Besides keeping a small but obvious vegetable garden, I've taken to sneaking a few seeds into the ground in vacant lots and unused untended land here near downtown LA, just to serve as a non-centralized emergency food supply.
Sure, without specific care, they won't all make it.
But some will, even with very little care and water.
Many of the legumes, for instance, will grow as weeds. Near my old house in San Diego there was a vacant canyon bottom near a park, filled with wild oats and scrubby manzanita and a few little crippled-looking live oaks, between several mesas topped with housing developments. The little canyon/barranca was used only by kids riding their dirt bikes, folks walking their dogs, and teenagers hanging out in "forts" under the manzanita to smoke, drink, and make out. It was dry -- no creek. Most folks in the neighborhood didn't even know that little canyon was there!
But someone had planted some sweet peas there, and each spring, they exploded. Each year there were more and more, until you could smell the wonderful scent from a quarter mile away, and the whole canyon bottom became a sweet pea field. In summer, they'd form edible (although really fibrous!) pods, quite suitable as relatively high-protein emergency food.
A few handfuls of *any* fairly drought-tolerant hardy dried beans, planted in the bottom of a canyon, might do as well.
Also, whenever my potatoes get old and start to sprout, I cut them in pieces and bury them in amongst the ornamentals, or out in all the scrub along the bikepaths and dry river beds.
Better than nothing.
Can't hurt.
I wonder how peanuts would do in this area? I also know that some yams and beets kick ass here, despite the hard dry soil, 'cause I've planted them and forgotten about them, only to unearth some Monster Yam or Monster Beet a few years later.
I try not to let these little "semi-volunteers" look "garden-y"; the more random, the better, as most folks in this culture wouldn't know one food plant out of a hundred, outside the context of neat garden rows.
Sure, without specific care, they won't all make it.
But some will, even with very little care and water.
Many of the legumes, for instance, will grow as weeds. Near my old house in San Diego there was a vacant canyon bottom near a park, filled with wild oats and scrubby manzanita and a few little crippled-looking live oaks, between several mesas topped with housing developments. The little canyon/barranca was used only by kids riding their dirt bikes, folks walking their dogs, and teenagers hanging out in "forts" under the manzanita to smoke, drink, and make out. It was dry -- no creek. Most folks in the neighborhood didn't even know that little canyon was there!
But someone had planted some sweet peas there, and each spring, they exploded. Each year there were more and more, until you could smell the wonderful scent from a quarter mile away, and the whole canyon bottom became a sweet pea field. In summer, they'd form edible (although really fibrous!) pods, quite suitable as relatively high-protein emergency food.
A few handfuls of *any* fairly drought-tolerant hardy dried beans, planted in the bottom of a canyon, might do as well.
Also, whenever my potatoes get old and start to sprout, I cut them in pieces and bury them in amongst the ornamentals, or out in all the scrub along the bikepaths and dry river beds.
Better than nothing.
Can't hurt.
I wonder how peanuts would do in this area? I also know that some yams and beets kick ass here, despite the hard dry soil, 'cause I've planted them and forgotten about them, only to unearth some Monster Yam or Monster Beet a few years later.
I try not to let these little "semi-volunteers" look "garden-y"; the more random, the better, as most folks in this culture wouldn't know one food plant out of a hundred, outside the context of neat garden rows.
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Los Angeles
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