Pasadena Paradise: The Perfect Garden with Creative Urban Results.
(Page 2 of 4)
May/June 2006
By Justin Clark
It’s not all about earning a living, though. Come dinnertime, the Dervaeses enjoy sitting around a couple of steaming veggie pizzas and delicious desserts baked in their cob oven—all made with the kind of just-picked produce you just can’t buy, even from an organic grocer.
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Jules Dervaes: Why I Garden
Before I began my Path to Freedom self-sufficiency project, my beliefs had brought me in the direction of simple living and environmental awareness. When water conservation became so important in the 1990s as California was going through a severe drought, I did away with my moisture-challenged lawn, replacing it with wildflowers, drought-tolerant plants and edible landscaping.
In 2000, I got angry when I heard that U.S. biotech corporations were bent on introducing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) into the food supply. Not wanting to be GM’ed myself, I knew I had to protect my family from this mad experiment. I felt cornered because I had no other convenient (cheap) way of getting genuine food anymore. Even though I had been gardening for many years, I hardly relied on those plantings. My family was tied to the supermarket.
Because of this threat to the very seeds of life, I turned radical. I aimed to grow as much of the food for our dinner table as we possibly could ourselves. We decided to make a go of it on the one-fifth acre (8,700 square feet) we had, but there were nagging doubts at every turn: There is not enough room here.
With lines drawn in the dirt, we proceeded to plant fanatically, trying to use every available space in the four corners of our small world. After the first year of gardening for real, were we ever shocked when the final tally showed we harvested more than 2,300 pounds of food. I knew we could do more, for we had only scratched the surface of our anemic, worm-deficient soil. And, as I began to look around, I noticed that something incredible was happening. My small place was growing larger right before my eyes.
Excerpted with permission from “A Path to Freedom,” by Jules Dervaes, in Ecology Action online newsletter. Click here to read the full article.
Planting Seeds Outside the Garden
The Dervaeses’ garden exemplifies both sustainability and frugality––from the manure (sweepings from local stables) used as fertilizer to the trellises (old bicycle wheels), from planter dividers (recycled glass bottles) to homemade pots-within-pots that save water. And that vision extends beyond the garden.