The cell is not only cleaning the winery’s effluent, it is creating a new alternative fuel. Bacteria inside digest organic waste from water used to rinse barrels and wash grapes. While cleaning the runoff, the cell produces hydrogen, a gas that emits water vapor when it’s burned, rather than air-dirtying carbon dioxide. Although still in the research stage, this project hints at a future in which sustainable energy can be farmed from the agricultural byproducts of Northern California’s wineries, breweries, and distilleries.

It takes an astounding amount of energy to produce a glass of pinot grigio or a bottle of ale, and the process also creates a deep and fast-flowing waste stream. It can take up to seventeen gallons of water to make a single gallon of wine, which is formidable considering that California—perennially in drought—annually produces 580 million gallons of vino. And even mid-size breweries can generate tens of thousands of tons of solid waste each year. Turning effluent and solid waste into a fuel source, though, could help producers solve the problems of limited power and seemingly unlimited byproducts. No wonder, then, that the state’s alcoholic beverage industry is hoping to turn its trash into energy-rich treasure.

“Have you seen The Matrix?” asks Bruce Logan, director of the Environmental Engineering Institute at Penn State. Designer of the microbial electrolysis cell, Logan is working with Napa Wine to put his thinking into action. “In the movie, they hooked up humans in this goo to make energy,” he says. “That’s science fiction, but what we’re doing is not. We’re using microbes to break down glucose, alcohol, and other traces in the wastewater to make an electrical current and hydrogen.”

Electromicrobiology, the use of bacteria to generate electricity, may offer an alternative to expensive, scarce, and climate-damaging petroleum and coal. This plan for turning waste into renewable energy appealed to Andrew Hoxsey, the managing partner of Napa Wine and a fourth-generation winegrower who refuses to be yoked by operating conventions, such as spraying pesticides. Under his direction, the company’s 635 acres of vines were certified organic in the 1980s, long before “sustainable” was a buzzword. “My grandparents didn’t use many chemicals, basically just some Roundup, and learning to live without those few chemicals was pretty easy. We don’t know how else to do it,” Hoxsey says. “We’re focused on doing things with less impact environmentally.”

Hoxsey also keeps tabs on the hydrogen industry (“I’m adamant that hydrogen should be looked at more closely as a power source,” he explains), so when he learned of Logan’s studies in Pennsylvania, he offered his winery as a site for a pilot project. Researchers from Penn State installed the device last September; today, despite the overcast skies, Hoxsey stands in a lot behind the winery’s tasting room, unshivering before the box. Wearing a cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes, he gestures towards the fuel cell. “Microbes—we call them ‘bugs’—are present in the soil, in wine barrels and in water treatment ponds,” he says. “You can’t see them and the concept of them is way out there, but they’re there. We’re using these bugs to produce electricity.”

He outlines the process: The bacteria, living on bottle brush-like fibers inside the box, eat the sugary leftovers of grapes and exhale clean water. Meanwhile, a small amount of energy pumped in unites protons and electrons to form hydrogen. On a good day, the box produces the equivalent of five gallons of diesel—not much in the grand scheme of winery operations, but Hoxsey is unfazed. For now, the project uses just a fraction of the winery’s effluent because scientists are working out glitches in the cell’s design. (The vast majority of the winery’s wastewater is currently diverted
to ponds, where other kinds of bacteria clean it before it irrigates the vineyards.) “We’re learning a lot,” Hoxsey says. “Eventually we’ll store the hydrogen in a battery or cell, but for now we’re testing the feasibility. You could run a car with the hydrogen it makes or generate energy to power our winery. Hydrogen gives more alternatives than electricity.”

Although Logan estimates it will be another three to five years before the technology is used on a larger scale, a project like this is a tantalizing taste of what the alcoholic beverage industry could do to harvest its own energy. The idea of eco-friendly wine-making is certainly growing: Membership in the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance, which Hoxsey chaired in 2008 and 2009, has nearly tripled in the last five years, to 1,237 vineyards and 329 wineries statewide. While Hoxsey’s hydrogen cell may be unique, throughout the state other beverage companies are brewing up similarly innovative solutions.

The view from atop Chico, California’s Sierra Nevada Brewing Company roof is breathtaking. Blue skies and sun—the first clear day the region has seen in weeks—shine on a dizzying quilt of 10,000 rectangular solar panels. The brewery’s 200,000 square feet of blue silicon plates make it one of the country’s largest private solar arrays, but a row of large silos off to the left offers another glimpse of the company’s attempts to operate off the grid.

