BRANCHING OUT:  When What’s Greener Isn’t the Grass

by Ramona Byron

OK, here’s a quick herbal IQ test for you:

1.      Which vastly underestimated, common yard plant is both a highly nutritious vegetable and one of the most powerful medicinal herbs?

2.      Which two common plants that you see along the sides of the roads are edible?

3.      Which downright ugly yard weeds can cure your hangover?

4.      Which pesky invasive plant has multiple uses as a disinfectant?

5.      Which so-called weed can be used to make a healing and soothing salve for your skin?

Yeah, I wouldn’t have got any of them right either – at least, not before yesterday. But I’m going to keep you in suspense by putting the answers at the end of this article (OK, I know you’re going to skip to that part right now, but promise you’ll come back – there’s more good stuff).

And by the way, the term “weed” is a very subjective one.  If you actually want a particular plant in your yard then it’s not a weed, no matter what the neighbors think.  [On the other hand, some city codes for yard maintenance might be less forgiving than your neighbors. ]

Yesterday (March 1, 2007) I attended part of an all-day event sponsored by San Diego Food Not Lawns (http://www.sdfoodnotlawns.com/) , a group that encourages us to tear out our useless, expensive, non-productive, resource-and-time-consuming grass lawns, and create a naturescape of beautiful and nutritious plants there instead.  And if you don’t have a grass lawn, then they can tell you how to grow edible plants and herbs on your patio, balcony, or roof.  They can also tell you about composting your kitchen waste and raising worms (for fun, not profit).  These people are serious.

Hey, I’m onboard.  I’ve always hated grass.  I resent the time it takes to water it, fertilize it, weed it, and pamper it.  No matter how much effort I put in, my lawn was never the greenest in any neighborhood where I’ve lived; in fact, mine has always been one of those that make the neighbors feel superior about theirs.  Grass made a lot more sense for lordly manors, back in the days when there were serfs to do the constant maintenance that is required.  But since in these democratic times I will have to do it myself, I wholeheartedly agree that all that effort could be expended on something far more worthwhile than grass.

The first keynote speaker for yesterday’s event was Michele Simon, author of the book Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Health and How to Fight Back.  Ms. Simon quickly dispelled the two favorite myths of the American food industry:  that we have the safest food supply in the world; and that we have the cheapest food supply in the world.  The latest e-coli scare was enough to prove that our food supply isn’t all that safe.  And there are a lot of hidden costs of our food in tax subsidies (that’s YOUR tax money being siphoned into the deep pockets of the multi-billion dollar agri-businesses, in case you didn’t know), health consequences, waste disposal needs, and environmental pollution that cause our actual cost of food to be much higher than what we are paying at the check-out counter.  

Ms. Simon confirmed what I have suspected for a long time:  the corporate food industry is not our friend.  I wrote at length about this some time ago in a column titled “Seeds of Rebellion” for the Voice of San Diego, at http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2005/06/20/regional_talk/import-244.txt.

There were a lot of workshops scheduled for this San Diego Food Not Lawns event, but since the immutable laws of physics forbade me from being in more than one place at a time, I could only attend two in the morning and one in the afternoon.  So of course, those will be the ones that I’ll tell you about.

The first workshop that I attended was “Peak Oil and the 100-Mile Diet” which was presented by a local farmer, Barry Logan, of La Milpa Organica Farm.  Do you know how few people in the U.S. are farmers these days?  Only about 1%, that’s how few.  I haven’t talked face-to-face with a real farmer since I was a child.  It was almost like having a “close encounter of the third kind” with a space alien.

Mr. Logan talked about peak oil – something that I know a bit about, what with being married to Mike and all.  Mr. Logan pointed out, as Mike did in Infinity’s Rainbow, that our petroleum-based, agri-business-dominated food supply is extremely vulnerable to collapse when the oil runs out, which it seems to be about to do.  The “100-Mile Diet” is what we should strive for:  to replace our 3,000-mile, extremely petroleum-dependent, calorie-laden, non-nutritious diets with 100-mile, locally grown, tasty, and very nutritious ones.  Yum.  Makes sense to me. 

Mr. Logan says that a high standard of living is defined as having “shiny stuff and lots of money” for which you labor long hours and miss out on spending time with your family; but that “quality of life” is based on close and warm personal relationships, having time to relax with them and do things you enjoy, and “how good your food tastes.” 

Sounding like a modern-day Moses, Mr. Logan commanded us: “Turn off your TV, get off your ass, and plant something!”

