Creating Community Resiliency Through Diverse Edible Gardens By: Taylor Keefer, Marketing & Communications Specialist
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cross Santa Barbara, there is a network of gardens found within schools, youth centers, shared communit y green spaces, and private homes. These gardens, and the communities of people and organizations that tend them, are centers of innovation and collaboration. They encourage communit y and connection, transform dead spaces into vibrant outdoor classrooms and fight hunger throughout the count y. As interest in gardening grows, our communit y gardens play an important role in fostering a relationship between plants and people. This makes them the perfect foundation for protecting and restoring biodiversit y while demonstrating the power of native plants. In 2021, The Garden partnered with Santa Barbara Cit y College (SBCC) and local nonprofit Explore Ecology, who introduced the Santa Barbara Ecological and Edible (SBEE) Garden Project. The collaboration includes four other diverse nonprofit contributors including El Centro Communit y Center, United Boys & Girls Club, Mesa Harmony Garden, and the Youth Drought Project’s Communit y Food Forest. The project focuses on four pillars: ecology, collaboration, permaculture and food literacy. Several of these gardens introduced “companion plantings” with native plants to entice insect pollinators and other beneficial insects. To better understand the relationship between plants and pollinators, we conducted research on insect pollinators in four of the project’s gardens and at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden. The practice of companion planting is an approach that positions different plants close to one another to enhance growth or protect it from pests. Would this relationship with native pollinators produce a better garden? Working with Gabriella Espiritu, a college intern from SBCC, pollinator surveys were conducted to answer four basic questions: 1. Which insect pollinators are present? 2. How common or rare are they in relation to each other (relative abundance)? 3. What plants are they visiting? 4. Does the presence of native plants at each of these gardens affect the pollinators observed? Reviewing the data collected so far, we have noticed a stark difference in the presence of native bees and other pollinators between The Garden’s pollinator garden and other gardens in our test group. Over half of the visits were from native
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bees at The Garden versus less than a quarter at SBCC and only 15% at La Mesa Harmony garden. Bottom line, native bee visitation was most prevalent in The Garden’s pollinator garden - a location that has the most native plants (by far) of the test group. We spoke with Hugh Kelly, president of Mesa Harmony Garden and one of our valued Garden members, to learn more about the SBEE project through his lens as a certified Permaculture Designer and Master Gardener with the UC Cooperative Extension Service. Q: One of the SBEE project pillars is permaculture. Could you explain to our readers what permaculture design is? A: Mesa Harmony Garden is a communit y food forest and demonstration site with a grounding in permaculture design – an approach to designing landscapes that are rooted in systems thinking. The permaculture design principles help to take the complexit y of social and ecological systems into account to develop long-term sustainabilit y. One part of this approach is to consider the functionalit y of each element of the design in relation to the other elements. The benefits of fresh, locally grown food are becoming ever more apparent, and it doesn’t get any more local than if you grow it yourself. So, one valuable function a plant can perform is food production, but there are many others. For example, planting a low-lying Ceanothus griseus var. horizontalis 'Yankee Point' under the fruit trees fulfills multiple functions – as a groundcover, suppressing weeds, and providing shade to protect the soil and reduce evaporation rates, attracting beneficial insects, and fixing nitrogen in the soil. Q: Why is sustainable urban landscaping and foodscaping important? A: As the benefits of fresh, locally grown food become increasingly apparent, so too are the benefits of growing some of our own food. The amount of underutilized space in our urban landscapes represents a valuable resource going to waste – in backyards and in communit y spaces like the church-owned land that has now become Mesa Harmony Garden. Hundreds of volunteers and workshop attendees have joined us in our learning process as we create naturally healthy and abundant landscapes where no fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides are ever used. Not only are we avoiding all the industrial processes that create those inputs, we’re also avoiding the downstream pollution that they cause. By nurturing healthy soil, attracting beneficial insects opposite page: Danaus plexippus Nectarine (Photo/Gabrielle Espiritu)
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