Each of those silos contains almost 25,000 gallons of beer. To craft that beer, brewers boil the grains, filter out the solids, cool the product, then add yeast to the liquid. That slurry sits in fermenters—the silos—for ten to fourteen days. Yeast, a single-celled organism, eats sugars from the malt and hops. As it digests its food, the yeast exhales carbon dioxide and produces alcohol. But instead of releasing the greenhouse gas into the air, Sierra Nevada diverts it to a storage tank, where it is cleaned and pressurized. It later plays a vital role in the brewery’s operations, adding carbonation
to some of the brews and pushing beer from one boiler to another via a labyrinthine series of tubes and pipes. “Our philosophy is a closed-loop approach,” says Cheri Chastain, Sierra Nevada’s sustainability coordinator. “We take the byproducts of brewing and use them for something we need.”

This both saves money and reduces greenhouse gasses, she says. “Carbon dioxide is usually a big purchase for carbonation and dispensing,” Chastain explains. “With the recovery system in place, we’re not releasing carbon dioxide and we’re supplying a hundred percent of what we need. It’s a free fuel source and we have it on-site, so we might as well use it.”

Sierra Nevada employs mindful production elsewhere. Chastain walks nearly the entire loop of the twelve-acre facility, which exudes the sticky-sour smell of yeast and hops familiar to anyone who has visited a fraternity after a keg party. Chastain points out the silos that store spent barley until it’s fed to steers destined to end up as hamburgers in the brewery’s restaurant; she describes the ultra-efficiencies of the boilers, lighting, and bottling line. After all, she says, “You can create all the green energy you want, but if you’re not using it efficiently, it defeats the purpose.”

Squinting against the sun, she gestures toward a set of metal containers shaped like upside-down pyramids. The three giraffe-height vessels hold 300,000 gallons of wastewater that’s been used to rinse fermenters and bottles, along with billions of bacteria that are busy chomping sugars
and cleaning the detritus-laden water. These microbes generate methane as they eat, and instead of being released into the air, the gas—more than twenty times more corrosive to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide—is pumped back to the plant to power boilers. Although methane isn’t innocuous (it releases carbon dioxide when used), it offsets the brewery’s need to buy natural gas, a finite source of energy that expels its own atmosphere-altering compounds. And while Sierra Nevada does buy some natural gas, it generates 84 percent of its own energy through its combination of solar arrays, gas reclamation and fuel cells—up from 65 percent in 2008.

The brewery also takes a cue from iconoclasts who power their cars on deep fryer oil. Sierra Nevada recently purchased a biodiesel processor designed by Chico State University graduates, and the machine converts its restaurant’s dirty vegetable oil into about a hundred gallons of biodiesel a month. That clean-burning fuel powers trucks delivering beer around town. Sierra Nevada is also investigating other alternative fuel sources, including distilled ethanol from spent grains. “We hope that not just the brewing industry, but all industries, follow suit and work to make their operations more efficient,” Chastain says. “We believe that all manufacturing should be done in the most sustainable manner possible.”

Six hours’ drive south of Chico, Sun-Maid embraces an “ecosystem” approach to operations, turning its waste into products that help the environment and the company’s bottom line, says Vaughn Kiligan, Sun-Maid’s director of corporate sustainability. Although better known for its raisins, Sun-Maid also produces alcohol from sub-par grapes that is later turned into brandy and sherry. At the company’s distillery in Orange Cove, just southeast of Fresno, grape juice is transformed into toast-worthy spirits via a method largely powered by biofuel.

To make alcohol, heat is applied to fermented fruit juice in a still. As the liquid evaporates, it produces concentrated alcohol and leaves behind a mush of sugars and grape solids. For the last twenty years, Sun-Maid, run as a cooperative of grower-owners, has taken those “slops” and run them through a methane digester, a state-of-the-art device when it was installed in the 1980s. Just as in Sierra Nevada’s water treatment, microbes eat the leftovers and exude methane. That gas is harnessed and burned to heat the still that will produce alcohol and more waste for the digester. The repurposed byproducts provide sixty percent of the energy needed to power the still, slashing the company’s natural gas consumption.

“We’re not opposed to saving money, and we wanted to deal with the waste in a way that gives maximum returns to the co-op members,” Charles Feaver, vice president of the distillery at Sun-Maid, says of the company’s decision to install the methane digester years ago. “We’re also concerned with sustainability, and it’s a win-win on both accounts. Farmers are not interested in wasting water, contaminating land, or anything else other than the health of the land and making a profit. After all, growers and farmers were the first environmentalists.”

