Growing Desert Perennial Tomatoes and Peppers: Supporting Vegetable Plants with Recyclables Brenda Barnes, Home Grown Food Network President March 9, 2008 Yesterday I was doing some cleaning in our enclosed porch that we made into an indoor-outdoor dining room. I came across half of a large white metal bird cage that had been covered with a red tablecloth to become a skirted side table. It was good as that, but I've decided to open up more floor area in that space, and last week Peter moved a big rectangular dining table with ten chairs from the workshop for me. There's no room for side tables and an extra seating area as there was with our old plan with a small circular dining table to seat only six. Therefore, I moved the bird cage and tablecloth to the former carport we have enclosed as a recreation room on the other side of the house, to decide later how to use them. This morning I was out singing to the tomatoes in the garden and noticed a clump of vines with tomatoes on the ground that needed tying up, so I moved the half bird cage out there and tied the vines to it with recycled twisty-ties we save from thrown away supermarket vegetables. I noticed how much better that works than the true tomato vine support I have right next to that vine. The round open galvanized metal graduated cone-type thing they sell for tomato vine supports just does not work well. Vines have to be trained into the middle and then tied on the sides, which is fine when the vines are small, but when they are big you break half of them trying to get them to go into the middle. It's much better to have something open on one or two sides so you can tuck the support behind the vines that need tying up, and then tie them along the rectangular metal. Also, they sell those cone things in two or three sizes, all of which are either too small or too large at various times while the tomatoes are growing. If you get the big one, you've got a tower of metal with a small bottom section of vines near the ground much of the time. If you buy the small ones the vines grow out the top right away, and then you have no support for the tomato vines to stay out in the air and sun and not clump together. With recycled things, you can just keep tying another one onto the top of what you started with—which you can pick to be the right size for whatever height the vines have grown to when you decide to tie them up—as the vines keep growing. Now I can hardly see any of the supports we have put into the garden, and most of the time I couldn't, since they were the right size when I put them in and kept growing as the vines did. The only exception is one bird cage that I put in a really open area where no tomato vines had grown and then kept transplanting next to it tomato vines that broke off (even with recycled things as supports, I sometimes do break a vine because they're too clumpy by the time I decide to tie them up). Nothing has taken root there, so the poor little bird cage looks lonely and bare still. We'll see. It's the most shaded area of the garden, so maybe it's too shady for tomatoes. Another way I'm using recyclables to support the tomato vines is letting a few jacaranda trees grow from the thousands of seedlings that germinated in the garden from seed pods blown over from a neighbor's tree. The seed pods from jacarandas are amazing. You could have thousands of trees from one. They're more invasive than most weeds, at least here in the desert in the conditions in our yard. I was pulling out jacaranda seedlings by ten or twenty a day for months and throwing away hundreds of pods I could not use for mulch because of the seeds, contrasted to one or two things people call weeds. And if I hadn't pulled them out when they were small, jacarandas get a taproot that makes you need a shovel and loads of work to get them out when they're only two or three feet tall, I learned last summer on the other side of the back of the house. However, this year at first I transplanted seedlings where I wanted trees, and they always died. Then I realized I could just wait until one grew on its own where it would be good to shade the tomatoes and our house in the summer. They know where they want to grow, apparently. The ones that started on their own are doing great. The pepper plants I grew all over from supermarket vegetables we ate like to be supported by round plastic things, both around the plants coming up, and on the limbs where peppers come. I put some kind of threaded black plastic plumbing thing I found, about eight inches in diameter and six inches tall, around a growing small plant, and it just took off when I filled the thing with mulch and buried a soaker hose under the thing, next to the plant. It seems like the pepper plant likes the refected heat of the sun. Then when peppers came out on the limbs of the plant, they surrounded several PVC pipes stored on a ledge next to them. In other places where I don't support the plants, peppers have fallen off before they are ripe and been wasted. Interesting how plants teach you what they like, just as children do, if you let them, and how easy it is to find things to give them to help them grow. What a great life growing—and eating--naturalizing vegetables in the desert! -30 -   Growing Perennial