Keeping You Cool and Well Fed Too
by greg peterson
Photo © Carole Topalian

The electric bill at my home, the Urban Farm, was $350 last year—for the entire year. Credit for 40 percent of my savings can be given directly to the solar panels that live on the roof. The rest is the result of getting creative and continually finding additional ways to coax my electric bill ever closer to the “Holy Grail” of $0 per year.

The first comment people always make when they learn about my electric usage is “You must not have air conditioning!” Ah, but I do. However, my evaporative cooler is the first line of defense against our intense desert heat until the humidity wins out (usually sometime in July), and then my air conditioner comes to the rescue. You see, I stick to a very important personal rule: Living a green life is not about suffering or doing without; it is about making wise economic and environmental choices.

Those of you who know me also know that part of my economic choice is to grow a lot of food in my yard. So as you might imagine, my brain couldn’t resist trying to figure out how I could overlap growing food and reducing my electric bill. I came up with a strategy to surround my home with edible shade.

This course of action began with paying attention to the processes that naturally occur in and around my home. My backyard west-facing walls take the brunt of the summer afternoon heat. My outdoor kitchen also faces west. So coming up with a solution for the west side of my home was a priority.

A few years ago the 70+ year-old grapefruit tree in that area decided its lifespan was complete. At just about that same time, a nonchalant Thompson seedless grape vine decided to hoist itself into the 20-foot-tall canopy provided by the barren grapefruit’s trunk and limbs. My job was easy: Pay attention to nature. Before long a “grape tree” developed in the heart of the former grapefruit tree branches. My morphed tree now provides more than enough shade for my outdoor kitchen and a couple hundred pounds of grapes to boot.

The west wall of my office also was ripe for an edible shade solution. So I attached wire fencing to hang from the rafters and today the far-reaching tendrils of the grapevine, as well as loofa gourds, happily grow there. In the heat of the summer both plants grow in harmony, creating a dense blanket of foliage between the wall and the sun that significantly reduces the temperature of the office.

In my east-facing front yard I have taken a different tack. The area on the northeast corner of the house is the lucky recipient of the greywater that flows from one of the bathrooms. Greywater is the water that normally flows down the sink and shower drains to the sewer. The centerpiece for the front yard’s shade and the beneficiary of the greywater system is a Screwbean mesquite tree that is growing straight up, nearly 20 feet tall. (I anticipate that it will reach a final height of about 30 feet.) The mesquite provides a nice filtered shade that allows enough light to pass through it to grow other things under it, so I took the opportunity to nuzzle two apricot and three cherry trees, all of which are bearing fruit this year, under the filtered shade next to the house. The fruit trees create the same kind of barrier to dissipate the extreme summer heat in the front yard as the grape vines provide in the back, further reducing my electric bill.

Although I did not plant the ash tree on the northwest corner of my home, this 50-foot gentle giant also provides summer shade and is responsible for at least a 10-degree temperature drop for half of my house, again significantly cutting electricity costs. While the ash tree doesn’t provide an edible harvest, it supplies bushels of leaves each year that I use to make great organic garden mulch.

Developing strategies to shade the house and grow healthy food are two of my favorite budget-saving efforts. To discover your own electricity savers just sit back and think about how you might most effectively add some edible shade around your home. The financial and edible fruits of your efforts will be well worth it.

Greg Peterson owns the Urban Farm (urbanfarm.org), a sustainability showcase home on one-third of an acre in Central Phoenix.