Backyard Sustainability
Scott McGuire believes that the path sustainability starts in our backyards, and he's on a mission to teach others how to take the first steps. "Authentic security is a dependable food supply," he asserts. His home garden in Ashland meets about 60 to 70 percent of his family's food needs during the growing season, and 30 to 40 percent off-season.
McGuire opens his "White Sage Gardens" for tours and weekend classes on all aspects of food production from soil building, plant propagation and greenhouse use to canning and seed saving. He also works as a landscape consultant.
McGuire studied at UC Santa Cruz's Farm and Garden Education Project and has worked as a gardener and design consultant in the U.S. and Ireland. Along the way, he developed a unique rapport with plants and focuses his work and teaching around building this skill. "Our relationship with plants is what will save us," he says.
Simple Steps
McGuire moved into his current residence — a rental — in February 2006. The property had been largely unused for gardening before, offering a canvas for creativity and a test of McGuire's skills.
"I want to have a place where people can get inspired," he says.
He immediately started building the soil using plentiful low cost and free materials such as manure and yard waste from landscaping work. At the same time, he set up a greenhouse and started seeds for the first crops of vegetables, flowers and herbs.
In just a few months, the land began bursting with colorful flowers and food crops. This was achieved without the use of fertilizers or other chemicals, just natural materials and healthy outdoor work. McGuire estimates that during the spring he worked on the land for four to six hours each weekend and one to two hours on weekdays. During the summer, he spends about six to eight hours in the gardens.
The garden differs from the typical home plot in that it includes a variety of medicinal plants, dried beans and grains such as wheat, amaranth, oats and millet. The dried beans and grains are "mostly an experiment," McGuire says, noting that he wanted to determine how much land was needed to produce enough for a family. As he learned, yield is small with a home-sized plot. He envisions sharing a larger piece of land along with others to grow these kinds of crops. Existing fruit trees and vines provide apples, cherries and grapes to round out the gardens and offer sweet treats after an afternoon's work.
Partnering with Nature
McGuire views his success as the result of a partnership with nature. His early garden training focused on organic systems and traditional methods of locating plants according to sun and water needs. He later learned about "Co-creative Gardening" which relies on communication with plants in designing a garden layout. Co-creative gardeners use changes in muscle tension to determine whether a proposed element of a garden design is the right fit or not.
"It sounds iggy wiggy, but it works," he says. "Plants are beings, we have to have a dialogue with them and treat them as beings versus objects."
A further partnership with nature involves the addition of chickens. The feathered friends provide nitrogen-rich fertilizer for the garden and protein-rich eggs for the family. McGuire is constructing a modular chicken coop that will be easy to move, given that he is a renter. His greenhouse is also easily disassembled, a positive inspiration to other renters who might feel they can do little if they don't own their property.
Saving for the future
Preserving food, saving seeds and composting are skills that McGuire sees as critical for self-reliance as reserves of natural resources like oil decline. The McGuire's canned peaches, tomatoes, salsa, jelly and other foods this summer. These will reduce their need for store-bought foods through the winter. They also dried the grains and beans they grew and will freeze other foods for winter meals.
McGuire saves seeds by harvesting them from the best of the crop. Some vegetables like tomatoes are ready for seed saving at the same time they are harvested for eating while others need time to age in the garden. Greens, many flowers and other plants must be left to go to seed, while beans must be left to dry.
Compost piles sit on several empty plots in McGuire's garden, where they can start feeding the soil immediately and be accessed more easily. Compost returns critical nutrients to the soil like nitrogen, which McGuire feels is of particular concern for the future. He notes that some sources of ammonia-based commercial nitrogen come from natural gas, a limited, non-renewable natural resource. Manure and legumes are two clean, renewable and easily available resources McGuire uses in his own garden.
At its root, McGuire's work is quite simple — working with nature to ensure that humans and the environment thrive. His methods work for renters as well as homeowners, and can be scaled to properties of many sizes. He is happy to cast the seeds of his experience morewidely by sharing information and consulting on landscape and garden design. "I'm passionate about education," he says. McGuire can be reached at scottmcg@jeffnet.org, 488-7489 or whitesagegardens.com.