Tomatoes in the Desert, Part 3: Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny Brenda Barnes, Home Grown Food Network President March 8, 2008 The past few days we have harvested two or three tomatoes a day and eaten them right afterwards. Some right then after washing, like apples. Some cut up in salad. None cooked—they are too good to cook. They are SO tasty!!! Beefsteak tomatoes, Early Boy and Early Girl tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, medium-size generic-looking “salad” tomatoes, and Roma tomatoes I have recognized among ones that got ripe already. Watching them ripen a few a day has made me start thinking of what I learned when I was in college at Cal Berkeley taking human genetics: Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. I know most people don't think that, when they are harvesting and eating great tomatoes, in the desert or anywhere else. OK, so I'm a little bit weird compared to other people. That's not news to me. I'm comfortable in my own skin these days. It's so nice getting older and realizing you did quite well compared to a lot of those people you were trying to copy when you were younger, and besides that, life is not a contest where there is one set way to win. Each of us can win in our own different way. Anyway, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” was a phrase I went around saying for awhile trying to impress people with how much I had learned in college--strike that, at the World's Greatest University, thank you very much. I don't remember thinking about it more than twice since I was that 19-year-old full of myself, over 40 years ago. However, suddenly it came into my mind when I was looking in a tomato vine the other morning and saw one ripe tomato with five other green ones around it. I just googled and read the wikipedia entry, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory. Not surprisingly, everything I remembered about the phrase except the general idea was wrong. That was good, though, because for me in reference to the tomatoes it was a metaphor anyway. The general idea is a specific member of a species in development during its lifetime repeats stages of evolutionary development of the species it is a member of. The first thing I was thinking is the way these tomatoes, many different varieties, are all ripening one or two at a time shows one reason why cardboard tomatoes evolved. Think how many tomato vines a farmer would have to grow to get enough vine-ripened tomatoes to sell, when only one or two per vine ripen at once. There had to be a way to get them all to ripen at the same time in order for tomato-growing to become a profit-making enterprise. Enter hybridization to get types that ripened all at once, and at different times. Seeing these individual tomato vines still do the same thing they must have done hundreds of years ago in the wild, then later when gardeners were trying to grow enough to make meals for their families, and still later when farmers were trying to develop good businesses, is exciting. It makes me feel in brotherhood not only with Nature and the soil, but also with generations of people. That's strange, since the last thing I thought I wanted when I planted those tomatoes was to fit in in any way with people who developed cardboard tomatoes. Then I thought, besides not ripening all at once, these tomatoes are hard when they're green and soft when they get ripe. Of course that repeats how they were in history, so technology happened, to introduce something into the process so tomatoes could be harvested hard and put in stores soft. Gassing of various kinds and packing in protective packages naturally resulted. This morning I was tying up a vine and noticed how really fragrant it was. Not just the wonderful prolific yellow flowers. The green vines too have a distinctive pleasant smell like nothing else. These individual plants still have what their ancestors in evolution had to have to survive, even though a fragrant smell of the plants is not that important anymore. I would tie them up and make sure they got pollinated even if the plants smelled bad or had no smell because it is the fruit I am most interested in. In history, though, if the plants did not smell good, and certainly if they did not have the distinctive smell of tomatoes, the insects that took their nectar around from blossom to blossom did not come to those plants, so they died out. Now, with about 15 different types of tomato vines in our garden, all of them have the fragrant “tomato vine” smell. Then I started to wonder, how does growing tomatoes in a home garden lead to a different evolution in the future from the one in the past. And will it be better, and/or should we think of intervening in natural processes again the way people did in the past? Having the tomatoes not all ripen at once is actually a benefit. We can use two or three a day and not face a glut. (Interestingly enough, the reason we had these tomatoes is they were thrown away because there was a glut last summer, as there probably is every summer, so even with intervention in natural processes, the market has not solved that problem.) There may be a time when we have too many tomatoes for just our family to use fresh, so then we can make tomato juice and sauce out of the ones we can't eat. I even have a cookbook named Too Many Tomatoes, so there must be many other things to do ourselves with extras. If we ever have too many to use even those ways, hard to imagine, I love them so much, we can give them away—which will make us many friends, a good thing--or sell them, making us a little extra money, another good thing. Dealing with recapitulation of the hard then soft process with these individual tomatoes is easy because we are dealing with a small scale and growing in a place that does not have frosts. We can just wait for hard tomatoes to ripen. That's a lot cheaper and less scary—what do those gases do to human organs, what do workers applying gases have to face in side effects years from now, etc.?