Slicing Your Food Bill by Using Nature’s Bounty

During the Great Depression, Seventh-Day Adventists planted carob trees around Pasadena, hoping that residents would learn to use the chocolately pods and never have to go hungry.  A worthy idea that fizzled. Most people didn’t know how to put the pods to use and the trees are too messy and destructive to be good street trees.

Altadenan Gail Murphy of RIPE (Residential In-season Produce Exchange) and Tucsonan Brad Lancaster from Desert Harvesters had better luck with their ideas, and built communities in the process.  They told their stories at a talk hosted by RIPE of Altadena on Saturday night. 

The event, attended by about 50 people, was almost as much about community as it was about swapping produce and eating mesquite pods and prickly pear, or sampling the carob crispies brownies and acorn mesquite cornbread that was for sale.

Murphy’s idea of exchanging home-grown produce with neighbors as a way to avoid tossing out good food helped to create a community of gardeners.  “It’s kind of the same as leaning over the fence to talk to your neighbor,” she says.

Murphy started out by selling the excess blackberries and other fruit that grow in her yard, which led to conversations with neighbors and eventually swapping garden produce as it came in season.  The hundreds of grapefruit that used to litter her yard “like snow” now feed a multitude. 

Over in Tucson, which only gets 12 inches of rain a year, Lancaster had a different problem.  He and his brother bought a house in a neighborhood that looked like a dry-gulch town in an old cowboy movie.  No trees, no shrubs, no vegetable gardens.  When it rained, though, the streets turned into a kayaker’s paradise.

With a little ingenuity and ecological awareness and a lot of positive enthusiasm, Lancaster was able to harvest the rainwater by cutting out a chunk of curb and creating a water-catching basin around native drylands plants.  He got the neighbors involved, and now the street has lush vegetation and large shade trees that attract a variety of native wildlife.  Lancaster even got the city to sign on by making curb cutting legal and encouraging the planting of native vegetation. 

Neighborhood buy-in is important in these projects, he said, both in ensuring the plants are maintained and creating tighter communities.  After petitioning the city of Tucson to build a traffic circle to slow down vehicles, the neighborhood took on the responsibility of planting and grooming the circle to create common space. 

Lancaster commented that people often think it’s frustrating to talk to the city (or in Altadena’s case, the county) to get improvements in their neighborhoods.  “I think it’s awesome!” he said enthusiastically, “because it gets you to talk to your neighbors.”

Lancaster started on his quest to beautify Tucson after running across metates and other cooking implements in the desert.  He asked himself what they could have been used for in this desert land, and discovered that only a few decades earlier, Tucson had a flowing river and riparian plants. 

He found that native plants not only grew best in the area and required less water than their exotic counterparts, they created an ecology that was beneficial to wildlife and supplied food to the people who lived in the area.

A “mesquite guild,” as he calls it, is like a small community of plants and animals.  Plants that need nitrogen benefit from the nitrogen-rich mesquite and the shade it provides. Underneath a mature mesquite tree, salt-tolerant plants leach the salt that harms other plants, shrubs provide berries and  roosting places for native birds (which have almost completely displaced non-native pigeons), and the birds provide fertilizer and reseeding.

People benefit from the shade as well, and can also eat the fruit and grind the mesquite pods into flour.  Desert ironwood produces pods that taste like peanuts when mature, or when green can be used like edamame. The flowers are edible as well.  Prickly pears make tasty jelly, and mesquite flour can be used in cornbread and other cooking.

“We’re not going out to the desert to harvest,” Lancaster says,  “We’re bringing the desert to the city core.  We want to enhance the places we live, rather than deplete them.”

The efforts pay off economically, as well.  Every fall, Desert Harvesters boost Tucson tourism by hosting the Mesquite Milling Fiesta and Mesquite Pancake Breakfast at the Dunbar/Springs community garden.  Individuals have discovered they can earn money grinding flour in hammermills or harvesting rainwater. 

Lancaster himself wrote two books, Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1: Guiding Principles to Welcome Rain into Your Life and Landscape and Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 2: Water-Harvesting Earthworks, both of which are available on his website, Harvesting Rainwater.

In addition to talks such as this one, RIPE sponsors workshops in such skills as jam making, grafting fruit trees, preparing acorns for food, and square-foot gardening.  Visit the website to find out the latest goings-on or join in the exchange.