Earth-friendly lifestyle finds sustenance close to home

WALTERBORO — Everything in Shawn Jadrnicek's yard serves a purpose, even the flowering bentwood fence in front that looks like little more than an amateur's attempt at topiary.

"That's to distract my neighbors," he said.

Behind that fence, Jadrnicek (pronounced Yon-uh-chek) created an ecosystem that feeds his family and requires no maintenance. He grows only edible plants, recycles water running off his roof and raises worms and larvae to feed his tilapia and chickens.

Some would call it sustainable living. But Jadrnicek, a 32-year-old horticulture agent with Clemson University, worries that pop culture already has perverted that phrase. What he's doing here is more than "going green" and, at the same time, even simpler.

This, he said, is the business of "Earth stewardship."

Chewing the scenery

Jadrnicek, before landing in Walterboro, supervised an organic herb farm in Virginia and then started an organic edible flower farm in California. He moved here, to this little pink house on the outskirts of town, with his wife and 9-year-old daughter in 2005. Within a year, he began transforming it into the Urban Permaculture Institute of the Southeast.

Permaculture, he explained, means living harmoniously with an environment in which everything has multiple functions.

"My first goal was to eliminate the lawn," he said. Mowing grass, after all, uses energy, pollutes the air and returns nothing.

He dug up a camellia bush, sold it for $1,000 and used the money to buy plants with a purpose. With little sentimentality, he remembered, "It was very beautiful but not very functional."

In that same spirit, he killed off the azaleas to make room for blueberries.

Now he has prickly pears, pomegranates, figs, asparagus, loquats, Jerusalem artichokes and some less traditional foods: Edible daylilies with a reputation for causing gas. Poisonous poke berries with leaves that, when harvested and processed precisely, make a fine spinach substitute. And kudzu because the invasive weed makes a bitter alternative to collard greens.

"It's just an edible landscape, really," Jadrnicek said, plucking a kudzu leaf from the side of his house and popping it into his mouth.

He now grows about 10 percent of his family's food here, but as his system matures, he hopes it will meet half his needs.

Low maintenance

Jadrnicek already is under way on his next task. He demolished a chunk of his house, previously his kitchen, with plans to lay a glass-enclosed concrete slab. It will take cold air from inside, he said, heat it and send it up and back through the house in the winter. As for the kitchen, he moved his water, gas and drain lines farther in and bought all new appliances online.

Jadrnicek gives tours of his system in between his job and other obligations: responding to people who need help identifying plants (he gets about 10 calls a day), teaching a Master Gardener class and helping with side projects, including the Jasper County Farmers Market.

The biggest misconception, he said, is that Earth stewardship demands a lot of work.

"There's no maintenance in the system. There's only harvesting," he said. "If you have to maintain your system, it's not working properly."

In his pond, for instance, a gravel-filled trench filters the water before it travels to a settling pool. Muck accumulates there, ready to be scooped out and used as fertilizer for the yard.

The water then moves through vegetation that filters it further before it reaches the part of the pond where tilapia live. A few bass there keep the tilapia from overpopulating.

Jadrnicek feeds both his fish and chickens with earthworms that grow beneath his basil plants and soldier-fly larvae that turn up in his compost piles.

He wastes little. Soggy logs, after he drills into them and injects them with mushroom mycelia, become a personal shiitake crop. Dead bamboo from around his block becomes a backyard fence. And dried leaves from his neighbors' trash piles make perfect compost.

"People don't like to tolerate a lot of death and decay," he said. "Without having death and decay, you can't have life."

Razing revenue

Jadrnicek wonders when people will catch on to how easy it is to save money and support the environment. But harvesting worms and eating yard-farmed salads won't appeal to everyone.

On a smaller scale, though, Earth-steward initiatives have crept into the local culture.

One Mount Pleasant woman, Rebecca O'Brien, runs South Carolina Sustainable Deconstruction, a nonprofit corporation that keeps reusable materials off the fast track to the landfill after a building comes down.

O'Brien hires low-income or unskilled laborers to work a site and then carefully takes apart the property at the same cost as a traditional demolition. Then she sells recovered materials at a secondhand price.

"I can't keep a piece of used two-by-four," she said.

Social service groups turn to her for work, while startup businesses turn to her for supplies.

That spirit of resourcefulness hasn't escaped the more affluent set, either.

The S.C. Aquarium's Sustainable Seafood dinners, for instance, have garnered quite a following. The most recent event, held on the second floor of Anson Restaurant in downtown Charleston, featured six courses created from shrimp — except the sweet corn ice cream.

Men in khakis and women in sundresses clinked glasses of paired wine even before the shrimp with heirloom tomato and buffalo ricotta hit the tables.

Between courses, initiative coordinator Megan Westmeyer spoke about local wild shrimp as a renewable resource and Earth-friendly dining choice.

Before stepping to the microphone, she said, "We can only teach them so much when they're here to eat and drink."

But beyond educating the consumer, perhaps the greater accomplishment is teaching participating chefs about conservation. Sustainable Seafood partners pledge not to serve certain fish, and some restaurants, to earn a special designation, also undergo a menu assessment to rate their sustainability standards.

There's that buzz word.

Even a catchphrase-wary Jadrnicek takes comfort in this: "People are thinking maybe those permaculture wackos aren't so wacko anymore," he said.

One day, he imagines, he might even have to compete to get to his neighbors' dead leaves first.

Reach Allyson Bird at 937-5594 or abird@postandcourier.com.