Making an ecological impact with your urban garden

I wanted to share this thought provoking essay which challenges us to be mindful of how our food choices can have a positive impact on our local ecosystem and community.

“ This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t grow tomatoes, lettuce, or kale. What I’m asking instead is to find ways we can integrate native plants into these gardens and ways we can begin the very complex challenge of shifting what the food we desire looks like for the sake of future generations. Like any other new challenge, cold turkey won’t work. If you enjoy walnuts— try black walnuts. Try one new native crop a season. Learn its nuances and how it reacts to different processing and cooking methods. How can we better understand the ways in which we can substitute sumac for lemon? How can we honor the history of these plants on the landscape and make it so that our ways of living demand that they continue to exist on the landscape? How do we make our landscape's flavor reflect our palate's desires in new and exciting ways?”

https://open.substack.com/pub/poorprolesalmanac/p/homesteading-with-a-planet-on-fire?r=2m3ig&utm_medium=ios

Thank you for sharing this.

All too many folks forget about native plants.

Though I tend to believe that some are not forgotten, like yaupon holly and the Jerusalem artichoke that folks on the forum are familiar with.

A challenge I have here is that the local edibles are harder to identify, probably, mostly because they don't come in seed packs (usually) and I find that they occupy more space and time, as well as needing more coddling, before becoming productive. What do yall think? Am I missing a piece in understanding this?

Suzette Thib wrote:A challenge I have here is that the local edibles are harder to identify, probably, mostly because they don't come in seed packs (usually) and I find that they occupy more space and time, as well as needing more coddling, before becoming productive. What do yall think? Am I missing a piece in understanding this?

Most urban gardens are not exactly a "natural ecosystem" even if they were before the earth was compacted by big machines, regraded, topsoil removed then maybe replaced, and the typical "heat island" effect of human made ecosystems and change in wind patterns due to buildings, all conspire to quite possibly leave local plants at a disadvantage.

If a person's goal is to produce as many of their own calories as possible on a small piece of land, and think that step one is to improve the soil as many ways as possible. One of those ways is to allow lawn monoculture to gradually turn into a polyculture. Sheep sorrel lives in my lawn in an area, dandelions and their relatives are allowed to grow, but they're imported as are the English daisies. However, both dandelions and English daisies support both native an imported pollinators.

I have a large enough property that I can let native plants move in. One is a native Red Huckleberry. Their berries are far more time-consuming to pick than either my raspberries or the invasive Himalayan Blackberries. I do it because they're awesome in a cake I make, but only if I get the timing right and it's a mast year.  I am trying to encourage Salal, which has an easier to pick berry, but mine don't seem to produce berries, unless it's just that the animals get them all first.

However, if you *aren't* planning to get every calorie you can from your land, gradually improving your soil with planting natives in mind will help to support local birds, insects and small animals/reptiles.

Suzette Thib wrote:A challenge I have here is that the local edibles are harder to identify, probably, mostly because they don't come in seed packs (usually) and I find that they occupy more space and time, as well as needing more coddling, before becoming productive. What do yall think? Am I missing a piece in understanding this?

It is true as Jay alluded to, that cultivars often produce a bigger calorie per square foot bang than native plants. When we are working with a smaller plot of land in our urban gardens, that can be a very important consideration. Remember though, in permaculture gardening, plants play many roles in addition to food production including nitrogen fixation, attracting beneficial insects, deterring pests, improving soil health, providing habitat for wildlife, and weed suppression. You may have better luck finding native plants that can fill those roles in your garden than exclusively focusing on edible natives.  Late Boneset (Eupatorium serotinum) does an absolutely outstanding job attracting pollinators and other beneficial insects like predatory hover flies to my yard. Wild oats (Chasmanthium latifolium) is a fantastic dynamic accumulator that fills in shady areas where most crops wouldn't thrive anyway. My native Echinacea species might not be quite as showy as some cultivars, but they have even greater wildlife benefits and I would wager greater medicinal benefits. Turk's Cap (Malvaviscus arboreus) is another wonderful native shade lover. While it's never going to produce a high volume of calories for your family, its fruit is edible, you can make hibiscus tea out of its flowers and you can substitue its leave in for grape leaves when you make dolmas. Speaking of grapes, Mustang Grapes (Vitis mustangenis) is a prolific producer. The grapes have astringent skins that can irritate your mouth, but the juice once squeezed and sweeted is so delicious that my mom and I go to the trouble of canning a decent amount every year. I recently learned that when harvested green, you can pickle them and they make a decent olive substitute. Some people even bake the unripe green grapes into a pie. I need to try out some of those recipes this year as I have a bumper crop growing on my fenceline. Other native edible plants that have produced well for me and have been easy to grow are elderberries, mulberries, dewberries (native low growing blackberry vines), and the permaculture favorite, the sunchoke. I garden in zone 8b in North Texas so many if not all of these plants should work for you in your zone 9 deep south yard. If you need any sunchoke tubers or seeds from the other plants I mentioned, send me a DM with your address and I can mail some to you.