--than gassing tomatoes. It's also a lot less wasteful and harmful to the environment than wrapping each tomato in something usually plastic. Having fragrant tomato vines and flowers—even though we don't need insects to pollinate tomatoes as much as wild tomatoes did—is a nice bonus. We can close our eyes and smell the garden even sitting on a couch in our enclosed patio space almost 100 feet away. It is wonderful. Another thing I've started to think about evolution is people say don't plant supermarket seeds of any kind because the fruits are hybrids so what you get will not be true to the fruit you liked. When I was planting these seeds, I had not eaten any of the tomatoes. They were all overripe and thrown away when I found them. However, I knew from years—no, decades--of eating such tomatoes that they would not taste like tomatoes of my childhood if I had eaten them. I did not want them to be true to what was being sold! Our experience so far in planting and harvesting a variety of supermarket fruit seeds shows evolution can undo harm. Moreover, if people are worried about losing biodiversity, maybe besides going to all the trouble of saving and planting heirloom seeds, they could just trust Nature to revert to heirloom types or maybe create something even better. My eyes, taste buds, nose and brain tell me it just might work. Hallelujah! - 30 -

Making a Fence Extension Panel from Recycled Wine Bottles and Bed Frames, Part 1

Brenda Barnes, Home Grown Food Network President March 3, 2008 Yesterday I finally started on the recycled wine bottle and bed frame fence panels. What fun! It's already looking beautiful. I'll post some work-in-progress pictures with the final installment of this. Also, since as I usually do, I forgot to take “Before” pictures—in this case, the materials not put together and tools—I have more of all of them so I'll take a faux “Before” picture and post that as well. We have a 30” redwood picket fence that was here when we bought the house. We also have a landlord from Pleasantville and a land lease that says anything affixed to the land becomes the landowner's when we leave (a “fixtures clause”). Fixtures clauses are pretty typical, but most of you probably don't have a landlord who has hated everything you have done, without exception, so you wouldn't be so sure as we are that whatever you left would be destroyed overnight. With a celebration party. Making these wine bottle panels is quite a lot of work, though, and I can see already they are works of art. Therefore, even if you think your landlord would leave it up for posterity after you moved, you probably want to make it removable as I wanted to. I got the idea from a Rodale Press book named Adam Wade on Affordable Housing from the 80s. It's funny, I was reading the book waiting in a line or something one day, and put it down and forgot where I put it. Then months later I wanted to start on the recycled wine bottle fence panel. I automatically googled the project with all the search terms I could think of and never found anything. Finally, an hour or so later—an eternity for a web search—I remembered it was in a book. How quaint! I'm scanning the page where the description and picture appear and attaching that to this. You'll see the panel Adam Wade describes is in a studio wall and made of wood frame and mortar to keep the recycled wine bottles in. I didn't want to use anything combustible, since there are different rules about things built to the property line compared to things three feet or more inside it, and these fences are on the property lines. (All other tenants here—including the owner and his manager—have wood fences built to the property lines, but because we are being discriminated against for some reason still to be determined in litigation, we have to follow rules no one else follows, so we have to use non-combustible materials. Besides, you don't want your art pieces to burn, so when it is out there exposed to the elements—including some vicious people in some places—the way a fence is, I think it is better to use non-combustible materials.) Therefore, I found some metal bed headboards and footboards to use for frames. They have a curved top I'll leave open for decoration, and the frame of the headboards is 45” from bottom of the legs to the part of the top I'll cover with wine bottles. So added to the 30” fence we're going to attach it to with wire, that makes 75”, and the Code allows a 6' fence without a permit, so that allows 