GROWING YOUR FOOD ON A CITY LOT

Jules Dervaes and his family started growing food on their standard city lot (1/10th of an acre) in Pasadena, California – because they needed the food. That was about 10 years ago.

Now they produce record “crops” from their home garden, over 7 tons of produce in 2010. They did it even with the usual asphalt driveway, and even a bunch of cement in the back yard.

You will hear how container gardening can be mixed with in-ground to find just the right conditions for each plant. How to save water and weeding by the way you plant. Some tips on keeping the garden alive during high heat waves. That is surely necessary knowledge as global warming develops.

In fact, this year of 2011 was a real challenge for Jules and his three adult children. There was a long period of heat and poor growing conditions in California, and even experienced gardeners are struggling. The Dervaes family will still feed itself handsomely, but they may not have the extra income they hoped for selling the extras to organic restaurants. Nature is always teaching us how to adapt.

Jules has a wealth of knowledge, which the family freely shares on their various web sites.

Start out with their main page at: urbanhomestead.org

Read the family daily blog at: littlehomesteadinthecity.org

The Dervaes family also runs a store at: urbanhomesteadsupply.com

Or find people in your area through the social network at:
freedomgardens.org

And finally, for those who want to talk about raising chickens, bees, or larger animals in the city, try: barnyardsandbackyards.org

Lots to chew on there! Everybody should hear this interview with Jules, to know your prospects for feeding yourself or family, should the need arise. Self-sufficiency is coming to the city.

From http://www.ecoshock.info/2011/09/growing-through-storm.html

Cooking with edible flowers can seem difficult. In addition to growing them (or finding a reliable, not-too-expensive purveyor), there’s also knowing which blossoms can be used, and how. But the effort involved is so rewarding. “A cake is a cake until you put roses on it–then it’s a work of art,” says Jules Dervaes, owner of Urban Homestead in Pasadena, Calif., whose attempt at edible landscaping 15 years ago turned into a thriving business that supplies edible flowers to local restaurants and caterers. These easy, eye-catching recipes will inspire you to start scattering petals and artfully arranging blooms in your dishes all summer long.

[...]

Tending your edible garden

Like any crop, edible flowers have to be cared for to keep them unblemished and pest-free. Jules Dervaes shares his growing tips.

1. AVOID GETTING BLOOMS WET. Water can cause wilting and spotting when it comes in direct contact with the petals. Water a plant at its base, or keep delicate flowers, just as pansies and primroses, in self-watering containers.

2. SPRITZ TO CLEAN. “You should not get edible flowers too wet or spin them dry in a salad spinner, so we use a spray bottle to remove dirt,” Dervaes explains.

3. STAY AHEAD OF PESTS. “When you garden organically, the possibility of pests is part of the process,” says Dervaes. His tools for pest reduction? A spray bottle of water or a cotton swab to knock aphids off plants, or organic sprays, such as hot pepper wax. If plants become overrun, it’s better to take them out and start over than have the bugs infest the entire garden.

Vegetarian Times, June 2011, pages 68-72

Tough economic times and environmental uncertainty inspire a new generation of urban back-to-the-landers.

Tele Darden’s domestic priorities are to feed her family, then make sure they are warm and comfortable. Most people would do this by going first to the grocery store, then the mall, and once home, turning up the thermostat. For Darden, however, this means growing her family’s food in the backyard of their Parkville Cape Cod; learning to knit, weave, and sew their clothing; and, eventually, warming their home with a wood-burning stove—all the better to heat a kettle of homegrown herbal tea sweetened with honey from the bees she plans to keep in the back yard.

The rise of the DIY movement over the past couple of years has rendered such hardcore home-ec projects increasingly unremarkable. During one recent February brunch at Clementine, a Hamilton restaurant known for its locally sourced menu, it was possible to overhear conversations from nearby tables about wintertime organic gardening, installing rain barrels, and lamenting the four-bird limit for keeping city chickens. Any one of these undertakings could be daunting. There are, however, people who do all this, all at once, and much more—all on their tiny city or suburban lots. They are city kids gone country, hipsters turned hippies. They are urban homesteaders, right here in Charm City.

