We will end the year having raised and eaten 1.22 percent of our annual calories on our suburban, less-than-a-fifth of an acre — and while it’s not the final percentage we’d hoped for, it’s a fitting and fine number.

Besides healthy-in-every-sense fruits, vegetables, and eggs, the number represents the lessened demand we placed on land outside the borders of our own property.  It represents fewer edibles traveling an average of 1,500 miles to reach our plate (or even 15 miles).  This fraction also stands for knowledge, in that we know for certain how this food was grown, and that beyond the compost from our own yard, all inputs were organic.  This year our sandy, unfit, and inhospitable soil called for many organic amendments, but unlike industrial farming, which degrades the land, our effort has resulted in a sustainable net improvement to our property’s ecology.  Each season our land will require fewer additives, rather than the ever escalating amounts of petroleum-based chemical fertilizers and pesticides that concentrated, monocultural agribusiness demands.

We’ve also provided, as part of that percent, a free-ranging life for our four hens in exchange for the eggs they have recently begun contributing to our super-local diet — a deal they may not have gotten elsewhere, depending on the size and character of the flock into which they were introduced.  Because they are heirloom breeds, they likely never would have found their way into a CAFO, but who knows?  It doesn’t take 22,000 birds in a hen house to make a chicken’s life cruel.

All in all, our four chickens, seven fruit trees, and the hundreds of plants and thousands of individual pieces of fruit and vegetable that we’ve raised and handled and bungled and perfected have shortened the distance between us and our food — a gulf of familiarity that tends to widen for most consumers with each meal, to their and the source of their food’s detriment.

For us, it’s just a beginning.

If this effort were just a hobby garden, I would wholly agree with the assertion that the deaths of several squirrels presents a waste unbalanced by the return of a handful of veggies, but this has never been about a few summer tomatoes, half cared for in a pot on the porch.  It is not an idyll or lark to mark the time while the weather’s warm.

For me, this is about the future of food, or at least what agriculture must look like, in part, if we want any squirrels left and anyone to appreciate them.  We each have to achieve some level of food independence from industrial farming if we really want any say in how the entities that control what we eat produce those goods.  And we have to distribute the responsibility for feeding billions of people among billions of people, because concentrating that food production concentrates waste and encourages environmental, human, and economic degradation.

I find a few critiques interesting and emblematic of the food debate.  First, I have been talking about killing insects for months, in a variety of ways, such as luring them into bowls of sugary beer so they will drown, crushing them, and releasing predators in the yard that will catch them and eat them alive — yet no one has spoken out on behalf of the bugs, which are no less alive than the squirrels.  They’re just not mammals, and so harder to relate to because we cannot see ourselves in them, or don’t find them as aesthetically pleasing as, say, a cuddly squirrel on whom we can project human qualities.  Secondly, there is a presumption that just because someone elects not to eat animals, somehow their food choices are clean and guiltless, with no impact on the environment.  Yet, industrial agriculture results in massive environmental impacts that kill thousands of animals of all kinds — insect, amphibian, fish, and mammals like squirrels and things even cuter and more kin to us than that.  Lastly, there is the suggestion that if I had eaten the squirrels, their deaths would somehow have not been wasted, and instead would have had purpose as their meat and organs made their way through my gut.  No less dead, but somehow more justified than killing that same squirrel so that I can choose to eat a squash or a tomato.  This is a self-serving rationalization that allows us to eat meat without feeling bad but not kill so we can eat something else.  And it is argued in surprising disregard of the wants of the squirrel, which would probably find neither option satisfying.  The squirrels I killed will nourish the soil, and the environment, but not me directly, and this, for some, is not okay.  Don’t kill it unless you’re going to eat it.  Well, why not have the same policy for grasshoppers and pill bugs and flies?

These critiques come in part because there is the presumption that I don’t have to eat from my yard because I can just go to the store and buy what I’m trying to grow, thus making my effort invalid or odd and the deaths of a few squirrels completely unjustified because going to the market doesn’t result in the deaths of those same squirrels.  But it definitely results in the deaths of other squirrels and other animals by supporting the large-scale, commercial agriculture that devastates the world to stock those shelves with food so that I don’t have to grow my own, so that I don’t have to kill those few squirrels.  It is only an illusion that a head of lettuce or an apple or a beet is a vegetarian dish considering the amount of dead animals that likely went into its successful raising and harvesting.

