Urban Homestead: Local, Organic and in the City

Finding Dervaes Gardens is truly a trip back in time. You travel to its loca­tion by first tak­ing a crowded, bustling free­way, then exit­ing at a busy, wide boule­vard, and then turn­ing off on a side street. If you care­fully search the street for the proper address, you’ll most likely spot it with­out hav­ing to find the num­ber: beau­ti­ful blooms and plants crowd all the way up to the iron gate and are even thriv­ing along the curb strip, where nor­mally you would find either poorly sur­viv­ing grass or sim­ply dirt.

You walk up to the porch and are warmly greeted by Jules’ daugh­ter Anais, wear­ing a floor-length dress and car­ry­ing apples in her hands. She is gath­er­ing them for one of today’s chores: mak­ing apple butter.

Now, for one brief moment, you pause, fully expect­ing to turn back around and see a dirt road out front and, beyond that, orchards and fields dot­ted here and there with wood-frame houses lan­guish­ing under the blue sky and bright sum­mer sun. Perhaps a buck­board would be going by, pulled by a horse, the dri­ver tip­ping his hat good morn­ing to you.

Such a vision would be in per­fect con­text to where you are cur­rently stand­ing; for back then every­one would have been doing as Jules and his fam­ily are now: grow­ing their own food, and sell­ing the sur­plus to cus­tomers and local eater­ies. It wasn’t until the advent of inex­pen­sive long-distance ship­ping and sci­en­tific med­dling with crop growth that it became more con­ve­nient to pur­chase pro­duce at the local super­mar­ket. Over time, the prac­tice of grow­ing one’s own food—and indeed the entire cul­ture of local farming—became a relic of the past.

But it was just this future shock that brought Jules Dervaes to seek out the ways of his ancestors.

“I’ve had a gar­den wher­ever I’ve had my own home,” Dervaes told Organic Connections. “I emi­grated to New Zealand in the sev­en­ties and started my first gar­den there, learn­ing how to grow my own food. Then I came back to Florida and put a gar­den there. Then when I bought this home in ’85, I put in a gar­den here—it was just a lit­tle 15 foot by 15 foot sec­tion of the back­yard. But there came a point when we had been using Taco Bell taco shells that they got recalled by Vons because they had genet­i­cally mod­i­fied corn in them; and I thought that if they made that mis­take with one genet­i­cally mod­i­fied crop, why wouldn’t there be oth­ers? You can’t tell genet­i­cally mod­i­fied prod­ucts from the out­side; they’re not marked and they look like any other prod­uct. So I just said, ‘I can’t do that to my chil­dren.’ I told them, `We’re going to turn this into a farm whether we like it or not.’ So that’s what hap­pened here.”

Because the prop­erty had to be con­verted entirely—the back­yard con­sisted in the main of a huge slab of con­crete and a garage—it was a several-year process. However, in their first year they pro­duced 2,000 pounds of pro­duce. Dervaes was very sur­prised at the high amount. “We all thought it was a fluke,” he said. “Nobody could believe it, and I thought maybe we had beginner’s luck or some­thing. But we stuck with it, and then in 2004 I decided to push the enve­lope a lit­tle fur­ther and gave my adult chil­dren the chal­lenge to make 6,000 pounds—three tons—in a year. I think we did it because it would have been an embar­rass­ment if we hadn’t. But you push your­self, set your­self high goals; and, just to make sure, we did it again in the next year.”

They’ve had a few ups and downs since, not the least of which is the drought that California has expe­ri­enced in the last few years. But they’ve still man­aged to main­tain high yields, feed them­selves, and cre­ate a thriv­ing busi­ness sell­ing the sur­plus to local organic mar­kets and restaurants.

“One of the bless­ings of the gar­den, besides giv­ing us our diet, was we actu­ally had a sur­plus, which was a shock,” Dervaes related. “I don’t know if you’ve ever thought what goes into a pound of let­tuce; you can do a pound of toma­toes, bingo, but with let­tuce you have to keep cutting—there’s a lot of area. All that stuff is really light­weight, so you’re col­lect­ing let­tuce or greens like it’s nobody’s busi­ness, and I just thought we couldn’t do that. But when we finally per­fected a lit­tle tech­nique, we were able to sell to local restau­rants and cater­ers. They’re tak­ing off because of the local, fresh organic move­ment; but also, more than organ­ics, because it’s local food. So the ones we’ve been sell­ing to are get­ting good business.”