“Urban farming is getting a lot of attention right now, but urban homesteading goes far beyond growing food,” says Jules Dervaes, a Pasadena, California-based urban homesteader who is commonly viewed as the movement’s patriarch. “Homesteading also encompasses rainwater capture, gray water reuse, reliance on alternative energy and fuels, extensive recycling, small animal husbandry … The most underutilized space in America is the backyard.”

Perhaps true for many, but not the Dervaes household: Last year, he and his three children harvested over 7,000 pounds of food (from more than 350 varieties of vegetables, herbs, fruits, and berries) from their 1/10th-acre yard just blocks from the Rose Bowl stadium. In addition to annually producing 95 percent of their own comestibles, the Dervaes family also runs the Web’s oldest and most comprehensive urban homesteading site, urbanhomestead.org. “We used to spend 90 percent of our time on homesteading activities and 10 percent online,” Dervaes says. “Now over 50 percent of our time is spent helping people looking to start their own setups.”

Here in Baltimore, the lack of jobs has been a driver. “It was economy driven, totally—we were all in different trades, and we all lost our jobs,” says Allison Guitard, one of the founders of the Baltimore Free Farm, a Hampden-based collective featuring a group house, urban farm plots, and a warehouse space to house their burgeoning community-building activities. “We didn’t even realize there was a homesteading movement until we just started doing it ourselves.”

The Free Farm’s twelve full-time members, all in their twenties or early thirties, joined forces just over a year ago and labored mightily to transform three vacant city lots into attractively terraced hillside gardens that produced enough food for the collective members to feed themselves last summer, with extra to give away. In true self-reliant homesteading spirit, the Free Farmers specialize in creative reuse of materials. The group heats their shared house by wood stove, burning scrub wood left over from clearing the garden and scrap wood scavenged from construction; Free Farm member Mike Grabinski has even rendered lye from the stove’s ashes, which the group plans to combine with tallow donated by Woodberry Kitchen to make homemade soap.

Why would young people invest such back-breaking labor transforming such a forgotten corner of the city into a productive homestead, when there are emptied-out towns in the Midwest literally paying young families to move there and establish farms? “In the country there are already tons of farms,” Guitard says. “We want to grow free or low-cost food for people here who can’t afford or even find fresh vegetables.”

Besides, says Free Farm member Billy Thomas, “Cities are where the people are. If you want to change the dominant paradigm, this is where you start.”

Homesteading in the city makes sense pragmatically as well as philosophically. A core principal of homesteading is supporting yourself via home-based business, and “here, you’re living in the middle of your market,” says Denzel Mitchell. He operates Five Seeds Farm, a city-based community-supported agriculture program that provides food for a dozen CSA members as well as his own family. He farms a vacant lot across from the Belair-Edison home he shares with his wife and five children—and, out back, four beehives and twenty-two fruit trees. He strives to live as independently and off the land as possible, even foraging wild foods from Herring Run Park.

The renewed homesteading movement is urban-based, Denzel observes, in part because tenets of sustainability and self-sufficiency crucial to the homesteading philosophy are already in place in cities: the ability to walk or bike to destinations, for example, or use public transportation. Mainly though, says the man now teaching two younger farmers to grow on vacant city lots, it’s because, “There’s land available here, affordably or even free, as the inner cities have emptied themselves out.”

There is another force driving this movement. Celine Manekin, a 24-year-old Park School alumna freshly graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in environmental science, is starting a small CSA in her parents’ Cockeysville backyard. She is drawn to agriculture because, she says, her college courses repeatedly presented a “worst-case scenario” for the planet’s future. In the face of these grim prognostications, “I just really want to know how to feed myself and the people I care about, and eventually be able to teach others as well,” she says.

