Prototype Issue
Eating off the Vine
By Nathaniel Page
(page 3 of 4)Kelly: Especially with the whole exterior room trend which has been big for the last few years; that your outside is a room too. You have to go out there and tidy and clean. Everything has to be a showpiece.
RTLA: But it’s not pure functionalism. There’s an aesthetic to it as well.
Kelly: We don’t spend a lot of time on layout. When you pay attention to plants, they do well. When you’re investing some of your life energy into the yard, it shows that back to you. So our yard does look better than it has in the past, but it’s not through decorating. The yard is just very healthy and active. When we first moved here, before we started becoming food-obsessed, we planted with water-light plants because we thought, ‘Well it would be stupid to try to plant lawn out there.’ We hadn’t made the food connection yet, like how much food we could grow here. There was some sage and stuff out there that we never looked at, we didn’t care about, we just kind of went and whacked it back once in a while. If you put a dollar value on every square foot of this land, it was a huge waste. And now our idea is that nothing is wasted, there’s no space that is fallow or ignored.
RTLA: From what I understand there’s a big conflict between native plant and permaculture people.
Erik: We definitely side with the permaculture people.
Kelly: The plants have to match the climate, to some extent. But whether the plant is from Italy or South America or it’s a native California plant doesn’t matter to us.
Erik: We’re opportunists. If a plant produces food and it doesn’t need water, it’s in.
RTLA: The gray water system is illegal and some of the other things probably aren’t totally up to code as far as the city goes. Have you guys met any major adversity in regards to that?
Kelly: That’s another good thing about living in Los Angeles. There’s so much to deal with that it doesn’t matter where our chickens are, what our gray water is doing. We couldn’t do this in a planned community.
Erik: That’s one of the things you have to consider when moving somewhere: Can I do these things? Am I in a place that’s so tight-ass I can’t do this stuff? One of the things I would look for is a community of recent immigrants. Recent immigrants understand. They grow food in their front yard too. They keep chickens. They have roosters. They understand. And when I walk around this neighborhood with the dog I’m talking to Filipino guys and Latino guys and we’re talking about our gardens and we’re talking about the food we grow. That’s one of the greatest things about LA, is that it’s so diverse. There are people from all over the world with their own food traditions and ways of growing food in urban places. That’s what makes it an interesting place.
Kelly: Our neighborhood is gentrifying, and I hope it doesn’t gentrify into the kind of place where you can’t do this anymore.
Erik: As the gray water goes, if you do it discretely you get away with it even in planned communities. You just have to hide it, don’t talk about it, and don’t brag about it. You don’t discharge your laundry water into the alley; that’s not right, but as long as you’re being responsible about it, it’s fine.
RTLA: So what are your suggestions to those who live in a little north-facing apartment with no balcony?
Erik: If you want to grow your own food you have to grow it elsewhere.
Kelly: You can either guerilla garden or join the community garden. There’s so much good land and you get free tools, free compost and free water for a very low monthly or annual rent.
Erik: Maybe you don’t have time to do vegetable gardening, so buy your vegetables. You can ferment things, do lacto-fermentation, make your own beer, wine and spirits and all sorts of things in your own house. There’re all kinds of things you can do in an apartment.
Kelly: The food growing is just one aspect of things we do. There’s this whole lifestyle and home economics. Growing your own food is kind of the foundation of it, but not the end all. It’s really important to learn how to process your own food to make pickles; you buy food seasonally, but a lot of preservation is about preserving the flavors of the season instead of relying on the god-awful supermarkets and their flavorless vegetables. At a certain time of the year even the expensive Farmer’s Market tomatoes will be cheap because they’re trying to get rid of them before they rot. Take them home and dry them or can them. Take advantage of other people’s bounties and then process it yourself and make it your own. Oh and there’s fallen fruit too.
Erik: Yeah, you can do a lot of foraging.
Kelly: There’s an organization called Fallen Fruit that’s really worth looking up. Los Angeles is ideal for fruit foraging. Look around. This neighborhood is full of fruit and a lot of it doesn’t get collected. They encourage the planting of more fruit trees instead of decorative trees, harvesting the fruit and sharing it with the community.
Erik: Their rule is that if it’s hanging over public property, it’s fair game. You can also ask people. A lot of neighbors have fruit trees. It’s very sad that people have a fruit tree but they’ll go to whole foods and buy the same fruit that they have in their back yard. They have some sort of inhibition about picking their own food. So you can ask them.
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