I couldn’t find a webpage for La Milpa Organica Farm.  I imagine that Mr. Logan is so busy with keeping up a 20-acre farm and supplying various stores and restaurants, that he doesn’t have time to do a webpage or a blog – which is just another reason to suspect him of being a space alien in these days, I suppose.  But here’s a link to a CityBeat article about the farm and about Mr. Logan:  http://www.sdcitybeat.com/article.php?id=5048&atype.

The second workshop that I attended was about creating an edible landscape instead of a lawn in front of your house.  In true liberal fashion, I arrived late to this workshop and so I have to apologize that I didn’t catch the name of the presenter.  I’ll try to rectify that and update this post later.

The presenter showed slides of his front yard, and even though it was very productive and utilitarian, it also was strikingly beautiful.  He had tall and short plants combined, nice color combinations, flowers to attract local birds and insects, as well as combinations of plants that nurture each other.  He encouraged us to think in three dimensions when planting, instead of just one low, flat plane like the grass that you’re replacing; and to plant in boxes as well as using tall and short plants.  His front-yard little farm looked like a place that you would want to spend a lot of time in, even if it was just weeding. 

But speaking of weeds, he doesn’t diss weeds the way that the rest of us have been taught to do.  He says that they also add value to the soil, and he mostly leaves them where they are.  Not so for gophers—he has a zero tolerance code for those.   He likens it to dealing with pests inside your house – you just do what you have to do, however unpleasant it may be.  I can relate.  Bugs in my house don’t get a second chance.

The third workshop that I attended was about herbal medicine.  The presenter, John Finch, was a delight.  I have rarely heard someone speak who kept the audience so entertained.  It was from Mr. Finch that I got the valuable information about those plants in my front yard that I had previously considered to be weeds. 

Mr. Finch showed us the basics of preparing teas, infusions, tinctures, and decoctions.  But the main thing that I learned was that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and that if I want to know more about herbology, I’d better sign up for some classes.  Mr. Finch teaches classes in San Diego, and I’m sure his would be loads of fun.

In the breaks, I went to every booth that was there and gathered everything that they were offering.  I got info on worm farming, composting, organic farming, and more.  I also got some free seeds (well, I made a $1 donation for them) and a free lunch (who said there’s no such thing?).

The evening keynote speaker was Delores Huerta, who was one of the organizers of the famous UFW grape boycott – that was way back when unionizing was actively discouraged by employers and governments that used brutal force.  Of course, nowadays they’re much more civilized, and so they just fire all their pro-union workers and move their jobs to China.  That’s what counts as progress these days.

But I missed Ms. Huerta’s talk because I gotta be home when it gets to be 8:00 p.m., and my attention span plummets after 7:00 anyway.  If anybody wants to talk to me or at me, they’d better do it before 5:00.  [Hey Mike, take a note.]

So now I’m all inspired.  Today, as I make my gigantic week-long salad for taking to work, I’ll keep the cuttings and compostable waste and put it in the back yard with some dead leaves, and give Mike instructions on how to keep it wet when he’s watering the trees, shrubs and potted plants in the back yard.  By the way, his large African tortoises long ago took care of the de-grassification of the back yard.  Unfortunately, they also will eat any vegetable plants that I might put back there, so if we are going to have a food garden, it has to be in the front yard.  Reptile lovers, take heed.  You cannot simultaneously have a herd of large tortoises and a soft carpet of grass, lovely landscaping, or a cute vegetable garden.  If you try it, you will end up with contented tortoises that have eaten their fill through your landscaping, and a broken heart for all your formerly lovely plants and plans.

When my new compost pile becomes soil (which takes some patience because it requires about 5 months), I’ll scatter it across the front lawn to help restore the beneficial microbes that I probably destroyed with my chemical warfare on weeds there – oh, wait a minute, those weren’t weeds, they were medicine!  And I was killing them!  DOH!!

And now, having finished writing this and also having shamelessly loafed around for much of this beautiful Sunday morning, I’ll obey Mr. Logan’s commandment, get off my ass, and plant those tomatoes that I bought last week.  My Tetris scores weren’t all that great today anyway.

Here are the answers to the herbal IQ test:

1.      Which vastly underestimated, common yard plant is both a highly nutritious vegetable and one of the most powerful medicinal herbs? 

The humble dandelion.

2.      Which two common plants that you see along the sides of the roads are edible?

Ice plant and oxalis (also known as sourgrass).

3.      Which downright ugly yard weeds can cure your hangover? 

Malva and milk thistle.

4.      Which pesky invasive plant has multiple uses as a disinfectant? 

Dog fennel.

5.      Which so-called weed can be used to make a healing and soothing salve for your skin? 

Chickweed.

See?  Who’d have thunk it?  Just goes to show, you never really know a plant until you’ve been properly introduced.