This is a conviction familiar to Jules Dervaes from his seat on the front lines of the urban homestead movement. “This next generation is going to have to shoulder a huge burden,” he says. “When I was their age, we had acid rain. These kids are facing global tilt, polar shift, melting ice caps, global weirding, and depleted resources, and social upheaval from the resultant declining food production worldwide.

“In the face of all that, I really admire the upcoming generation’s combination of positivity and pragmatism,” Dervaes says. “Instead of miring down in hopelessness, they’re getting down to work.”

http://www.urbanitebaltimore.com/baltimore/by-their-compost-heaps-ye-shall-know-them/Content?oid=1390843

[...]

But some city farmers remain undaunted. Jules Dervaes, an urban homesteader in Pasadena, Calif., lives on a fifth of an acre with his three adult children, eight ducks, eight chickens, three beehives, two cats, composting worms and a tank of tilapia. In 2006, he added two goats to the menagerie, and he quickly came to appreciate their cat-like intelligence, dog-like personalities and general adorableness, despite the management they require.

“I’ve lost a citrus tree, a mango tree, wood off the house, five or six brooms,” said Mr. Dervaes, 63. “We’ve had to protect our investment more than we ever did with chickens or ducks. In a city, where there’s not much forage and your place is compact, man, they can go through the trees and bushes like nothing.”

Making the best of it, he tacked chicken wire around his tree trunks and against the wooden garage where the goats live, to deter their chewing. In the absence of nearby medical services, his daughter Jordanne, 27, stocked up on veterinary books and learned how to do basic care like deworming, which involves examining feces and administering parasite-killing medicine and herbs. For alfalfa hay, Mr. Dervaes drives 25 miles round trip to equestrian stables in Los Angeles.

He also recently created Barnyards and Backyards, a social networking site for urbanites raising livestock to connect with their more knowledgeable rural counterparts for advice. Still, he sometimes wonders if his metropolitan goats might be better suited elsewhere.

“In the end,” Mr. Dervaes said with a note of resignation, “maybe we’ll have to move to the country.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/dining/23goats.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

Fresh vegetables, herbs, honey and new eggs every day; Jules and his family are living the farm life. It’s also a most unconventional lifestyle given that their home is in the middle of Pasadena, California. The family struggles to be as self-sustainable as they possibly can—their car drives on biogas, solar panels power their television, and each day they have fresh food from their own meticulously well-maintained crops.

Jules first began his farming life before moving to Pasadena, when he lived for several years in New Zealand. Jules embarked on his current lifestyle after becoming concerned about how the food industry controlled what he and his family ate. Jules wanted to be more in control and minimize his family’s impact on the environment.

Living this lifestyle doesn’t mean that you have to be old fashioned. After a day working on his urban-farm lot, Jules and the rest of the family sit down to watch movies on Netflix or work on one of their many websites. The Devraes family websites center around the idea of living a greener life, and are some of the biggest websites/communities about urban farming. It’s a growing movement; and a green revolution!

Created by Nicholas Reid & Joris Debeij

http://www.iamlosangeles.com/2011/01/01/jules-dervaes-%E2%80%93-a-greener-living-for-an-urban-family/

It’s using your yard for more than just grass. That useless, stubborn weed.

One family in Pasadena, Calif., took this idea and ran with it. Nearly every nook and cranny of their yard sprouts something edible. Last year, they grew more than 4,000 pounds [correction: more than 5,000 pounds] of food, including fruits, vegetables, herbs, eggs, milk, honey and more. And they live within a stone’s throw of Pasadena’s bustling shopping district.

Check out the video to catch a glimpse of their rural city life, which they’ve dubbed: Urban Homesteading. Sit back and meet Anais, Justin, Jordanne and their father, Jules, who pioneered this movement decades ago.

