Prototype Issue
Eating off the Vine
By Nathaniel Page
(page 2 of 4)Erik: If we were in Northern California, it would be like, ‘Well, everyone does that, right?’ Oh, they have a compost pile, big deal. In LA, the contrast is so nice and you don’t associate LA with this kind of stuff—sustainable agriculture and these kind of things—so the contrast is exhilarating. In a way, it’s to prove that if we can do it here it can really be done anywhere. I like the challenge of dealing with little rainfall, that’s an interesting thing. These kind of simple gray water things are what we’re experimenting with, like the surge tank that I showed you, there’s a big interest in this now because the climate is changing and rainfall is getting more unpredictable. Every time I do a post or a comment on gray water, I immediately get a lot of interest and traffic because people are really worried right now. Atlanta is having a terrible drought right now so people there are really focused on gray water.
RTLA: I also noticed on your blog that you don’t like to be called a hippie. Why is that?
Erik: [laughs] No, I love hippies. I have hippie friends. I’ve actually been to the Rainbow Gathering.
RTLA: How was that?
RTLA: Intolerable. We talked to a lot of hippies in the course of writing our book because the last time people were doing these things was that generation. A lot of the reference books we looked at were written in the late 60s and early 70s, during the back-to-the-land movement when people were moving to rural areas to escape the city. I like cities. Kelly likes cities. As far as hippies go, one of the comments I got on my blog was, “Oh thank God you guys aren’t hippies.” I get that all the time. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with hippies, it’s just that why does doing these things mean you have to be playing hackie sack or growing dreads? Why can’t these activities just be tucked into a normal life?
Kelly: Whatever your life is, whether you’re a marketing executive, a stay-at-home-mom, or flaky writer types like us, anyone should be able to do this. It’s part of living.
Erik: I really believe in opportunism. I don’t believe in big mission statements or trying to save the world or anything like that. You just grow some vegetables. Do things that are more enjoyable than the status quo. I don’t ride a bike because I don’t want to pollute the environment. I ride a bike because I like to ride a bike. It’s just more fun, pure and simple. The environmental aspects of it are a side effect. You do it because you like to do it. We grow food because it tastes better.
Kelly: I don’t think anybody will do anything for long unless they actually like doing it. So with all this green propaganda floating around in the media lately, trying to encourage everyone to go green or those books that say you should go green, people might go green for like a week out of guilt. Lasting change can only happen through pleasure.
RTLA: How much time do you guys devote to this?
Erik: Not much. I really like the permaculture notion that work makes work. This took time to figure out. That’s one of the reasons why we wrote the book, to figure out what vegetables I can grow that won’t take much time. Grow things that are native to where you live, things that grow in similar climates, and you won’t have to do much work. You try to grow roses here and you have to prune them once a year, you have to spray them with pesticide, you have to water them. Why not plant an artichoke that grows largely without water? Throughout the book we try to find ways to save labor.
Kelly: Yeah, we don’t spend any time watering. The key is front-end planning. If you plant the right things at the right time they grow for you. It doesn’t take more than a few hours every weekend. People spend much more time on their lawns and if they put that energy and those resources into their gardens they could all have amazing ones.
RTLA: People spend so much time working they pay someone else to take care of their lawn.
Kelly: In LA particularly. I think in the suburbs people still have lawn pride, gentleman like to go out there and compete with their lawns. That just doesn’t make any sense.
Erik: There’s a lot to learn from permaculture, like mixing your plants, making sure they attract beneficial wildlife—birds and insects that take care of your pest problems—and that they produce excess foliage which fertilizes the ground so you don’t have to add more fertilizer.
Kelly: Our yard doesn’t look like Martha Stewart’s. We don’t spend much time cleaning it. We keep all our leaves. We don’t believe in a tidy yard. People spend a lot of time tidying up their yards. All of those fallen leaves go to mulch (a natural protective covering that maintains even soil temperature and control weeds), under the fruit trees, or sometimes directly into the garden bed. They’re so valuable. So by not working, I’m actually doing myself a favor.
Erik: There’s too much garden porn out there; the magazines, the Martha Stewarts.
Kelly: All those fancy books. We fell into it. When we first moved here, it was the first time we had a yard. We were looking through garden porn saying, ‘I want to have a Tuscan estate.’
Erik: You know, like Versailles or something.
Kelly: This is just how real people live. We have to come back to earth. This is comfortable.
Erik: There’s interior design porn too, this ridiculous expectation that everything has to look like fancy magazine photo spreads.
Discussion