Ask An Expert: How starting a "resiliency garden" can help the Potomac River
/How to score a win for clean water (and your stomach!) with a garden of any size
Photo Courtesy of the CHesapeake Bay Program
Edamarie Mattei, owner of Backyard Bounty, is an expert on sustainable gardening. Her company understands the value of native plants, productive yards, and smart water usage for our river (and business!)
Her years of experience have also taught her the wisdom of turning to plants in a crisis.
But what’s the real reason she’s so passionate about getting the most out of the ground? Like most of us, she’s motivated by a delicious meal!
Here’s Edamarie’s personal story of how home-grown food helped her through hard times and her expert tips on turning your yard (or windowsill!) into a river-friendly “resiliency garden”!
A family history of resilience and resourcefulness
“My Italian-American family loves to talk food.
EdaMarie’s Grandparents on their backyard “farm”
So after I ate at Chez Panisse for the first time in 1990, the first thing I did was call my father. I started to rave about the main course – the best poultry I’d ever eaten. “What was it” asked Dad. “Squab, you know, pigeon.” I replied, “It was amazing. So much more flavor than chicken.”
Dad laughed and then groaned. “Edamarie, I will never eat pigeon again.”
Dad was born in 1925 and grew up during the Great Depression. He and his family survived the Depression because my grandparent’s transformed what could have been a tiny lawn into a small farm.
The family grew and preserved their own produce, raised chickens, rabbits and pigeons, collected coal that fell off trains that ran along the tracks next to their house for heat, and spent the precious money my grandfathers earned on olive oil and Parmesan.
I grew up in suburban New Jersey in a split-level house built on what had previously been Quaker farmland with a 2-car garage and a large lawn. Except for a few tomato and zucchini plants in the summer, all our food came from grocery stores and local farmstands.
Dad ate pigeon. I ate squab.”
The importance of productive land: yards v. gardens
“My grandparents grew sustenance on productive land in order to survive.
My college-educated parents grew lawn that we used for games of tag and our swing set.
EdaMarie’s south jersey childhood home
In the 1970’s, my parent’s use of land was called ‘progress’. In the 1990’s, that first great meal at Chez Panisse awakened me to an ever-deepening understanding of the environmental degradation our suburban plots and industrial agricultural system have created. The more I learned, the more I wanted to return to gardens.
Eventually, I quit my job as a teacher to study sustainable land systems and begin building them through the company I named for my grandparents, Backyard Bounty.”
Remembering the power of plants in a time of crisis
As we isolate to contain Covid-19, we are all reminded of how powerful nature is and how much we need it to survive.
Now is the time to learn about the native plants that we can grow to maintain habitat and biodiversity.
Now is the time to learn how to grow herbs and vegetables to sustain us in organic, biodynamic systems.
Now is the time to re-double our efforts to protect our water, wildlife and habitat.”
Photo courtesy of chesapeake bay program
How you can get back to nature and get gardening
“All of us at Backyard Bounty are busy figuring out ways to share this knowledge with our community, through our blogs and Instagram posts.
We’re posting weekly information about native plants blooming now, finding them in walks in the woods our neighborhoods or in the Lee Dennison Sustainable Garden demonstration garden we recently designed and installed in the Town of Chevy Chase. After installation in Fall 2019, the garden is just now starting to have its first blooms.
We’ve started up our own backyard and indoor ‘Victory Gardens’ and are taking pictures to show you what we are growing and how we are growing it.
We are supporting organizations that take care of our environment such as Potomac Conservancy.
And if you are looking for cooking inspiration, my cousin Julie Mattei has compiled a collection of Italian family recipes and stories inspired by our grandparents at her site Delicious Memories!
Our hope is that we’ll inspire you the way we are inspired to get outside and cherish nature to use our land constructively and productively. Now, more than ever, we need it to survive.”
Edamarie Mattei is the owner of Backyard Bounty, a DC area landscape firm committed to helping our environment by helping customers and communities design, build and maintain sustainable, native, clean water landscapes. Backyard Bounty recently received the Carol Carter Excellence Award from Montgomery County for our work on environmentally-friendly landscapes. Learn more >