Microbe-powered boilers, repurposed waste products and recovered greenhouse gases all seem like logical ideas in an era of dwindling resources. Yet creating alternative energy within a company can be capital-intensive. For example, Sierra Nevada’s Chastain estimates it will take another nine years for the brewery’s solar array to pay for itself. The hydrogen cell at Napa Wine is so experimental it probably won’t even have a price tag for years, but like methane digesters, solar arrays, and other industrial-sized energy conversion technologies, it likely won’t come cheap. As a result, it is often fiscally impossible for small producers to hop on the waste-to-energy bandwagon.

Ryan Donnelly, co-founder of Miracle One Wine, a Napa County producer of chardonnays and pinot noirs, wanted to craft impressive wines “at the least cost to the environment,” he says. Yet being part of a small start-up meant that he couldn’t try the energy-saving projects that Napa Wine Company, Sun-Maid, and Sierra Nevada champion. “We’re just getting started and don’t have the capital to do our own solar power or wastewater treatment,” he says. Remaining committed to eco-friendly practices, though, Donnelly and Miracle One moved in with Sonoma Wine Company, a co-op style warehouse for small producers. “We chose to make our wine at their facility because of their sustainability efforts,” Donnelly explains. “One of the interesting things they do for us is save our wine waste for Green Energy Network to produce ethanol.”

Ethanol, the once-lauded alternative to gasoline, has been criticized as a fuel source, because some farmers now prefer to grow corn for fuel production, rather than the edible crops needed to sustain their communities. Green Energy Network’s solution circumvents these criticisms by distilling unsalable wine—an already-existing product—into ethanol. “Wineries in our area have to dispose of some wines for one reason or another. They don’t dump it—that’s wasteful and it causes environmental problems,” explains Damon Knutson, co-founder of Green Energy Network. As he walks around the yard outside his Sebastopol home, sheep bleat noisily in the background, occasionally interrupting his train of thought. “The waste has to be dealt with, and what we do is take their wine and distill it to 190-proof alcohol to blend with gasoline,” he says. Knutson and his brother Durrell run the business mostly as a hobby, he concedes; it remains secondary to his career in construction.

If their operation looks somewhat makeshift, that’s because it is: The Knutson brothers have cobbled together their experience in construction, solar technology, plumbing and alternative energy promotion to create a self-powered distillery. Their homemade still is twelve feet high; wrapped in silver insulation and looking like a prop from a campy space-age movie, it stands alongside dark gray tanks holding wine outside a friend’s furniture store. Trucks from Sonoma Wine Company periodically crunch over the gravel lot to drop off pallets of reds and whites that can’t be sold, either because they’re too old or mislabeled. Damon Knutson distills all the alcohol from the wine, pours the finished product back into the original bottles and sells the biofuel to members of the Green Energy Network, who add it to their tanks with regular gasoline. At $3.80 a gallon, it may seem cheaper to simply fill up at a nearby Chevron, especially because adding ethanol can reduce a car’s efficiency. “But you’re still increasing your mileage per gallon of gas, and our product is essentially carbon-neutral because it’s made by converting a waste product in a low-energy process,” Knutson explains.

The Green Energy Network is small—Knutson can’t keep up with the wine that arrives from the co-op members at Sonoma Wine Company and has had to start storing it—but he plans to more than double his current output of a hundred gallons of ethanol a week. Yet the point he wants to prove is clear: By pooling resources—or rather their waste—minor wineries such as Miracle One can outsource the waste-to-energy procedure. The partnership benefits the wineries (which would otherwise have to pay to dispose of their waste), the innovator (Green Energy Network turns a free material into a salable product) and consumers (individuals reduce the impact of driving a car with a local substitute for gas). The symbiosis between Green Energy Network and Sonoma Wine Company demonstrates that even the little guys can get in on the alternative fuel game.

This front yard, producing pounds of food each week, is not, after all, just like the others next door. Where a lawn used to be now sprouts food: artichokes blooming like dahlias, red-green tomatoes hiding like treasures among acrid-smelling leaves, and tiny lettuces unfurling in the sun.

Sylvaiette and Den Hill, the home’s owners, planted their front yard garden in early 2009 as an eco-friendly alternative to a water- and chemical-guzzling lawn. The garden now uses a drip irrigation system, and the Hills harvest almost all their vegetables from it, only buying eggs and some fruit at the farmers’ market. “Before, our lawn served no purpose,” explains Sylvaiette Hill, who has shoulder-length graying hair and an easy laugh. “We save on money and water, and we give away the extra food we can’t eat.”