Generations past have so degraded the ecology in the neighborhood I call home that the squirrels flourish in numbers that can’t be supported by the local environment, and so they have become dependent on humans.  In other words, they’ve become unbalanced, they’ve become pests, and because they exist in such a way they make any effort to be self-sustaining near impossible.  Does this mean that each year I’ll start the season by killing squirrels?  I sure hope not, because for me, I recognize and live with the conflict it poses to my ideals, my aspirations.  I don’t even want to kill the grasshoppers.  I have always liked grasshoppers and found them interesting.  But until the ecology sings a little bit better here, killing a few squirrels might be a last-ditch option a time or two again.  Or maybe I’ll find another way, for which I’m intently searching.  Or maybe next year I’ll eat them, instead, as well as the bunnies that gnaw my carrots, and we’ll see what kind of heat I take then.

I hate that the squirrels died, but I want to eat food I know, with a history I recognize.  I want unquestionable food, squash I don’t have to wonder about where it’s been as I use it for a base in baby food for my daughter.  She’ll take her first bites in a few months, and I’ll damn sure know where at least that first meal comes from.  Last year, I stuffed my pregnant wife with strawberries for nine months only to hear on NPR shortly after she delivered that those same California strawberries were covered in toxic pesticide residue that increases the risk of miscarriage — a situation I refuse to repeat.  Yeah, the squirrels died, but I can own that impact and grow from it like I can’t do with items bought at a market, whether its super or farmer’s.

Insects have ceased to be a serious threat, including the grasshoppers that proved such trouble in early spring.  A lot of hands contributed to this success.  For my part, I noticed where new grasshoppers tended to emerge and returned there daily to crush the nymphs.  The praying mantises I released are rapidly maturing based on the few I’ve encountered, and I can only assume they’re doing their share of the pest control since other insects are all they eat.  And we’ve begun letting our four chickens range and eat what bugs they will, turning problems into eggs.  I also distributed 50 feet of floating row cover around sensitive areas of the yard, which seems to have given the seedlings in those plots time to mature unimpeded and uneaten.  However, the heat the covers trap tends to wilt the plants during these hot days of July, so I’ve begun phasing them out.  But they did their part and will be key to next season’s success in the cooler months of early spring.

Nature has finally begun to work with us, or the other way around.  Several pairs of birds are nesting in our yard, including a set of Orioles, and I have watched on several occasions as a bird has swooped in and plucked a caterpillar off a broad squash leaf.  And I haven’t seen the gnawing, strawberry devouring rabbits in weeks.  They used to make daily forays into our yard, but no more — prey to something, I assume.

I have also been fortunate in keeping the powdery mildew that plagued seasons past at bay by treating outbreaks immediately with a spray of one part milk, 10 parts water.

That just leaves the squirrels.

Right outside our property line a colony of California Ground Squirrels took up residence, and the eight or so animals seemed to feed only on our edibles, chewing the growing tips off of every vine, eating new sprouts into the ground, pulling down wheat and rye stalks, biting into immature squash, melons, and almonds, and generally ravaging plots in our lower, upper, and front yards — including those planted right up against the house.  The row covers seemed to provide a bit of a temporary obstacle, but the fencing that kept the rabbits out sure didn’t.  Marigolds and other defensive plantings proved ineffectual.  I put out packs of pelleted fox urine in an attempt to make them fear fear itself, and this worked, except on windy days, of which we have many.  The scent deterrent was most effective on days when it could just hang in the air.  But the squirrels only needed one breezy afternoon to devour weeks of progress.

While planting a last effort at a late-start warm season crop in June, I felt I had little choice but to get rid of the squirrels.  Trap and release is no good.  In California it is only legal to trap them, not release them, because they carry diseases and are classified as agricultural pests.  Shooting them with a .22 is only recommended in rural areas, and would likely be ineffective and time consuming.  They won’t scare easy with a scarecrow or other predator mimic.  Natural predators and domestic pets can’t control their populations, typically.

I decided to poison them, which infringes a bit on the permacultural ideals I’d hoped to establish here.  And it’s hard to say how it’s much different than the poisoning practices of industrial agriculture.  I find arguments of scale and magnitude self serving and unconvincing.  It’s clearly an industrial move.  But, at the same time, I found the prospect of harvesting no warm season edibles for a second year unacceptable.  Resources are wasted on an organic, super-local effort that yields nothing.

