When I was speaking at the San Francisco Flower Show a few weeks ago, I was asked to be on View From the Bay, an afternoon talk/variety show on the ABC TV affiliate in the bay area.
I did a segment with correspondent Lisa Quinn (who is a hoot) where I demonstrated how to start an edible vegetable and herb garden from seeds. It was great fun! Take a look.
I just turned the water on.
Is that a big deal?
I’m talking about irrigation water. And YES its a big deal because it has been off since October. Yes OCTOBER.
How did I manage to avoid watering for nearly six months? Easy! I grow low water plants.
When I started working on this garden in 1992, all the other gardeners I knew labored to create the perfect, flower-filled English garden. I was planting my back corner with natives. While they toiled over roses, I planted aloes and agaves. When everyone wanted a lush lawn, I went for ornamental grasses set amidst un-thirsty flowering shrubs from Australia and South Africa.
My goal was, and still is, to see how much beauty I can create using as little water as possible.
So how did I do? Judge for yourself. Most of the photos decorating the pages of this website are photos from my garden. Previous blog entries have photos of my garden as well.
A low water, high flower combination: golden orange South African annual Ursinia anthemoides with 'Dusky Rose' California native poppy
I can’t take credit for it all, of course. I am fortunate to have good advice from designer Linda Chisari who helped with the original design for my backyard (in 1992) and became a valued friend in the process. Nearly a decade later, designer Scott Spencer, another of my favorite people, got me going in the front yard. I have learned and continue to learn a tremendous amount from both of them.
And then there are the dozens of nursery folk who endure my never-ending questions as I search and research plants to write about, talk about, and of course, try out in my garden.
Not that my garden is entirely low water. I couldn’t live without a vegetable garden (I have a hard time understanding how anyone can live without a vegetable garden).
Late summer harvest in the vegetable garden
Vegetables take a considerable amount of water, but I use drip irrigation to target the water to each plant and drip it directly into the ground above the roots, so it is used very efficiently.
Fruit trees take more water than natives, but probably not as much as you’d expect. Deciduous fruit trees - those that are bare in winter - need water only when they are actively growing in spring and summer.
Evergreen fruit trees need water year-round except when it is raining. Still, their well-established roots are less thirsty than, say, an equal area of lawn.
And besides, if I am going to spend water, I want to spend it on plants that give me something back - like food!
Lots of green, no grass in my front garden
I finally made front page news today! The San Diego Union Tribune’s front page story was about people removing their lawns as a water-saving measure. Reporter Mike Lee quoted me as a local expert:
“It’s the beginning of the end of lawn at home,” said Nan Sterman, who teaches a class called “Bye Bye Grass” at the Water Conservation Garden in El Cajon.
Last week, the garden’s managers started a hotline for people to seek advice from Sterman about “water-smart” landscaping.
“It’s not just the early adopters anymore,” Sterman said. “It’s (average) people who are really getting the sense that we have to do something . . . which tells me that it’s becoming part of the mainstream.”
Yes, going grassless it is becoming mainstream. No longer do people walk by my front garden and scratch their heads, wondering where the grass went, or giving me funny looks when I tell them there never was any grass.
In fact, I just taught a Bye Bye Grass series at Quail Botanical Gardens this past week. It was a full class of men and women, from all over the county, all of whom came to learn how to get rid of their lawns and replace them with low water plants - and a few with vegetable gardens.
Are vegetable gardens lower water than lawns? I get this question all the time. It isn’t that easy to answer but generally, when you water a vegetable garden the idea is to target each plant. A lawn, on the other hand, is blanketed in spray. And most vegetable gardens are smaller than lawns.
Either way, as I like to say, if you are going to “spend” water, spend it on something that feeds you.
Click here to read the entire story.
And by the way, if you are interested in getting rid of your lawn, the next series of Bye Bye Grass is April 1 and April 4 at the Water Conservation Garden at Cuyamaca College. The next series at Quail Botanical Gardens is May 13 and 17. To register (which is required) for either series, click here.
The class travels too… in case you have a venue where you’d like to have me teach it!
Yesterday, I visited Stone Brewing World Bistro and Gardens in anticipation of the program I am doing there next Sunday, March 15. For the Ides of March, I am leading a stroll through the brewery’s wonderful gardens.
I remember the first time I visited Stone. It was September of 2005 when CEO Greg Koch toured me through the not-yet-open brewery.
I was totally taken by the amazing facility. A plane Jane tilt-up building was being transformed transformed into a beautiful, striking structure, adorned with local rocks, boulders from on-site, worn brick from a historic building in downtown San Diego, and slabs of granite leftover from a quarry not far away that makes tombstones. Countering the gray and black, and white textures were vast surfaces of coppery rusted steel. But that would not be finished for a while. Click here for a photo log of brewery and garden construction
Inside the brewing facility were two story tall stainless steel silos -
or so they looked to me - where the brewmasters soon would be doing their magic.
An enormous glass wall stood between the brewery and the soon to be bistro.
The bistro itself was a vast space with soaring ceilings, bamboo planted water features, a long bar (of course), and a huge, outward slanting wall of glass with roll up glass doors that when open, erased the line between inside and outside.
At that point, however, I had to wonder why anyone would want to go outside. Greg pointed past the construction zone he called a dining patio to a HUGE hole in the ground. It looked like the entry of Journey to the Center of the Earth.
The hole, Greg explained, was the detention basin for the entire commercial development around Stone Brewing. If or when, there would be a 100 year flood, all the water in the surrounding properties would rush into the big hole where it would enter an enormous culvert and diverted to who knows where.
What I saw as a hole, however, Greg saw as a garden. He talked about making it the brewery’s backyard by filling it with fruit trees and natives. He envisioned boulders and seating areas in a garden where patrons would learn where their food came from.
Who was doing the design, I asked. Well, Greg said, he’d talked to some landscape architects and some other folks, but he was thinking he’d just do it himself.
Honestly, I thought he was nuts. But then again, I it was the first time I’d met Greg Koch.
Today, the hole in the ground is indeed a lovely garden filled with fruit
trees, natives, bamboo, and other plants that together, create the brewery’s backyard. There are lawns surrounded by groves of fruit
trees, natives, and bamboo. A stream running through the center is filled with cattails and other aquatic plants. It flows into what looks like the most wonderful swimming hole, thanks to strategically placed boulders and cascading waterfalls. Of course, it isn’t a swimming hole. It is the big hole that I once imagined leading to the inner world.
This coming Sunday, I have the honor of leading folks on a stroll
through the garden, pointing out its
amazing and fantastic features. The fruit trees are coming into bloom, the natives are thriving, the pine forest (not native but pretty darned impressive) of formerly distressed trees, the fantastic agave hill, and
more.
It is a lesson in success that comes from not listening to the experts (though there are some features of the garden that I know Greg will eventually live to regret, like planting running bamboo without a root barrier), a lesson in sustainability, and a lesson in following one’s heart.
Come join me in Stone’s garden at 1 pm on March 15. Come early and eat lunch, have a beer (but not too many), and then mosey on over to the patio bar where we will be gathering.
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