Making the Energy Garden

An 18-month experiment in self-sufficiency.

BY JULIAN DARLEY & CELINE RICH-DARLEY n

FOOD+FUEL: The front yard of the Energy Garden at the height of summer 2007.

On Valentine’s Day 2007, we immigrated from Vancouver, B.C., to Sebastopol in Sonoma County, Calif. To our surprise, the house we’d rented, sight unseen from an ad on Craigslist, had a double-sized lot. The third of an acre was in a very run-down state; it had been used as a Rottweiler and pig run by the previous tenants. Our request to turn the yard into a garden was granted by the landlord, and the Energy Garden was born.

For some years we had been concerned about that we currently rely on petroleum for. We were climate change and energy depletion and how a also interested in the calorie. How many calories liquid fuel shortage would affect the world’s food could we grow, both to eat and to turn into other supply system. With our colleagues at the University forms of energy, and how could we demonstrate of British Columbia and the University of Kentucky, different methodologies of gardening to the public? we were looking at small-scale farms to see whether they could be energy self-reliant.

The first thing that sprang to mind when we saw the yard was a question: can a family, in the middle of a town, be food and energy self-reliant, and even have some left over to share? Our garden would be an experimental demonstration. Its goal was to produce as much food and fuel as possible with as few outside inputs, especially petroleum, as possible.

We wanted to produce the “five Fs” in our garden: food, fuel, fiber, fertilizer, and feedstock — all things

Methodologies

We used John Jeavons’ book How to Grow More Vegetables as a guide for the Grow Biointensive method, which advocates double digging of beds and helps calculate expected yields from areas of land. We also drew on permaculture methodology, including “guilds” of mutually beneficial plants, and crops with "stacking functions," where many parts of the plant are useful for different purposes.

We also staggered our plantings, following market

Photography by The Energy Garden Team

68 Make: Volume 18