Living Like Ed by Ed Jr. (i have read the book a hundred times TXT) 📕

was twelve years old when the Bay of Pigs crisis took place and had a profound effect on everyone. We thought that the

Nothing tastes better than food that’s picked fresh from your own garden.

Russians wanted to kill us, that they were going to send nuclear weapons over to bomb us. We might have been able to stop them, but we might not. And it wasn’t just talk. We had duck-and-cover drills at school, and people actually built fallout shelters in their homes and backyards.

So I had a thing about survival and self-sufficiency from an early age. One day my father caught me digging into the foundation of the house. I was going to dig a series of tunnels, then bring down a generator that would run on fuel and that I was going to vent outside. I planned to store the amount of fuel that I thought would be sufficient to run it for a year. I was going to grow algae, which would produce oxygen and also be a food source. In this way I would enable my family to survive the nuclear blast, and it seemed totally sane and rational to think that way. Of course I knew that after the blast there wouldn’t be much food around. I’d have to grow it, harvest it, and store it. So I started a garden.

(As a side note, this was actually when I first got interested in solar panels, too. There was no talk about nuclear winter in those days, so I thought I might have some solar panels outside the fallout shelter to provide our power. Hopefully they wouldn’t get damaged by the blast—or I could pull them in and then put them out afterward. And I’d live. I’d survive.)

My love of gardening wasn’t solely about providing sustenance in the wake of a nuclear disaster, though; I simply liked the idea of the earth. I had been a Boy Scout—thrifty, brave, clean, reverent, resourceful. Gardening fit with all of that and I wanted to give it a try.

I started my first garden at my home on Magnolia Boulevard in Sherman Oaks when I was sixteen. And right after I put some seeds in the ground, my dad told me, “We’re going to New York for a visit, and we’re going to be back there awhile.” And then when we got to New York, he decided we were going to Europe. We took a whirlwind twenty-one-day tour of several countries in Europe. It was wonderful in every way.

When I came back, though, I thought, “Oh, my God! My garden!” I had been gone maybe six weeks.

But miraculously, several of the plants had survived. They weren’t in great shape, but some water overspray from the neighbor had been enough to take care of a few radish plants, and the radishes were kinda edible. I was impressed beyond description. Those seeds I had put in the ground, and tended to only briefly, had endured absolute neglect for six weeks and still produced radishes.

I vowed that I would again have a garden when I had a patch of dirt to call my own. So the number one thing I wanted for this house when I bought it was room for a vegetable garden, and it has turned out I am good at gardening.

Eco-Friendly Gardening

You know, when I first bought this house, the garden was quite different. I knew enough to take the lawn out right away. It just didn’t make sense to have a lawn in Southern California. If I lived in Seattle or Indianapolis—any part of the country that gets a certain amount of rainfall—then I might have been comfortable having a lawn, but certainly wouldn’t have one in a place like Southern California, where water comes at such a high environmental cost.

Getting rid of a lawn can also do wonders for the environment. First of all, you could entirely eliminate the need for gasoline-powered lawn equipment at your home. By that I mean things like lawn mowers, edgers, and string trimmers. These machines emit all kinds of pollutants, including

• carbon monoxide

• carbon dioxide

• oxides of nitrogen (NOx)

• sulfur dioxide

• VOCs (volatile organic compounds)

• toxins, such as benzene

There’s also gasoline evaporation whenever you refill your gas can and whenever you use that gas can to refill your mower or edger. And if you don’t maintain your equipment properly, it can burn oil, too.

One of the keys that I’ve learned over the years to having a successful, energy-efficient garden is choosing plants that are suited to my site. If you live in the desert, as I do, plants that thrive in moist, tropical climates are not going to be happy unless you give them lots of water and lots of special fertilizers and generally try to adapt your site to suit the plants. This is virtually never an environmentally enlightened way to approach your garden.

Plants that have adapted to your climate and conditions are better able to grow without a lot of attention or input. In my case, that means native plants from this region as well as plants that are classified as Mediterranean.

You can check with your local garden center or your local county extension office to find out which plants will work best in your climate and conditions. If you’re in California, you can go online to the California Native Plant Society’s website (www.cnps.org) and find lots of good stuff. Odds are there’s a native plant society in your state or region, too

Over the years I’ve developed a list of produce that grows well for me and that I plant year in, year out:

• corn

• tomatoes

• lettuce

• broccoli

• cauliflower

• peas

• artichokes

• chile peppers

• onions

• herbs like cilantro, basil, and sage

I also have a little fruit orchard at the front, back, and side of my house where I have these trees:

• 2 avocado trees

• 1 lemon tree

• 2 semidwarf tangerine trees

• 1