3” for attaching the feet of the frames to the 30” base. It probably will take more than that to make it sturdy, so I'm thinking we'll attach two 1 x 10s with screws to the top of the fence base, and then wire the extension panels to that. (That makes the base combustible, and it has spaces in it anyway where the amazingly snoopy management here can bend down and look through, so we'll stucco that later. As I said, everyone else has wood, but we know a notice to comply with the rules would come to us if we left the fence bases wood after we attached these “unusual” extensions to them. Our landlords like brown and wood, things they are used to. Not anything we do, that's for sure.) It turned out the metal bed frames were good for another reason besides being non-combustible. They also have cross-pieces in the design that can be used to attach the wine bottles all the way across, adding stability and making attaching easier than having to depend just on frame edges. I thought copper wire to attach the wine bottles to the frame would be beautiful, but when I got to Home Depot it came only in 18 gauge, which is too hard to work with for all the bending around curved and circular things wine bottles require. It also cost the same for 50' as 20 gauge galvanized cost for 175'. Besides, there were signs up everywhere saying copper cannot be returned without a receipt, which made me remember billboards up about turning in people who steal copper wire. I don't know if there is danger anyone would go to all the trouble it would be to steal copper wire that had been twisted and cut over and over, but avoiding theft was the third reason to choose galvanized 20 gauge wire instead. I laid the frame on a big craft table we had put up in the “family recreation room” we made by enclosing the awning area where our carport used to be, and Peter dug out 20 wine bottles we've been saving in the workshop. They are mostly Corbet Canyon green 1.5L Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Chardonnay wine bottles with a distinctive semi-square bottom going up to a wider rounder midsection and then the narrow round neck with a flat lip. Really pretty. Peter and I do not drink, but my son and his wife own a coffeehouse and live music cafe in Joshua Tree that serves beer and wine. They recycle, but wine bottles are not recyclable, so we started recycling and saving them years ago. We'll have to get more methodical now that we're actually doing the fence panels because I used almost all we had in one frame. We'll need at least 10 frames to extend all our fences to 6'. I got a long phone call after I had attached the first two wine bottles to the metal bed frame. As I stood there looking at it while I was talking, I realized even after I used lots of wire attaching the wine bottles to that good frame, the bottles were still going to move out of place when I turned it over to attach from the other side, as the Rodale Press book said the man who did the studio walls had done with mortar. So I thought I should put something more solid to keep them in place. First I thought welded fence, but when I looked at that it seemed too hard to straighten and work with, so we ended up using chicken wire. Peter and I stretched and cut a length big enough to extend from side to side, and attached it to the underside with wire, right side up, at both sides of the frame. Then I started attaching the wine bottles to both the chicken wire and the headboard frame with the galvanized wire. It made them really solid. I realized as I was going along that starting in the middle and doing every other one first is easier than going from one side to the other the way I had started to do, and of course I got better as I went along. So I almost finished the first side of the first frame in less than two hours. I'm hoping not to have to put a length of chicken wire on the front side to keep the wine bottles in place, since it looks better with the bottles more visible. There also are spaces between the bottles where the man with the studio walls filled in with mortar but I don't want to use that, so I'm going to try some resin with artificial flowers embedded and see how that works and looks. I used pliers and wire cutters, but I should have worn gloves, so it turned out well to have a night's sleep to allow the pricks in my hands to heal. More on this after I get time to finish the fence panel and take the pictures. - 30 -

Perennial Tomatoes, continued

Brenda Barnes, Home Grown Food Network President This morning at 8:30 I went out to sing to our tomatoes. They seem to like it. There are one semi-red and about 20 green tomatoes on 30 vines, each different. There also are at least 200 flowers. This is the first time I have actually grown tomatoes more than once, for only one season. I thought about it for over 30 years, but mostly the only things I actually grew were perennials like citrus and avocado trees and artichokes. I studied Permaculture and natural farming, but mostly I was living the typical city life where there was no time or space to grow anything. Even myself, I see now. I started thinking about growing tomatoes, the first time I remember, in my mid-20s, newly divorced, trying to cover by myself payments a couple chose. I