As the recession drags on, more homeowners of every income level are replacing expensive and water-intensive patches of grass with miniature farms that become at home produce aisles. In 2009, the number of Americans growing at least some of their own food was expected to jump 19 percent from the previous year to 43 million households, according to the National Gardening Association. And in today’s economy where sales seem to go only one direction—down—sales of gardening supplies are up. Seed sales at Burpee Seed Company, one of the nation’s largest and oldest home gardening providers, have risen thirty percent this year. Even First Lady Michelle Obama set aside some of the White House’s South Lawn to grow food. Like the Victory gardeners of World War II, families are using growing food to demonstrate solidarity against common crises—the specters of peak oil, tainted food scares and, most of all, the malingering economy.

Some families, of course, have long relied on gardening for help managing on a tight budget. Abeni Ramsey, an Oakland single mother of two daughters, had always wanted to serve her family healthy dishes made from quality ingredients. Yet while commuting to school at UC Davis to earn her bachelor’s degree in agriculture, she couldn’t find enough money to put nourishing food on the table. She filled her pantry with donations from a crisis food bank for a time, but the choices were so nutritionally barren that she applied for state assistance. The monthly $350 in food stamps only bought so many organic fruits and vegetables, and she supplemented with $150 of her own money to buy whatever was on sale—usually two-for-one cereals and breads at Safeway. She had to fill her girls’ stomachs but hated serving them prepackaged junk. “I asked myself, ‘What can I do to make sure my kids get fed?’” she says.

Three years ago, Ramsey applied to the nonprofit City Slicker Farms’ Backyard Gardening Program, which installs gardens in West Oakland homes and gives low income individuals the knowledge and resources to grow their own food. In a single Saturday, City Slicker Farms employees ripped out the dead grass behind Ramsey’s home and replaced it with raised beds, a compost system, and her favorite crops. Since then, Ramsey has added more beds, installed a rain catchment system to save water for irrigating, and begun raising goats and chickens. This summer she began working for City Slicker Farms as the community market farm coordinator, managing the organization’s organic produce stall.

Gardening at home is a lot of work, but Ramsey says it pays off. “Winter gardening isn’t as glorious as summer gardening,” she says. “It’s a pain to feed the chickens and muck out the coop in the rain, and I grow plants that have a longer maturity time, like turnips, onions and potatoes. But it makes economic sense to grow my own.”

Ramsey and her girls, ages thirteen and six, now devour meals made mostly of vegetables picked from their yard. They eat canned pickles, tomatoes, and green beans Ramsey puts up. Both of the girls help in the garden, and the only time they get sugary cereal is when they visit their grandparents. “Our diet has improved significantly, and I haven’t been to the grocery store in two weeks,” Ramsey says. Instead of stocking up on shelf-stable packaged goods and produce that might go bad in a few days, she simply steps outside to pick kale, blueberries, or leeks. “You can’t do that on $350 a month in food stamps,” she says.

Barbara Finnin, City Slicker Farms’ executive director, points out that although California produces roughly thirteen percent of the country’s farm commodities, many urban communities here have limited access to healthy food. As long as the neighborhood bodega is the only nearby source of groceries, obesity, diabetes and other health issues so prevalent in poor areas will continue, she maintains. “Fritos, cereal, and maybe a mealy apple aren’t exactly life-affirming or enriching foods,” Finnin says. “People in low-income communities don’t have access to the organic food they want to eat. No one I know says, ‘Please give me pesticides,’ but they don’t have the choice.”

City Slicker Farms now installs a new garden every week, and has a waiting list about ten people deep, but Finnin says requests for garden installations have not skyrocketed during the recession. “In West Oakland, people have been dealing with an economic crisis for years,” she says. “It’s nothing new.”

What is new, though, is an increasing cultural awareness that the perfectly groomed front lawn—long a status symbol for American homeowners—may not be the most productive use of that space, nor all that good for the environment. Sylvaiette Hill, for example, decided to get rid of the grass in her front yard after watching water roll off the lawn and into a storm drain night after night. Dedicating so many resources to an unused patch of grass, especially in drought-weary California, seemed wasteful. “We wanted to do something different,” she explains.