Poisoning is not a friendly, humane enterprise.  I chose an anticoagulant bait, which is housed in a feed station only squirrels and similar animals can access, rather than a pelleted poison broadcast on the ground.  This minimizes the collateral damage like a smart bomb does.  It’s also a low-dose poison that must be eaten regularly over several days to kill — again to reduce the likelihood of a non-target animal dying.

But, in the end, something does die.  Horribly.

An anticoagulant prevents blood from clotting, so a bruise or a bump turns into an internal (or external) hemorrhage that never stops.  I have no fantasies of squirrels curling up in warm dens and drifting off to a peaceful sleep from which they will not awake, none the wiser, because I have found them immobile, panting, and scared, the ants already upon them.  And I should find them and see it, and own the decision, so that next season it doesn’t come to such a false dichotomy: food or squirrels.

I haven’t seen a squirrel in weeks.  The garden flourishes.  Next year we’ll do better.

Must read.

1. The Ominivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
2. In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan
3. The End of the Wild, by Stephen M. Meyer

Should read.

1. When the Rivers Run Dry, by Fred Pearce
2. Citizenship Papers, by Wendell Berry

Could read.

1. Field Notes From a Catastrophe, by Elizabeth Kolbert
2. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver

Skip it.

1. The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman
2. Coming Home to Eat, by Gary Paul Nabhan

This last book I’m working my way through now, and it’s a bit wandering and self congratulatory without imparting any real knowledge or sense of experience.  At best.  Which is disappointing because I had high hopes: It recounts a guy’s attempt to consume only what he can get from within 220 miles from his Arizona home (a bit far for “local”, but a great goal).

I have a “to read” stack on my desk that includes The End of Food, by Paul Roberts; Hot, Flat, and Crowded, by Thomas L. Friedman; Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser; and Second Nature, by Michael Pollan.  That’s where I’ll be heading next, trying to read as many as I can before the spring semester starts and my reading turns back to student work.

If there’s anything else I should read, or any of the above that I’ve misread — drop me a note.

Before the trimming, the 14-foot shoots of this Bougainvillea arced toward our pool and tangled in our redwood tree.  The stalks can easily put on a foot or more of growth each day.  Over time, the soft vines thicken and turn tough and woody like a tree.  But unlike most trees, the branch-like shoots of this vine wield inch-and-a-quarter, hooked thorns tipped in a mild toxin.

I came away from the work with my arms and legs utterly lacerated and a decent slash across my face.  I came away bloodied, the spikes having cut, and caught, and torn, and punctured through leather glove and rubber-soled boot.  In short, they did exactly what they were supposed to: They tried to protect the plant from me.  Despite my hedge trimmer and chainsaw, this South American native wouldn’t stay hit.

Getting close enough to a plant to cut it can provide a unique perspective: The menacing thorn that protects new growth, the specialized leaves, called bracts, that evolved to attract pollinators to an otherwise unassuming flower, and that carry the mature seed in the wind like a paper-mache glider.  This vine can be pared back from full, lush green to brown, dead stubble and in a week be resiliently sprouting away.  It can grow to 36-feet tall.  It can opt to be deciduous to survive a drought.

And it’s no passive resister, leaving cuts that redden and itch like a rash on account of the poison barbs.

A strange intimacy exists in becoming the victim of a plant’s natural defenses.  It provides an immediate ecological context that is often missing from our lives.  For most people, a plant’s defenses are easily avoided.  The reason for this disconnect exists largely in our no longer having to look at plants and decide if they are safe to eat, and if so, how best to harvest their edible parts.  Choosing produce from the market that is ripe or unspoiled hardly compares to making decisions in the wild.  And, frankly, some vetting has gone on before we get the opportunity to use our finely tuned senses to pick an orange out of the pile of oranges.  We are not the deciders.

When was the last time most consumers had to get around a thorn to eat a blackberry?  Or decide if that mushroom is the Amanita lanei they are after, or the Amanita phalloides that would kill them?

Or even simpler, when’s the last time most Americans had to put any effort into peeling an orange?  I can’t buy San Diego-grown oranges in San Diego, despite the excellent taste and superior quality of the fruit, because San Diegans refuse to be burdened by the struggle the peel entails.  Apparently it’s also not orange enough.  So San Diego County sends most of its oranges to Japan and India (where they’re quite popular), and San Diegans buy fruit that unzips easily from Chile and South Africa.

These are the kinds of frivolous carbon expenditures that encourage climate change and waste resources.