My 3-minute vid only scratches the surface of the plethora of skills and talents this family puts to work. They’ve had tons of press, but of course, there’s a lot more to them than can be told on camera or in an article.

For the record, Justin makes biodiesel for the family car from used restaurant kitchen grease; Anais cooks up all sorts of food-based products like soap and is an expert at canning; Jordanne is developing a special line of poultry feed to prevent common diseases; and Jules passed down his aesthetic eye to the whole family, who produces stunning, high-quality photography on a regular basis.

Plus, their website is a beautiful hand-coded work of art, filled with a plethora of well-written content, snazzy photos and personal anecdotes. Props to Jordanne for the self-taught design and development skills.

My favorite thing about this family (along with the fact that they’re really, really nice) is their do-it-yourself attitude. They seem to have skipped the gene for complaining. Or laziness. If they need something done, they seem to just go out and do it. I think they see it as a “duh” response to life.

So why do they live in the city? Jules says they’ve always wanted to move out to rural California, but land isn’t cheap. They’re looking to relocate to a bigger farm eventually, but for now, they’ll continue to be a novelty among city dwellers who don’t think twice about using up their plot of land for grass.

http://squaresyndrome.com/2010/12/city-farming-is-not-an-oxymoron/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdbFPkKeSRw

Anchor Val Zavala visits an urban farmer in Pasadena whose family-run farm allows them to harvest enough not only to feed themselves but also to sell to local restaurants.

RESOURCES:
Path to Freedom – Everything you want to know about urban homesteading, from the Dervaes Family.

http://www.kcet.org/shows/socal_connected/content/environment/growing-your-own.html

Radio City 96.7 & City Talk 105.9

[...]

I met a family that’s doing just that.

JULES DERVAES: Some more tomatoes here, we’re about 90% self-sufficient in the summertime because this is all our bounty.

Jules Dervaes lives in Los Angeles, right next to a major highway, but he’s turned his backyard garden into a farm.

JULES DERVAES: These are heirloom squash from Italy, and they hang from the trellis here. Just watch your head.

He’s got two daughters and a son.

REPORTER: How do you like this yourself?

MAN: I love what I do, so I can’t complain. I got a green thumb.

They grow 350 different fruits, vegetables, herbs and berries. They all survive on what’s grown here.

JULES DERVAES: This is our barnyard. It’s in the city, so we’ve got a nice little animal enclosure here. We’ve got five ducks, eight chickens and two goats.

And while I’m there looking at these goats and chickens, I can hear the traffic next door, whoof whoof up and down the highway, but you could be in the middle of the countryside.

JULES DERVAES: We’re looking at a planet that has run amok. So you have to be sensitive about which direction you’re going. If it’s going the wrong direction, it’s either you’re going to turn around early or you turn around at the edge of the cliff.
Come up here to our store on the front porch – Nice to meet you.

They obviously had a fear for the future too of what’s going to happen. But they’re going around it in a different way.

JULES DERVAES: This is a completely different dream, we’re talking about self-sufficiency, we’re talking about neighbourliness, we’re talking about a community of helping one another.

WOMAN: It has the herbs from the garden. And we’ve already made some ice-cream. Yeah we have a hand-cranked. It’s cool, yes, it works for us. But it’s a little scary because out there, it’s no. It’s, you know – you could actually forget about the bad things out there.

There seems to be this common strand running through America right now – A fear of the future, and a sense of doom. But I saw people responding in very different ways – from preparing to hide from change, to preparing to make change happen.

JULES DERVAES: So we figure we’re preparing ourselves to live simply. I mean this here is riches, but people don’t understand. If you look around, you’ll see riches here but it’s in the form of tomatoes and peppers and animals. So we’re going backwards, and I say a step backwards is progress.

Transcript: http://www.sbs.com.au/dateline/story/transcript/id/600742/n/Future-Fear

http://www.sbs.com.au/dateline/story/about/id/600742/n/Future-Fear