was a teacher and started moonlighting bikini cocktail waitressing three nights a week in topless bars around my home in Manhattan Beach, California. It was awful as a lifestyle, but the money was ten times more than I had made at answering services and such, the only other places with night part-time jobs. The hours were also shorter, so I could get more sleep. It was unlikely parents of my Compton high school students would happen in to see me and jeopardize my career. So for a few years that's how I made ends meet. The places were sleazy then. I saw on Oprah the other day, now women can do such work in “gentlemen's clubs” with lockers to protect your things, dressing rooms, change of costumes, real uptown stuff. Where I worked it was not at all like that, and not many gentlemen came in. So I kept trying a new place. There were lots. No resume was needed to start working the night I applied. As I went in at dusk to about the tenth place, I noticed a straggling tomato vine growing by the sidewalk. It hit me I had seen tomato vines around most other places I had worked. Then it really hit me--drunks staggering out at two a.m. must have thrown up remains of cheeseburgers and beer at all those places, and tomato vines grew. I almost threw up then, myself. When I recovered I started thinking, if a drunk doing nothing but throwing up can grow tomato vines, it must be pretty easy. Thirty years later I actually tried it (not throwing up—planting tomatoes), and I put in just about as little effort as the drunks. We grew all kinds of tomatoes from seed in deep lovely redwood planters Peter built for our balcony in Santa Monica. The tomatoes and experience of food growing were great, but we moved before planting time the next year. Later when I drove by even the planters were gone. Years later we tried again. Results are not straggling. Instead, our tomato vines are the most prolific I have ever seen. We ate five great tomatoes since I squashed overripe ones from produce store dumpsters around soaker hoses on soil, one 110 degree day in the desert, last July. Since then, as I have written before here, all I did is tie vines up (with recyclables such as bird cages, metal and plastic shelving unit parts, abandoned real estate sign frames, and twisty-ties from other thrown away vegetables). Where we put those tomatoes seems perfect for perennial ones. I am so happy. All I do other than keep vines up is sing and pull a weed once in awhile. Weeds I put back as mulch, since they have no seeds when they're little, so there has been no waste and absolutely no expense except very little water, for this beautiful perennial tomato patch. The garden is so charming. It's a little 10' x 50' spot of heaven. Peter put a sports chair out there so we can sit and meditate or whatever. The other day, just for fun, I put out two Halloween scarecrows I had found. I've never seen birds there, although I know they were there because there is millet growing, and the only place I've seen millet—I didn't even know what it was—is in a neighbor's garden about half a block away. I asked him after I saw it growing, and he said he plants it for birds, so I left it growing too. Right after I put the scarecrows up, I found a many-colored tea pot made of wood glued to an upside-down terra cotta pot, and a planter with dried real red roses. “The universe rises up to meet you” when you take action. I wanted decorations; I got them. When we came back from two weeks in New Orleans last July after I had squashed tomatoes and left them thrown on the ground, when there were little seedling tomato plants growing, I wrote I didn't care if we never got one tomato, it was such a miracle those plants would grow themselves. Now I love having tomatoes and the experiment turn out to have fruit, so I don't know what I was thinking then. Of course the basic purpose of growing food plants is to have food. However, having food grow organically and easily is key. I think people want to grow their own food but get discouraged by what “experts” say you have to do, and don't start. Test soil pH is my favorite. Soils west of the Mississippi are alkaline. Soils east are acidic. I'm sure there is a general rule of thumb for other countries. Go from there. Most plants are not picky. If you must grow a picky one, work. If you just want to grow tomatoes, though, our experience shows, as Nike says, Just Do It. March 1, 2008

Catching Rainwater

Brenda Barnes, February 22, 2008 I read a lecture by Bill Mollison, the inventor of Permaculture, saying in the desert there is an average rainfall of ten inches a year, which means it doesn't rain for two years and then in the third year it rains 30 inches. That's how they figure the average of ten inches a year, which does not even begin to give an idea of what you have to do to live in partnership with Nature in a desert. Here it is even more crucial than in other places that rainwater be caught and used. That is because of erosion and other devastation rain can cause in the desert, in addition to the facts that everywhere rainwater is a free resource, and floods and polluted water flowing to oceans are problems we can solve by using rain. One of the ways Mollison suggests saving rainwater is building and using swales. These