We’d be better for getting pricked by plants a little more often.

Put another way, I could have grown 400 White Lisbon Bunching Onions, 300 Yellow Sweet Spanish Onions, and 300 Carantan Leeks.

I could have grown 1,200 Autumn King Carrots.

Or maybe not.  Even taking into consideration pests, disease, thinning, and successive plantings on some of those crops, I just don’t have the space.  Most people don’t.  And what if I did get 1,200 carrots?  I like carrots, but come on.  That’s carrots every day for a year even if I give away two thirds of that yield to — who?  The couple hundred people I know who trust me enough to eat something from my yard?  (For you regular readers, you’re probably thinking I don’t have to worry much about that kind of return, but I’m getting better — and some of these crops are easy.)

These enormous, space-consuming yields come from one, $1.89 packet of seeds for each crop.  That’s just the way seeds come.  For me and my space, that leaves a lot left over after I’ve planted my fill.  Typically I save them just in case of a crop disaster, but often by the time whatever ails my plants fells them, it’s too late in the season to start again from scratch.  Besides, that’s some pretty pessimistic seed hording going on.

Instead, we should plant with optimism and give away our remaining seeds as soon as the ones we’ve used hit the ground.  I tried this in the spring, a bit, and have done better with the practice this cool season.  In the spring I shared ground nuts and watermelon with friends and fellow amateur growers Paul and Amy Reams (who operate a fabulous wedding and portrait photography business out of San Diego).  Between us, I pulled six peanuts out of the ground and we all ate store-bought watermelon this summer.  But there was camaraderie in our lack of success.  I gave my parents tomato and pepper plants I’d started indoors, and while mine got eaten by pests, theirs made it to fruit.  This fall I shared all the cool crops mentioned above with my sister, Anna, and just this week she, her husband, and our grandpa ate salads fixed from her bursting raised bed (pictured above).

My sister never gardened before this season, and she’s doing great.  And in the coming seasons we’ll grow more edibles we’ve never grown before with Paul, Amy, and Anna, experimenting in good company.  And my folks will grow stuff, too.

Typically when people have a hand in producing some of their own food, when they see that it’s possible to step into their yard, pick something, and eat it — something they had no choice but to go to a supermarket for in the past, that they’ve only seen piled in a produce section — they tend to plant and grow something every season after that, even if they’re not gardeners by nature.  Because it’s so possible.  And so good.

Sometimes all someone needs is a handful of seeds and an encouraging word.  Every homegrown tomato is one that hasn’t been chemically raised and shipped and preserved and irradiated, that hasn’t been part of an industrial food system that devastates the environment and results in massive waste.

Yeah, you can save your seeds for coming seasons.  Some seeds last longer than others.  It all depends on how you store them.  But how frugal do you need to be?  Hundreds of seeds for $1.89, or so.

Didn’t your mother teach you to share?

However, by having a clear idea of what we mean when we mean it, we can better determine for ourselves whether some product meets our standards, rather than being wholly at the mercy of some company’s label, the criteria for which they have defined in their interests, not the consumer’s.

I’ve been thinking about such things while trying to create a context for the food growing in my yard.  Below are links to two articles that have helped me better understand what I mean by sustainable eating.  Check them out.

“Twinkies Are Not Real”

“The Movement for a Sustainable Food System”

There’s something to that feast or famine adage.

So, what does 1,000 calories really add up to?  It’s about the same as drinking six cans of Pepsi.  Or eating two Big Macs.  Or three Snickers bars.  However, because homegrown food is so damn healthy, the calories accumulate at a bit slower pace than processed food (I’ve really missed an opportunity here to infuse everything with corn).  To reach this milestone we ate six strawberries, 10 grapes, 27 Husky cherry tomatoes, two asparagus, one clove of garlic, five basil leaves, one Beefsteak tomato, four small Purple Viking potatoes, and three-and-a-half medium-sized Gala apples.  We shared half that last apple with friends, enthusiastically.

I am happy with our first month’s calories, even though they fell short.  Potatoes, again, are a trip to pull from the earth.  And satisfying a snack-time craving by stepping off the front porch and snapping a ripe apple off our tree has a sense of heritage to it, and excellence — especially in the afternoon, when the apple’s sun warmed but crisp and tastes like chewing cider.

It’s been a tasty first thousand.

