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!