Over the years, Dervaes has learned how to grow his crops with­out the use of chem­i­cal pes­ti­cides and fer­til­iz­ers. He became an expert in com­post­ing and learned to add min­er­als to his soil with rock dust (a process called “rem­iner­al­iza­tion”) and worm cast­ings. He fights pests with nat­ural meth­ods, using predators—praying man­tises, wasps and birds—and organic pes­ti­cides such as neem oil.

As for weeds, he con­trols them mainly by not giv­ing them room to grow. “I crowd them out,” Dervaes said. “I use mulch heav­ily, and then I’ll put plants close together. I’ll per­son­ally do all the weed­ing when they’re young, and if they don’t go to seed and you keep at it, you can win the bat­tle of weeds with­out her­bi­cides. But the reg­i­men is to not have any room for them and to not let them seed at all.”

Click on any image above to see a larger version.

When it comes to his choice of crops, he decided to go far “out­side the box” of what is con­ven­tion­ally avail­able. “One of the things we wanted most of all was diver­sity. We’re prone to go for things that peo­ple have left by the way­side. Modern agri­cul­ture has come in and said, `This is your stan­dard car­rot,’ or ‘This is your stan­dard let­tuce; this is your stan­dard squash.’ We said to heck with that—we’re going to go find some for­got­ten vari­eties. So we searched the world over and found exotic squashes, exotic cucum­bers, exotic toma­toes, and more. We like that because we’re sav­ing them for the next generation.

One exam­ple he likes to show vis­i­tors is a vari­ety of squash called trom­bon­cino. The fully ripe squash is some five feet long. “We take this every­where and we show it off,” said Dervaes. “It’s a sym­bol of what we try to go for—heirloom stuff. You can’t worry about what the super­mar­ket car­ries; you have to make your own diet where you live. Eat locally and grow locally. We’ve made a mis­sion out of that one.”

In walk­ing around the gar­dens, you soon dis­cover that fruits and veg­eta­bles are not the only non-human res­i­dents here. Within and behind the build­ing that was once a garage, eight chick­ens, four ducks and two goats make their homes. They pro­vide eggs, com­post and companionship.

The chick­ens are not aver­age vari­eties. Two exam­ples are a hen that is brown with black speck­les and another that is black with broadly feath­ered legs. “We’re try­ing to save these heir­loom chick­ens because the mod­ern chick­ens just lay eggs,” Dervaes explained. “The speck­led one is a Belgian vari­ety and they lay small eggs, but they’re just pets and we also use them for com­post. The black chicken is a cochin, a Chinese vari­ety, and was one of the orig­i­nals; in human terms she’s about ninety or a hun­dred and ten years old. She’s gone past her egg-laying capac­ity but she still eats the food and is good for compost.”

Dervaes then points to a duck. “The ducks are also egg-layers. That’s a khaki camp­bell duck; it’s a her­itage breed from England. It gives some great eggs.”

About the goats? “Goats are for fer­til­izer. They also eat things that we can’t get rid of, like this pile of sticks and leaves. They’ll eat every­thing, includ­ing rose thorns, so they’re our trash compactors.”

At this point, your visit to the Dervaes Gardens is com­ing to an end. You’ve long for­got­ten the world that lurks just out­side, that mod­ern place where won­ders like this are not at all com­mon­place. You’ve been totally cap­ti­vated by the myr­iad smells from the crops and herbs, the sounds of the chirp­ing birds and the buzzing of bees.

But if Dervaes has his way, this is only the begin­ning. “In the old days, peo­ple had rela­tion­ships with nature and con­nec­tions with ani­mals,” he said. “When you remove that and put it in a fac­tory some­place far away, peo­ple for­get about it. When you have a dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ship with your ani­mals and with your plants, when you treat them real well, they respond. Your own health and the health of the planet are inti­mately related, and as a soci­ety we’ve got­ten away from that. So we just brought this all to pass in the city, in our Urban Homestead, and we’re spread­ing the word far and wide.”

To find out more about Dervaes Gardens, visit their web­site (fully cre­ated and main­tained by Jules’ daugh­ter Jordanne) at www.dervaesgardens.com.

You can also find out about the Dervaes fam­ily and their con­tin­u­ing jour­ney by fol­low­ing their blog at www.urbanhomestead.org.

For more infor­ma­tion on soil rem­iner­al­iza­tion, visit www.remineralize.org.