We had my folks over for dinner a few days ago.  I served up a Caesar salad with Husky cherry tomatoes from the garden, which went well alongside my wife’s excellent meat loaf and baked mac and cheese.  But my mom one-upped us with her homegrown contribution: a pie stuffed full of Anna Apples from the tree in her and my dad’s front yard.

The tree produces phenomenally well for only having been in the ground two seasons in an area of San Diego that gets no frost and about as many chill hours as you’d expect for “America’s Finest City”.  But the Anna likes heat, having originated in Israel, and doesn’t require the dose of cold that most apples do to flower and set fruit.  This season the tree nearly bent itself to the ground with hundreds of huge apples.  In the winter I’ll try my hand at grafting with a few branches from this tree.  We have two Galas that are doing better this year but aren’t nearly as fruitful.

Mom left us the pie, and I’ve been eating it all week and thinking about the community benefit of home-growing.  Civilizations of the past have always organized around the production of and exchange of food with neighbors.  It’s only recently that people have become completely detached from such sustenance networking, and, for the majority, completely lost the capability of producing their own food.  Despite this distance, we still come together around food — it’s just not food we’ve had a hand in.  Why not make it something we’ve grown and shared?  There’s a lot of potential in such exchanges, both in terms of relationship building and quality food production.  Maybe one yard’s good for squash but not for apples, one is all shade and another all sun, maybe one person has a green thumb but no yard and another space but can’t grow.  In each relationship there is potential for cooperation and food.  Figuring out such relationships involves getting to know people nearby, which is good for the neighborhood.  And, like most things, increasing the amount of homegrown food (the most local kind) is easier and more fun with friends and family.

There is a certain autonomy for a community that produces part of its own food cooperatively.  It means that for some portion of a meal people can opt out of the market or the restaurant for their food — two places that often offer little transparency in terms of how the food is made, where it comes from, and how it is grown.  Without home-growing there is little chance of changing the practices that are problematic in industrial food production, such as heavy use of chemical fertilizers and herbicides, because the industry has an ace: People have to eat.  And it is hard for people to hold accountable an industry they rely on to live.  Much like pharmaceuticals.  People are as likely to stop taking their meds as they are to stop eating.  Protesting a practice while funding it is not effective.

But it’s not all about protest gardening.  Sometimes you just get good pie.

I like the idea of fewer intermediaries between my food and I.  This preference has many reasons behind it, but for the most part it boils down to a concern and a belief: the earth cannot sustain 6 billion (let alone 9 billion by 2040) people living a business-as-usual lifestyle; the actions of one person are not in vain, but significant, in dealing with global issues.

Business as usual includes consuming outside of seasons (a New Yorker buying summer oranges and winter asparagus) and regions (that same individual buying an avocado any time of year), and blindly supporting a massive industrial food machine that manufactures everything from McDonald’s to Wheat Thins to corn with little transparency and against which consumers have little recourse.  More on all of this down the line.

We’re coming up on something fast and the effectiveness of a single person’s actions in mitigating that something cannot be ruled out.  The degradation of the environment and the decline in the quality of life that accompanies it is a global problem that seems to require a coordinated, global solution.  But what is apparent is that people think in terms of themselves most often because that is a rational, practical way to get through the day.  Big solutions become daunting, hard to imagine and relate to, and can be defensively forgotten.  What is needed, then, is 6 billion individual decisions to live differently, to consume differently.  In this, the individual act is essential, and all hope and responsibility for the future is not diffused within the crowd of a city, state, country, or hemisphere, but instead rests about a foot above the shoulders of every person, where real decisions are made.

So, where do we go from here?  Where I go is toward producing a significant portion of my wife and I’s daily calories at home.  I’ve set 15 percent as my first benchmark, which seems low and high at the same time.  Looking at that number I can’t help but think of all the scenarios where such an achievement would be pathetic.  I can’t help but think about the other 85 percent of my food (a far more robust number) and where it might come from.  I wince at the usual channels that are most likely.  Some who stumble across this effort might wonder why I don’t shoot higher, try for 50 percent or 100, even.  Those numbers almost certainly start getting into grains and meats.  I have every intention of growing some grain — look forward to it, in fact — but it takes up a lot of space, and I just don’t have the room for a subsistence-level effort.  As for the meats, honestly, I can’t really see myself butchering anything — at this point — and I’m not sure I’m zoned for slaughter.

However, I do hope that the 15 turns into 20 or 25 percent.  But that’s getting ahead of the now.  Just hitting that first mark is going to be a challenge.