Gardening Tricks That Don't Work for Shit

We read somewhere that we should procure a plastic snake to scare off birds that were picking at our seedlings. That would dissuade them and plants would grow. Right? Wrong!

It did maybe scare away birds, but it also scared off the family member we shall not name; the one who was supposed to water our seedlings in our absence. It's harder to grow seedlings on a drip irrigation system. Until they come up and develop deep roots, you have to make sure the area is evenly moist.

The family member that shall remain unnamed thought the snake might be real and he carefully avoided the bed. The seedling, unwatered, died.

Los Angeles San Fernando Valley. Four Seasons

Los Angeles gets 4 seasons, just like everywhere else.  Seasons go as follow:

October-November: FALLish-SUMMER: Scorchingly hot but maybe some leaves drop. We get super excited. We carve pumpkins, children trick or treat in T-Shirts and we thank native Americans by eating the sweet-potatoes that have been curing in a dark spot (did you know that unlike regular potatoes, sweet potatoes can't be eaten right away? They need to be cured to be sweet).

December: WINTER. Average rainfall: nil. Average temperature: a frigid 70 degrees. But the sun is lower in the sky and night falls around 5 pm. So maybe, perhaps, less sunlight in some areas. We wear Santas' Hats and do holiday shopping in flip flops.

January-February-March: SPRING! Flowers everywhere. Sometimes gallons of rain fall on your head, sometimes no water at all for say, years.

April-September: SUMMER. Temperatures fluctuate starting in the mid 80s and reaching as much as 115 degrees where I live.

So while my poor mom in France scrutinizes the sky for patches of blue and prays for temperatures over 50 degrees, I cruelly send her pictures of the San Fernando Valley where the garden looks like this:

Tomatoes plants are human-sized:



Tomatoes are timidly showing up



Corn is shoulder-high and the flowers have come out. The bags are not Halloween decoration, or ways to scare birds but my attempt at harvesting pollen from corn flowers. Because in small vegetable gardens, especially in urban gardens, bees can be hard to find and since we get no wind, there needs to be a way to pollinate.  I wrote a post about it here.



This is the ears'  silk that will need pollinating:





We have turnips the size of our heads.



Beets can barely fit in my hand.



Carrots are ready to pick.



Onions are producing humongous flowers that are too pretty to cut.





Beans come in such abundance that they're starting to haunt our dreams



Strawberries are turning from flowers to berry in the blink of an eye.




And pretty flowering vines are trying to devour the house.

Saving Water (and Money) With Permaculture in My Los Angeles Urban Farm

Here are the pros and cons of having an organic permaculture vegetable garden in your backyard:

PROS:

• saves water
• makes you feel giddy about saving water (in case you're one of us dorks that get giddy about that stuff)
• saves money on water bill, duh.
• giving vegetables to your neighbors results in 63.2% decline in risks of being tackled to the ground resulting in broken ribs and ensuing doctors and lawyers bills. 
• turns your garden into a heaven for bees.
• gives you interesting things to look at when you're bored/procrastinating.
• lifts your mood and spirit. Grounds you. 
• makes you feel connected to nature, humanity and yourself.
• saves money on groceries. In the Spring and summer of 2017, we bought very little fruits and vegetables and we definitely produced more than we could consume.
• reduces Farm to Table distance to nothing. Many of the things we grow never make it to the table. I'd say it is more Farm to Mouth at our house. That means no transportation, no refrigeration (smaller carbon footprint), no loss of nutritional value + makes you feel like hipsters
• helps you stay physically active in ways that sure beat going to the gym.
• gives you and your significant other something safe, non-fattening and inexpensive to indulge in.
• but mostly, saves water. That was the original goal and despite producing hundreds of pounds of vegetables over the last two years, we keep saving water.  Here is my proof: 

CONS

• becomes hard to keep up and ingest an ungodly amount of fruits and vegetables.

Urban Farming and Permaculture in Los Angeles: What I've Learned So Far

So, here are a few things I learned about gardening in the San Fernando Valley, where it's HOT and DRY and where water doesn't come at all -- for years -- or comes all at once and floods everything or created mud-slides and general mayhem. Here, water is expensive. We have to choose between filling our tanks with gas or flushing the toilet (or almost). So, we removed our lawn (the city gave us a whole lot of money to do that), and we stopped watering, save for a small area where we grow vegetables. A whole lot of vegetables, as it turns out; each one on a calibrated drip system. The whole story of how we got started is here. 

So here are a few tips I thought I should share.

1-  Don't be like me: Always install your drip system BEFORE you plant. All I do now is play catch up. Trying to install a drip system among full-grown plants is very hard. You don't know where you're going and you either smother plants or they smother you.

2- Don't plant more than two cucumber plants for a family of four unless you're from the Middle East and know delicious dishes to use them. Just trust me on that one.

