Lotus’s garden behind the modest home she shares with her partner Barb Smith has a wild, ramshackle feel.

Large, bare branches provide much of the staking for her tomatoes, beans and fruit trees. Weeds are plentiful. A handmade solar drier — made of unpainted pieces of scrap wood — sits next to the driveway, filled with figs and zucchini that the couple will enjoy this winter.

In a few short years, this former community college professor has transformed her small residential lot — not even a half-acre in size — into a place of bounty.

“I’m pretty close to growing all the food we eat,” Lotus said.

This Saturday, other Islanders can enter Lotus’s slice of paradise and see how she’s coaxed so much life out of her land when she opens up her property as part of Vashon’s first Ingenuity Tour. Her backyard is one of 16 sites on the self-guided tour — a daylong affair that will showcase what some of Vashon’s most resourceful residents have done to save natural resources, reduce pollutants, make their soil productive and live a bit more lightly on the Island.

Lotus’s garden captured organizers’ attention because of her labor-intensive but low-cost approach to gardening. Over the course of about five years, she’s beaten back blackberries, planted fruit trees, built a raccoon-proof chicken yard and found creative ways to retain water — all while spending very little money.

The result is a no-till garden that’s chaotic but lovely, simple but abundant. A system of weights and pulleys ensures her fences close automatically — a design she created after her 7-year-old granddaughter accidentally let the chickens out of their yard three times in a row. A rain barrel that feeds into four smaller barrels she obtained on the cheap means she doesn’t have to rely heavily on District 19’s expensive water. She copied the solar drier from a design she found in a book.

“I’m learning and doing and growing,” Lotus said, grinning broadly. “And I’m having a great time.”

Other stops on the tour suggest the breadth and depth of Vashon’s ingenuity, said organizer Susie Kalhorn.

Islanders can visit Michael Laurie’s home, where he’s installed four different irrigation systems, is undertaking native plant restoration and has created a pesticide-free zone.

Or they can drop by Duane Dietz and Patricia Kane’s garden and admire Dietz’s 800-gallon, cement sewer vault that he’s transformed into a rainwater collection cistern — undoubtedly the largest on the Island for backyard watering. Even now, at the end of a long summer-time drought, he had some water in it that he was using for his tomatoes, Kalhorn said.

Energy conservation also figures prominently on the tour.

Participants can learn about Tag Gornall’s geo-thermal heating system, which paid for itself in eight years of reduced energy costs. They can visit Alex and Irene Tokar’s home and find out how a heat pump helped to make their drafty house warm and toasty in the winter months. Or they can check out Linda and Gary Peterson’s house, believed to be the site of the oldest functioning passive solar system — a 30-year-old system that is still working and trouble-free.

Kalhorn stumbled upon the idea of an Ingenuity Tour sort of by accident. She was working with other Islanders on a home and garden tour focused on water conservation when she ran into Terry Sullivan, active in Transition Vashon, in the Thriftway parking lot. He, too, it turned out, was thinking of a tour, focused on other kinds of resource conservation projects.

They joined forces, secured seed money from Sustainable Vashon and other Island organizations and created a tour that Kalhorn hopes will be an inspiration in what she sees as a time of economic need and environmental concern.

How will she know if the day is successful? If lots of substantive conversations take place, she said.

“We’re not looking for huge numbers. We’re really interested in the landowners’ ability to share what they’ve learned from their experimentation over the years,” she said.

The Ingenuity Tour takes place from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday. Pick up maps for the self-guided tour on Saturday at the Farmers Market. Or download them by visiting www.islandgreentech.org.