GROWN IN San Diego.
DEW GARDENS was founded on a simple premise: San Diego homeowners deserve access to the same quality of edible landscape design that cities on the coasts have had for years — designed specifically for Southern California's climate, not imported from somewhere else.
DESMOND
ACHEBE.
Desmond grew up on a small farm in Giles County, California — 40 miles south of San Diego — where his family grew most of their own vegetables, kept a small orchard, and composted everything. The knowledge of what Southern California's soil, rainfall, and seasons could produce was absorbed long before it became professional expertise.
After studying agricultural science at California State University in San Diego, Desmond completed the UT Extension Master Gardener certification program and a Permaculture Design Certificate through a two-week intensive course. He spent four years working in commercial vegetable production in Williamson County before founding DEW GARDENS in 2018, focused exclusively on residential and small-scale commercial edible landscape design.
He teaches vegetable gardening workshops through San Diego's Farmers Market Extension program, leads tours of DEW GARDENS client gardens each fall, and maintains a demonstration food forest at his own East San Diego property that is open for tours by appointment.
LAND THAT
FEEDS YOU.
The conventional American landscape — lawn, foundation shrubs, ornamental trees — requires continuous inputs of water, fertilizer, and labor while returning nothing edible. It's a design paradigm built on convenience and aesthetics divorced from any relationship to food or ecology.
DEW GARDENS designs landscapes that invert that relationship. Your property becomes something that produces food rather than consuming resources. A food forest matures over time and requires less care each year, not more. A well-designed raised bed kitchen garden, properly irrigated, produces more food per square foot than conventional farming while using a fraction of the water and zero synthetic chemistry.
We design for the long term. The best we've installed in San Diego are three, four, five years old and producing more abundantly each season with decreasing maintenance. That's the measure of good design — not how it looks in the first year, but how it performs in the fifth.
Productivity First
Beautiful gardens that don't produce food are ornamental projects. Every DEW GARDENS design has a measurable production goal: how much fruit, how many seasons of vegetables, how many pounds per year from your specific space.
California-Specific Knowledge
Generic edible landscaping advice fails in San Diego because San Diego's conditions — the clay, the heat, the humidity, the specific freeze-thaw pattern — require specific solutions. We only recommend what we've tested here.
Decreasing Maintenance
We design for the long arc. A kitchen garden in year one needs establishment attention. A food forest in year five is self-mulching, self-fertilizing (nitrogen fixers), and increasingly self-regulating. We design for the trajectory, not just the opening season.
WORK WITH
DEW GARDENS.
Free 60-minute site assessment. We visit your San Diego property and tell you exactly what's possible.