3- Unless you have tons of bees and/or wind, you must hand pollinate your corn. The tassel at the top of each ear is comprised of filaments called silk. Each one of those delicate thingies that look like the stuff that comes out of Avatar characters's tails is attached to a single kernel. That means that each tendril must receive a grain of pollen from the flower above, BUT it must not be pollen from its own flower. I understood the idea of hand pollinating corn but it took me another season to understand the concept of cross-pollination. The pollen must come from DIFFERENT flowers. Isn't that complete bs? After two years of getting very promising corn plants but no actual corn, I had to figure things out for myself. So, when it's the season, I harvest the pollen and every morning I go out there with a paint brush and I delicately pollinate the silk strands. Of course I wear a bee costume the entire time or else it won't work.

4- There is no such thing as too many tomatoes. Or as Forrest Gump might say: Canned tomatoes, braised tomatoes, fried green tomatoes, crushed tomatoes, frozen tomatoes, tomatoes farcies, tomatoes à la Provençale, tomato soup, tomato puree, tomato salad, tomatoes for all your friends, neighbors, children. If you live near me, chances are you are lycopene rich by now.

5- Earth worms are not gross. In fact is it us, humans, that are gross because cannot step anywhere without destroying and abusing resources. Earth worms are in fact unsung geniuses.

6- Eggplants don't produce eggs. Eggs do not come out of eggplants: they come out of chicken. Very confusing, I know.

Removing an Eye Sore: Adios Pool Fence

When we bought the house in 2001, our sons were small and we had a lot of little kids running around the yard. So, we installed a pool fence.

I've hated the pool fence from the day it was installed. I felt it was ruining my fun, cramping my style and giving me eye-bleeds. I was obsessed with hating it, I admit.

This year our sons are respectively 25 and 18 and it occurred to me that they are adults. Adults who can be trusted to walk across the yard without accidentally dropping headfirst into the pool.

You know when you don't have a headache, or you don't have the flu, you take it for granted. Only when you get that headache and you get that flu do you realize how well you had it before: when you felt good, when you were gloriously healthy. An eyesore feels a bit like that. You can't stand it when it's there. You obsess (ok maybe you don't, congratulations for being such a level-headed, mature individual), you think that when it will be gone you'll be deliriously happy.

But you don't. Instead you take brief note of the improvement and go on with your life.

Still, I'm pretty glad that my garden is no longer an annex of Alcatraz.

Before: (not exactly the same angles, so shoot me)



After:



Before:



After:



Before: (note the new bed, ready for planting)



After:



Here is lunch and dinner by the way. It's August and we can't pick vegetables fast enough.

Winter and Fall Planting in Southern California

The end of the growing season means the start of the next one. We keep telling ourselves that we should let the beds 'rest.' We should do a cover crop. Only the moment we see a bit of bare earth we have to plant stuff.  So here it goes.

I am trying to convert the tiny bit of grass we still have near the pool into a wild flower meadow. I planted tons of seeds. I mean TONS. Well, really a few tiny bags, but you know what I mean.

And this is all that grew. I don't know what it is. Yet.


I planted a few purple fingerling potatoes and those adorable little leaves came out.

By the way, Whole Foods was selling 3 bags, one pound each of multi color organic potatoes. I put them into a dark cabinet next to a few onions and they all urgently germinated. I think that buying seed potatoes, a few scrawny sad looking wrinkled things for $6.99 is the con of the century when a single organic potato out of the cuppboard can be sliced and planted ten times over.

But I digress. Here is our first little purple potato leaves. Awww ....


This is them a few weeks later. No longer purple.



November is the perfect time to plant lettuce mixes. If you plant seeds too early then the top soil dries off too fast for the seedlings to survive, but in the cool months they do very well.

I plant it into a small patch not far from the kitchen (in the same bed where I plant my herbs). In a month or less, I'll clip them straight into my plate.  I mulch a lot so they hardly need any washing.



Once upon a time, I planted innocent strawberry plants in a well-defined raised bed. Now the strawberries have taken over and replanted themselves with no regard for the beds. I'll have to do something about it no doubt or they'll creep into MY bed soon.

A Salad Bowl in the Garden

Here is a genius idea: instead of planting heads of lettuce, just scatter lettuce mix and less than three weeks later (depending on the season) you get this:



All you need to do then is clip the lettuce as needed when it's time to make a salad.  The leaves are so young that they have no time to fill with bugs or dirt. Washing them is therefore easier and uses up far less water. Best thing is, as soon as you cut, the lettuce carpet starts growing again.

Like a beard, but edible.

This genius idea I got from my brother in law (So I guess he's the genius, not me). It's likely that you already know this and that what is genius to me is common sense to you. But as I explained earlier, I am new to this gardening thing.