Hill grew up with an expansive garden in her family’s backyard. Although she treasures the memory of stepping outside to bite into a sun-warmed tomato, the other parts of growing food—especially hauling buckets of water—pushed her and her husband to farm out the labor. Last March she hired Garden Fare, a San Francisco-based landscaping and gardening company that specializes in edible gardens, to convert her lawn and do weekly upkeep. The eye-catching sunburst layout of the beds gardener Leslie Bennett installed produces a startling amount of food: at their peak, three tomato plants yielded a whopping twenty pounds of tomatoes a week. “It was tomatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner!” Hill says with a laugh.

All those tomatoes would have cost the environment plenty had Hill bought them from the grocery store. Growing organically at home eliminates the need for chemical-based fertilizers and pesticides, as well as for energy-intensive hothouse growing methods. The tomato you pick outside the front door makes a significantly shorter trek than the 1,500-mile trip the average veggie takes to market—and there’s no need for fossil fuelburning transportation.

Growing food instead of a lawn has less quantifiable benefits, too. In the fall of 2008, Zachary Norris replaced his front lawn with an edible garden for the usual reasons: “Watering my lawn was a waste of money and bad for the environment, and I wanted more access to fresh fruits and vegetables,” he says of his decision to grow food in the lot sandwiched between a walkway and his driveway.

He had no idea that his garden would also grow him friends. Norris says that before he began gardening, he didn’t really talk to his neighbors, even though he has lived in the same Oakland neighborhood for most of his life. But once his front yard began to sprout greens and edible flowers, passersby stopped to admire his work or offer advice. (Admittedly, he needed it: Norris didn’t have much gardening experience, so he ate the immature shoots of red onions until realizing he was sabotaging his onion crop, and he struggled to subdue an enormous dinosaur kale that threatened to overtake the garden.) He found himself engaged in conversations with neighbors as he picked ingredients for dinner, and soon enough, strangers turned into friends. “There are these intangible benefits of offering people food and people stopping by to say hello,” Norris says.

Once he got the hang of raising food, Norris found himself with a new problem: The garden yielded much more produce than he and his wife, Saru Jayaraman, could eat. Loath to see such nutritious fare become landfill fodder, he now brings the extra strawberries, chard, and squash to his mother across the street, his neighbors, and his coworkers. Instead of trashing tomatoes that refused to ripen, he passed them to a neighbor who made them into relish. And instead of borrowing food—from his mother or sister, or from a neighbor with a catering business who sometimes gave him leftovers—Norris has a chance to be the generous one. “Now I have more to give back,” he says. “I can offer things in return.”

Norris’ refusal to let such abundance go to waste is the spirit that Amy Franceschini, co-creator of the San Francisco Garden Registry, wants to harness. She and her partners created a Web site, GardenRegistry.org, where San Francisco gardeners post alerts of their surpluses for others to pick up. Franceschini sees the interest in local and urban agriculture as the epitome of relying on others. “It’s more than a fad; it’s a concern about where our food comes from, and everyone has to be involved in this food crisis,” she says.

Devin Slavin has taken that concept of communal sustainability to a most entertaining extreme. Along with a friend, two years ago the 27-year-old permaculture designer started the Grow Food Party Crew, and since then he and a veritable army of volunteers have converted about 25 lawns into gardens in Santa Cruz, Ventura, Ojai, and other nearby cities. Slavin and an average of thirty volunteers gather at an individual’s home and spend the day ripping out sod, filling in dirt, and tucking starts into the newly tilled soil—for free.

If a full day of manual labor doesn’t sound appealing, keep in mind that Slavin very consciously calls his project a party crew. Participants bring a guitar or set of bongos for an impromptu concert, a potluck-style spread is served at lunch and children come to help (or simply play in the dirt). “When we first started, we were like ‘Whoa, that was easy and one of the funnest things we’ve ever done,’” Slavin remembers. “We asked friends to pitch in, and all of a sudden we have gardens all over the place.”

News of his group has spread by word of mouth and YouTube videos, and communities as far away as Germany and New Zealand have started their own party crews. Slavin offers his services to everyone, not only low-income or underserved families. “A lot of people face the challenge of opening up their lives to the community and asking for help,” Slavin observes. “But once we get past that, we create an opportunity for the community to make a contribution. People really want to pitch in—that’s another kind of nourishment.”

Slavin thrives on encouraging neighbors to help each other and introducing people who otherwise would never have met. “People who have never gardened come in and experience something they unfortunately don’t get in many places, a feeling of belonging to a village, working together peacefully and having fun,” he says.

