with Creative Urban Results.
A Southern California family adapts their back-to-the-land philosophy to an urban garden with astonishingly productive results.
May/June 2006
By Justin Clark
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PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEPHEN DABROWSKI
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For most people, eating organic means a trip to the local whole-foods store—and, often, a hit to their wallets. For the Dervaes family, eating organic only requires a trip behind the house. The family of four raises three tons of food each year—enough to supply three-quarters of their diet and maintain a thriving organic produce business to boot.
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Jules, along with his son Justin and daughters Anaïs and Jordanne, lives on one-fifth of an acre in suburban Pasadena, California, and cultivates about half the property, or one-tenth of an acre. Given that the average American’s diet requires 1.2 acres of farmland per person, the Dervaeses are eating quite well off one-fiftieth of the land the rest of us require.
Let’s put those numbers—one-tenth of an acre, three tons of food—in perspective. Granted, comparing monoculture (single-crop) farms with the Dervaeses’ (300 varieties of flora and counting) is literally like comparing apples and oranges. As a means of comparison, the California Department of Food and Agriculture reports that most California corn or rice farms produce an annual yield of less than a half-ton per acre and the average bean farm one-fifth of a ton per acre. The Dervaeses’ operation is about 60 to 150 times as efficient as their industrial competitors, without relying on chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
“Everybody wants more land,” Jules says. “We decided to find out how much we could accomplish on this piece of land.”
Jules had been running a small lawn-maintenance business six years ago when, in response to his growing concerns about genetically modified organisms and other potentially harmful additives in mass-market produce, and with no formal horticultural training, he and his family started their self- sufficiency garden project, dubbed “Path to Freedom.” The Dervaeses have raised everything from asparagus to jicama, kiwis to cotton––all of it organic––thanks to Pasadena’s lengthy growing season and the family’s dedication. They’ve been successful using space-maximizing gardening techniques, including raised earth beds and potted plants that hang between trellised plants.
Jules Dervaes’s genius lies in his ability to adapt his back-to-the-land vision to an urban environment. Ultimately, he realized that in addition to providing food for his family, this garden also could help sustain them financially if he sold its bounty to area businesses. Rather than competing head-on with larger produce suppliers, who can provide out-of-season crops, the family raises niche products that only a city full of gourmet restaurants could support: nasturtiums and Khaki Campbell duck eggs, for example. If a local chef needs a special variety of tomato for a new menu item, Jules snaps up a few semi-mature plants from the local nursery and fills a bed with them.
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