are shallowish, maybe three to 10 feet deep, five to 10 feet wide, trenches dug across the flow line of land, half or more filled with pebbles and bigger rocks, with trees planted on the sides. Planting across natural flow lines naturally limits erosion. Those long jagged gouges you see on bare mountain sides, such as where there has been a wildfire lately—lines that look like huge varicose veins—are caused by water running straight down. The same thing to a lesser degree happens when water runs across more shallow terrain, so digging swales across natural flow lines in and of itself slows down flow. Then putting pebbles and rocks into the trench allows water to percolate through, stopping and slowing even greater amounts of water. A side benefit is rocks purify percolating water. Then planting trees along the sides allows roots both to stabilize the soil, and also to go down deep and use collected water. After trees grow, they also shade the swale, reducing evaporation of water and heat reflection. After years, even water tables are affected. We visited Village Homes in Davis, California, where 50 years ago low-income housing was built on arid desert land with swales and edible landscaping such as Mollison later described. Now there are streams on the surface! Years ago watering trees became unnecessary. Side benefits are just amazing, when you realize it started as only flood– and erosion-control. Now houses there cost more than in upscale subdivisions. Ironic. Another way to save and use rainwater is to plan so rain naturally waters where you need it. Gutters can be aimed at plants or pebble-filled areas around them, to catch water running off roofs and put it where it will be used. As with swales, pebbles slow down water so it won't flood. Rain barrels can be put out to catch even more, with a runoff valve to divert the first polluted portion. We usually have so little rain that it would be a waste to set up such a system, so we have portable rainbarrels we move into place during heavy rains. Normally, just aiming toward our planting beds is enough. Porous materials on soil, mulch, and overhead vines also stop and use rain. We put in used brick for all our walkways, and gravel driveways. When I see puddling after a rain, I put in more gravel or fill in that space with soil and plant something there. Mulch all over every plantbed stops small rains, just as it conserves water we apply from soaker hoses when it is not raining. I have never seen a snail or slug here—a benefit of desert living—so we don't have to worry as I did in Los Angeles about keeping plant stems open, but from habit I still leave a three-inch radius around, just in case some bad bugs would climb up plants directly from mulch. Overhead vines stop rain and let it drip slowly off leaves, so walkways and plantbeds can absorb water instead of being flooded. Rain is great in the garden when used properly.

Ultra Low Cost housing Part 1

Blog: What Demonstrating Ultra-Low Cost Housing Can Mean, Part I Brenda Barnes, February 4, 2008 For the last 16 years, my husband Peter and I have been getting closer and closer to demonstrating how people can build really nice, big, comfortable, beautiful houses for less than $20,000. For the last three, we have been remodeling a $7,500 mobile home we bought in December 2004 in Desert Hot Springs, California, five miles north of Palm Springs. I've found it interesting—though sad--this has showed us many forces do not want people to produce their own low-cost housing. The mobile home is in a park. I now know that is enough for anyone who knows what goes on in America—and maybe more of the world, but all I know well is America—to know the landlord would object to our not having expensive, new housing. I had no idea. One would think after 20 years of dealing with landlords in all kinds of ways I would have had some idea they would want tenants to all live in white, new houses, but honestly, I had no idea. The first thing that happened, when we had been here only two months, was a Sunday afternoon the owner and son came to our door and said we had to get rid of our dog or leave the park. Amazing. I had called before I even came to look here, to be sure there was no restriction about dogs, since ours weighs about 70 pounds and is a purebred American bulldog. (That's another thing I didn't know. I thought our dog was a mutt we had rescued. A breeder saw him in my car soon after we moved here and offered me $1,500 cash for him, even without papers. We love him, though. He's not for sale.) Anyway, our application had disclosed our dog, so we just ignored them and never heard another word about that. Then, however, we noticed we'd come home from work about once a week and find things changed in our yards: trees pruned, plants removed, things moved around, the soil raked. I had had two whackos in a row try to evict me (Peter too the second time), and although they both ended up paying us well for it—I am, after all, a retired real estate lawyer who graduated in the top 10% from a Top Ten law school, and what they did to us was so illegal—I didn't want to go through it again. I remembered the lease we signed, which we never got a copy of, said one must get approval to remodel a house. I turned in a many-paged request to change our house, in part by building fences, enclosing porch and carport, and putting in gardens with arbors. I thought the drawings and details might hide that we were trying to keep him out of here without confronting him directly. He returned my plans in about a week and said we could do whatever we wanted as long as we got any permits we needed from the County. Peter has a master's degree in urban planning from Cambridge, and is a member of the American Planning Association, so he knew we did not need permits to do any of that work except the last parts, years away. He asked a friend—how nice! the head planner for the County!