Although growing your own food usually pays off in the long run—all the gardeners interviewed for this story spend less on groceries these days because of their harvests—the start-up costs can be daunting. Soil amendments, planter boxes, starts, and fertilizer add up, and of course, you still have to water.

Yet thrifty urban farmers have found penny-saving shortcuts everywhere. Composting yard waste and table scraps yields nutrient-rich fertilizer in a few months while diverting garbage from the dump. Sprouting seeds yourself, especially ones you save from your plants, can minimize the need to shop at pricey nurseries. Installing rain catchment systems can stop the need of a hose for weeks, and putting in a graywater system can delay it for months. Heather Flores, author of Food not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a Community, says that by reusing graywater, swapping seeds, and sharing tools, she’s brought her gardening tab close to zero. According to City Slicker Farms’ annual report, 92 percent of its participants say they save money by gardening.

Of course, growing your own food still requires an investment of time. But even so, many people overestimate the commitment it takes, says Flores. “People should expect to put the same amount of energy into a garden as they do with their current lawn maintenance,” she estimates. Most of the gardeners interviewed for this story spend fifteen to thirty minutes most days working in their plots and more during intensive periods, such as planting time.

Many gardeners don’t look at the hours spent with their crops as a chore but rather as a restorative activity. “It’s so satisfying,” Ramsey says of her morning work in the garden. “It’s nice to have a reason to get up in the morning besides going to work. It’s my meditation time: I get connected to the world in a more substantial way.”

That bond often extends beyond the confines of a yard to encompass a larger ecology. On a clear fall day, Leslie Bennett, the Garden Fare gardener who designed and tends the Hills’ patch, is doing upkeep and gathering the week’s harvest. She plucks mature lettuces, pinches off yellowed tomato leaves, and surveys the front yard oasis. “Who cares about a lawn?” she asks. “But if your yard is special and it grows your food, you’ll develop a strong feeling for the garden, the land, and, by extension, the environment. It’s so close that you realize you can’t pollute the ground if you eat from it.”

That connection is clear in the Hills’ garden. Sharpiescrawled labels on wooden spoons and spatulas peek out among crawling vines and delicate-looking shoots, identifying each crop. Bennett pauses from her harvesting, wipes her dirty hands on her jeans and points to the weather-worn markers. “They’re the perfect metaphor for the cycle that links us all from till to table.”

Tear up the lawn. Grass, much like invasive English Ivy, is a hardy colonizer, so you’ll have to physically remove it if you want to plant this winter. First, rip out as much sod as you can. Next, dig down a foot and a half to remove the root system, shaking out as much soil as possible. A rototiller may be faster than hand labor, but the machine will leave behind pieces of roots that will regrow grass.

For a less time-intensive process, and if you can wait until spring to plant, cover the grass with non-waxed cardboard and then add a six inch-deep layer of mulch, such as wood chips. After about three months, the grass beneath the cardboard will have died, nutrients from the cover will have trickled down, and you can plant directly into the mulch. (If you buy the mulch from a tree care company, make sure the chips aren’t contaminated with diseases that attack local trees, such as eucalyptus and elm, so your soil doesn’t become infected, too.)

Amend the dirt. Much of the soil in Northern California is clay-based, so you’ll need to add nutrients for a healthy growing medium. Soil enhancers such as manures, compost, and fish emulsions will give the ground the nutrients it needs to yield a bountiful crop. Many municipalities and nonprofits offer free or discounted compost, too.

Plan your garden. You’ll want a mix of trees and perennials, such as drought-resistant citrus or pomegranates, annuals (your produce), and pollinator-attracting native plants, such as Mexican Marigolds. Read seed labels or talk with a nursery employee to learn when and how to plant each variety. Think about the layout—for instance, you may want herbs close to the door, since you’ll use them often for cooking—and the design of the paths to make tending the area easy.

Plant your garden. Although we tend to think of gardening as a springtime activity, in much of coastal Northern California, winter is an ideal time to start. The soil is less active so your plants will have an easier time settling in. The season is also perfect for planting winter crops such as beans and peas, as they capture nitrogen—an element essential for produce yet scarce in nature—and make it available for the rest of the year’s abundance.

Get more information. DIY can only get you so far; if you need help, seek it out from fellow gardeners, Web sites, or books. Thayer recommends An Introduction to Permaculture by Bill Mollison and Sunset magazine’s Western Garden Book.

Thayer reminds gardeners that growing your own food is often a process of trial and error. Don’t be discouraged by setbacks or daunted by the idea of perfection, he says. And while planning is essential for a successful garden, nothing will grow before you begin. So start digging!