Here, I happen to have the lettuce seedlings right next to my herbs (thyme, parsley) and my onions. So I can clip everything, I head right into the salad bowl, rinse and dry and voilà!

Wildlife in Los Angeles

So now that our garden is hospitable to plants, it has become a sort of heaven for wildlife and other undesirables.

Meet the ducks.

First of all, they are super dumb. They mate for life but one of the male ducks that visits our pool did not get the memo. He has been a third wheel for the last few months and it's hard to watch. He follows the female everywhere and the other male keeps giving him a whooping.

My family argues that I am not sure it's always the same male getting whooped. I don't know. It's a bit of a sad Ménage a Quack.

Second, they can't tell the difference between themselves and their reflection. That or they are vain. They spent so much time admiring their reflection that I call them the Quack-dashians.

Ducks unable to tell shit from shainola. Below, the irresistible duck-fatale.

Thirdly, the poop in the pool and I don't know about you but I find that rude.

But you know what's NOT rude?  This! Awww ....

Other forms of wild life. 

Worms hard at work in the garden.

Dragonflies have begun appearing every so often. They never used to.

The cat, Dusty:  I put him under the category of wild life because if you even remotely try to pet him when he is not in the mood he turns feral on you.

Dusty acts mostly indifferent to the garden. But if he truly did not care, would he be rushing out the moment we are gardening?  I think he secretly approves. He does love the wood chips. Loves to roll in them. And once he is nice and dirty, he loves to take a nice, leisurely tongue bath while lying on our bed, preferably the pillow side.

,

Growing Citrus in Los Angeles

Growing citrus in Los Angeles is a little bit like growing nails or hair. Or a beard. It pretty much happens on its own or does not. That means that you cannot will them to grow if they don't want to any more than you can stop them from growing if they are in the mind to do that.

At least in my experience. I've tried both. I've tried to restrain the growth of my lemon tree to no avail, and I've also tried to do mouth to mouth resuscitation of other trees with no success.

One of your trees will get every disease in the book. An others will thrive. Why? Who knows. There are people who might know but not me. Ask someone else if you want actual usable advice on gardening of any kind.

In the San Fernando Valley where I live, temperatures can reach 115 degrees for several consecutive days. Young citrus can't cope. Older citrus think it's a walk in the park.

This is what my lemon tree looks like in February. All these flowers might turn to lemons or maybe none will. I've had years where branches broke under the weight of too many lemons and years where the lemons turn black, shrivel and fall off when they are no larger than a penny.




This is later in the year, around December, I think:

Lemons at its pinnacle, with lemons at every stage of development. One of our best year and we don't have a clue as to what we did did differently. 

Here you see the lemon tree at its mysterious pinnacle, with lemons at every stage of development throughout the tree. Ripe ones, green ones, flowers. One of our best years despite the heat, and I have no clue as to why it worked. You're welcome.

Earth Worms: The Final Frontier

Earth Worms are amazing. We did not add them to the garden, they just arrived.  They were undoubtedly beamed up from another dimension/universe. Or else they found their way into our vegetable beds after waiting in the depth of the Earth for a thousand years, because we sure as hell never saw one back when we had a lawn.

This is what earth worms do: they are able to somehow gnaw on solid rock and convert that into plant-accessible trace minerals. They also eat everything that is gross, abject, rotted, stinky, and all around revolting and covert it into nutrient rich worm poop aka worm gold.

It is my very scientific observation that they do all this despite zero eyesight and little brains to speak of. Only a mouth, a butt hole and very little in between.



We don't use pesticide or fertilizer. Only worm casting and worm tea. Some time, I'll explain more. If anyone is interested, leave a question in the comments section.

It's August and Everything Is Juicy

All this year, we planted melons, corn, cucumbers, and watermelons. At first we whined that things were not going fast enough.

Had we planted too early? Our suspicions that we sucked at gardening grew until BAM! Nature knew what to do even if we didn't.

It has been an extraordinary August harvest. We can't keep up with the picking or the eating. Here are a melon, a cob of corn, a couple of cucumbers and a watermelon that are growing so fast that we can see the difference in size from the morning to the evening.

July Is Fruity

This is our best year so far for plums and grapes. We've had tons of rain this year and perhaps this rain is why the growth has been spectacular.  When I was growing up in France, we waited for late summer and even fall for plums and grapes. Here we harvest as early as July.



We painstakingly wrapped each cluster in paper bags as soon as they began to ripen to protect them from birds, squirrels and dirt. It worked!

Until it didn't.

Some of the fruit did not mature evenly. Still delicious and it's nice to outsmart the squirrels for a change (or did they outsmart us? we asked ourselves, as we ate the --literally-- sour grapes.)




So many plums on some of the branches while the other branches remained bare. We think it was due to not enough bees. Next spring we are considering a hive.