Sustainable Suburban Living

One way to save money and the planet is to grow your own food. We don't have much space on our small suburban San Diego plot but there are a few things that we currently do, and there are also plans for future sustainable suburban living.

Grapes

As you can see from the photo I took today, we have a few vines, various different grapes. In the past we have wound up eating about 20% of them. The other 80% wind up being consumed by friends, neighbors, birds, and ants. One reason for this is that they all come to season at the same time and we really don't have anywhere to store them. I can think of a really cool way to store the next batch but it will take some time, space, and equipment (read: Money). The area where I plant them doesn't have any irrigation, but I have a theory that there is water coming from somewhere because they do well every year without me watering them.

Macadamia Nut Tree

We have a macadamia nut tree in the front yard that produces nuts in which a majority of the nuts meet the same fate as the grapes. The are very difficult to crack, and each nut yields very little. They are, however, very expensive on the open market so I am hoping to collect them and consume a portion. The ones we don't eat could be traded on Craigslist for other fruits and vegetables.

One interesting item to note is that the crows in the area will pick up the nuts and lay them out in our driveway. They know that the car coming out of the garage will run them over, thereby making available the sweet macadamia nut flesh. It took us awhile to notice this. We would sweep the driveway clear of leaves and nuts and the next day there would be nuts crunching under our wheels a we pulled out of the garage. It took about a year to finally notice the crows laying them out in anticipation of a tasty snack. Interesting.

Chicken (Gallus Gallus Domesticus)

This is our urban chicken, Moonbeam. She was purchased about 4 months ago so we haven't gotten any eggs yet. She is a wonderful insect controller and she free-ranges in the backyard all day and only goes in the cage at night. She isn't crazy about going into a cage, but it keeps her from being a meal for one of the neighborhood cats, raccoons, possums, owls, or any number of predators looking for a tasty chicken meal. We did have another chicken, Sundance, but "she" turned out to be a "he" and started to crow in the morning. 3am in the morning to be precise. Determining the sex of a chicken has an 85% accuracy rate, meaning we had up to a 30% chance of one of them being a rooster when we bought them (15% chance of being a male, we bought two so 15 X 2 = 30%). Because having a chicken in the city is a gray area, we sent Sundance out to the country with a co-worker who has 17 other chickens in need of some loving. Chicken poop, for the record, is an excellent natural fertilizer. Because she eats bugs, grass, weeds, and some basic bird feed, her poop and her eggs are 100% natural.

I'll keep everyone updated on the status of our diminutive farming efforts as events warrant.