--who agreed. I checked with the planning department at every step. However, from Day 1 we have had nothing but trouble, although we did exactly what the owner had said was OK. Over and over we get notices we are supposedly violating rules of the park and laws. The latest one said we had an unregistered car parked here, definitely against the rules of any park. My car was 25 days overdue but it goes about 15 miles an hour now, so we hadn't been driving it and had forgotten. Besides getting the registration that day, I went out and took pictures of seven cars with 2005 registrations parked here, one 2007, and the MANAGER'S car registered in Kentucky, when he works in California, so that's illegal. Funny. I'm sure only we got a notice. Wonder why? I'm afraid the truth is if you try to show people can live well and cheaply, some people hate you. (home)

Growing Tomatoes in the Desert

Brenda Barnes, February 3, 2008 Our charity promotes edible landscaping, ultra low cost owner-produced housing, and use of renewable energy. For the past three years, we have been experimenting with all of these at our mobile home in Desert Hot Springs. We bought it for $7,500 in December of 2004, and have spent next to nothing but our work tripling the usable size, making the yard fertile and productive with food, and starting on biodiesel, using passive solar energy, and investigating residential windmills. The most interesting results of the experiments with edible landscaping so far are what has happened with the tomatoes. Last June I squeezed about 30 overripe ones of all kinds—beefsteaks, medium-sized salad tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, and grape tomatoes, all red--which I had found in dumpsters at organic farmers' markets and other markets in town. I just spread the fresh seeds, pulp, and skins all over soaker hoses in our west side yard, 10 feet wide and 50 feet long. It was 110 in the shade, and there was little shade there, just on the east side in the morning from our house, and on the west side in the afternoon from our neighbor's house. In the middle there was never any. Then we went to our granddaughter's national AAU basketball tournament near New Orleans and stayed an extra week to visit my parents and see NOLA. It was very educational seeing what little had been done in two years since Katrina, but still, it was great fun. There is nothing like the music, food, and culture of New Orleans, even after Katrina. And to know we were helping the economy there by having a great time—priceless. When we got back, it was still 110 in the nonexistent shade. How amazing, there were tiny little tomato seedlings all along the soaker hoses! They germinated all by themselves. Since then, I still have done next to nothing with them, and they have continued to be amazing. I tied growing vines up onto whatever I could recycle to get them off the ground and make a walkway in the center. Old pieces of chicken wire I found, an extra hose caddy, frames of thrown-away real estate signs, pieces of broken plastic pegboards. I tied vines to them with recycled vegetable twisty-ties, from dumpsters, too. I fixed two leaks making puddles in one place and too little water at others, to make the soil moist but not wet, and mulched with lettuce trimmings. Other than that, nothing. In the middle of December, I harvested four medium-sized ones that tasted like tomatoes did when I was a child. Firm, meaty, a little juicy, and totally tomato-y. I ate them from my hand, like apples. Not like those red things that just look like tomatoes I have been eating for 40 years, trying to get back to a real tomato, which I could not do even when I grew them or bought at farmers' markets. No matter how drugs have turned on an addict and don't work anymore, he still remembers how they were at first and keeps trying to get that feeling back. I was that way with tomatoes, and my memory has finally been rewarded. Picked ripe off the vine and eaten right then, tomatoes really are tomatoes. At Christmas I took four large green ones to my grandchildren to experience fried green tomatoes. Now there are 20 more green ones, all different sizes and types, and lots of flowers. I'm waiting impatiently for them to ripen on the vines. How strange to have the growing season totally reversed from what I'm used to in Mediterranean California. I'm anxious to see if that sheltered area will result in perennial tomatoes. I saw perennial ones on a porch at Pismo Beach years ago, and more recently in a yard in Santa Monica, but I never thought it might be possible in the desert. What a great life!