I spoke with Greg Alder on a video call for nearly two hours as he walked through his extraordinary half-acre farm showing me the fruits of his labors. At the close of our conversation, this master gardener summed up his approach to food gardening with a question: “What if I don’t?” We agreed that would make an excellent title for a book expounding on his horticultural philosophy. As a subtitle, I suggested: “The Contrarian Gardening Wisdom of Greg Alder.” To access Alder’s wisdom go to gregalder.com.
Considering that Alder was a philosophy major in college, it is not surprising that he is forever questioning conventional gardening practices and asking, “What if I don’t?” After all, in order to get a degree in philosophy, you must pass a course in logic, which is all about asking whether something makes sense or not. And it does seem that everything Alder says about growing fruits and vegetables is quite logical and sensible. “Everyone’s always telling you, ‘You have to do this and you have to do that,’” Alder laments, “and my response subconsciously is always, ‘What happens if I don’t?”
Take the matter of fertilization. In the ten years that he has been food gardening in the town of Ramona, 35 miles northeast of San Diego (Sunset zone 20), he has never used fertilizer — neither synthetic nor organic, with the exception of sulfur that he sprinkles around his blueberries once a year, if even that.
Instead, his fruit trees — citrus, avocados, peaches, apples, pomegranates, macadamias, cherries, and his highly prolific pluots — are heavily mulched with wood chips. Under an avocado tree, digging gently with one hand, he reveals a dark layer of “black gold,” as he calls it, four inches deep, that has resulted from wood chip decomposition over the past decade. He shows me avocado feeder roots that have grown into the humus-rich soil. Keep in mind that the feeder roots of any plant, located in the top few inches of soil, are the roots that absorb the minerals that plants need.
What makes the beauty of a wood chip mulch all the more wonderful is that it’s free and constantly available. Most tree trimmers will be more than happy to deposit his load of wood chips on your driveway in order to save the cost of taking it to the dump.
When it comes to his vegetable garden, Alder relies on what he extracts from his chicken coop for keeping his beds primed for growing crops. This material consists of the wood chips that cover the ground where the chickens strut, poultry manure from seven hens and one rooster, as well as fruit and vegetable peels and other kitchen compostables that are scattered over the chips and manure. When his vegetable beds are transitioning from one season’s crops to the next, he spreads a layer of this mixture around his new plants. He will then traverse his beds with a spading fork, plunging it into the earth and rocking it back and forth for two reasons: to work his chicken coop compost into the soil and explore the area for any gophers that might be lurking there.
Gophers are the one garden pest that Alder is fanatic about. No matter what he is doing when surveying his food farm, the moment he sees a fresh gopher mound he immediately drops everything and sets a trap. His efforts have been rewarded as many years have gone by since he saw any gopher damage to his plants. His gopher trap of choice goes by the name of Cinch.
Although Alder grows a large variety of fruit trees, his passion is for avocados. I asked how many varieties he grows, and he said over 40, but then he added that he has around 30 trees. How can this be? Well, it turns out that he has grafted more than one variety onto some of his trees. This is sometimes a challenge when one variety grows faster than another. However, he reasons that if he is trying a new variety, it makes no sense to allocate space for an individual tree of that variety if the quality of its fruit does not measure up.
When I asked Alder about his favorite varieties, he mentioned two that have been the backbone of the California avocado industry since its inception over a hundred years ago — the green Fuerte and the black Hass. He also extols the Reed variety and is especially enthusiastic about Gwen, a green-skinned Hass descendant that he recommends due to the compact architecture of the tree, making it ideal for small backyard growing. While having two different types of avocado trees is an insurance policy for maximum yield, he has also seen many cases of solitary Hass trees that bear huge crops.
One of Alder’s discoveries was that you don’t need honeybees to produce an abundant avocado crop. Commercial avocado growers rent apiaries housing the common European honeybee to pollinate their trees. Alder, however, noticed very few honeybees on his avocado flowers last year but a plethora of native bees instead. He harvested enormous crops last year that were larger than those of growers who relied on honeybees for pollination.
He attracts native bees — that do not build colonies — by crafting bee hotels. These hotels are 2 x 4’s with holes drilled halfway through. Each hole serves as a nest for a native bee. Alder has more than a half-acre of native vegetation adjoining his food farm that includes California native plants — sages, buckwheats, elderberry, and ceanothus — that are magnets to native bees. He also grows lady phacelia, a species that he extols as more attractive to native bees than any other plant.
Alder’s philosophy regarding weeding perfectly represents his “What if I don’t?” mindset. The accepted wisdom on this subject is to remove weeds with their roots. Alder says otherwise. He cuts weeds off just below ground level for two reasons. He wants the roots to stay in place since they contain minerals that, as the roots decompose, will enrich the soil. The act of pulling a weed out by the roots also brings weed seeds to the surface where they will quickly germinate.
When it comes to pruning fruit trees, Alder’s approach is based on a single consideration: keeping the trees at a height that makes harvesting easy. He does not allow his deciduous fruit trees to get taller than seven feet. His citrus and avocado trees grow taller since their fruit lends itself to pole pruning, but he makes an effort never to let any tree grow so tall that a ladder is needed to harvest it.
.Where pest control is concerned, Alder’s attitude is laissez-faire. Pointing out aphids that had contorted leaves of a shoot on a pluot tree, he said that they never bother him and he does not consider aphids to be a pest. He said that birds do nibble on his cherries but he does not necessarily use bird netting since he is OK relinquishing some of his crop to avian creatures. Speaking of cherries, Alder mentioned that new varieties have been developed that fruit in mild winter climates, even when grown adjacent to the beach. In his own garden, a Lapins cherry tree has been quite fruitful.
California native of the week: One of the plants growing on land adjacent to Alder’s food garden is chamise or greasewood (Adenostoma fasciculatum). It’s generally considered to be the most widely occurring species of all California natives and dominates chaparral vegetation. It typically grows from five to 12 feet tall but a prostrate version is also seen on the Channel Islands. This is not a species for planting in wildfire-prone areas due to its flammability. It resembles heather with needle-like leaves and tightly held small, brilliant white flowers, but is actually a member of the rose family. Chamise is an outstanding plant for attracting native bees.
If you have any unconventional gardening practices to recommend, please send them to joshua@perfectplants.com. Your questions, comments, and gardening predicaments are always welcome.
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