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.

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.

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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.

Los Angeles Permaculture Vegetable Garden in the Winter

It is now winter but things continue to be super interesting. We planted cabbage. Not sure what to do with them once they are ready to harvest but I'll have to get creative, because, as usual, we over planted.

Kale in back, beets in the middle and gorgeous red cabbage in front. So colorful!

Before we planted the winter crop, I changed the drip system and installed flat piping. They are harder to close at the end and leak quite a bit. I don't think I like them. At least I was able to install before we planted, unlike our spring and summer crop, where I was always playing catch up, drip system-wise.

A ridiculously good-looking red cabbage.

Some kind of cabbage. Lost the tag, evidently...

"Kale bonne nouvelle!"  (only funny if you happen to speak French)

Starting to feel a little brassicaed-out if ya know what I mean.

Eggplants Before and After + Baba Ganoush Recipe

Eggplants are very intense. The flowers are tough little things full of thorns. The eggplants themselves seem indestructible, dark purple, the shiniest thing that ever sprang out of a garden.  When you harvest them, be cautious; those beauties bite back. The stems are full of thorns.

And when they come, boy do they come! And you better know what to do with them. So here is my recipe for Baba Ganoush (or eggplant dish, which is probably what Baba Ganoush means in Arabic).

Don't let the eggplant flower fool you into picking it. It has teeth in back; Very Little Shop of Horrors.

Eggplants are naturally shiny when ripe. As soon as they shine and are deep purple they are ready to harvest no matter the size.

Eggplants are surprisingly pest-resistant and grow late into the fall in Southern California.

BABA Frigging-GANOUSH!

  In France we call this "caviar d'aubergine' Or eggplant caviar. Yum!

1- Put the eegplant in an oven at 350 degrees. Do not pierce the skin or remove the stem. Cook until completely soft, about 45 minutes. Some people wrap them in foil but I don't see what that does beside add aluminum to your blood-stream and the landfill.

2- Let it cool enough to handle without pain.

3- Without burning yourself, the eggplant, or the house, put the eggplant directly on the gas stove without a pan.  Let the flame lick it all over until the skin is died and burned in places.  This is the essential step that will give your Baba Ganoush that complex smoky flavor. No need to carbonize it. A little flame is all it takes.

4- Scrape off all traces of skin or scoop out the flesh.

5- Using a fork crush it all to a puree. I think the blender makes it all too smooth. I like it chunky.

6- Add: juice of 1 lemon (no pits), 2 tablespoons of Tahini, 1 Crushed garlic clove (no skin) and about 1/2 cup olive oil per large eggplant.  Add salt, pepper and a dash of cumin to taste. That's it!

Stop the Press! First Harvest.

I'm in love. In love with a radish and a carrot. I've only put one image here but I took dozens of pictures, like the veggi-razzi that I have become.

A radish and a carrot in tender embrace. 

Beets: can't live without them; Can't kill them.

Beets are so pretty that I almost forgive them for tasting hideous.  If you disagree on this point, here is my argument:  Insects are all over our vegetables. The only plant they won't touch are the beets. I'm just sayin' ...



OMG am I really going to have tomatoes. Still can't quite trust it.



Peas. One or two at first, and we were so excited! Our excitement  did wane a bit after we had to eat them at every meal for two weeks.





Strawberries delicately lifted off the ground. Soon, they came so hard and fast that the thought of lifting each of them off the ground became laughable.

Radishes and Carrots as Far as the Eye Can See

Taking photographs of vegetables is good clean fun.

Small radishes and either a turnip or a mutant radish.
Already we are losing track of what we planted.

Baby carrots just picked.




Today is my birthday. Rather than lament that I have turned 50, I thought I would show my face.  After all, my little carrots and radishes are imperfect, bruised, gnawed at by gnats (sorry I could not resist) and I love them all the same.

So here is to healthy self love: moi at 50.  PS: The French accent is real.

Vegetable Garden: What Have We Done?!

Update from the vegetable garden. Still no drip system, but I don't care. Why did I ever think we needed one? It's march and cool out. I have conveniently forgotten that in the Valley (as in Los Angeles San Fernando Valley) summer temperature can reach over 110 degrees. But a mild form of amnesia compounded with winter lethargy has replaced my initial energy. I do better with super physical jobs than tedious ones where I have to learn something.

Planting all veggies at once, damning caution and restraint to the wind.

Meanwhile, the vegetables (and my husband), unlike me, got the memo: Spring has sprung.

 premature tomatoisation.

Carrot seedlings, ponions and asparagus in the back. Or as we say in French "n'importe quoi"

Vegetable mashup 

Here you can see our technique: vegetables are planted without rhyme or reason and with no concern whatsoever for size at maturity or the fact that the beds are too deep to be reached in the center.

Peas so tender and cute

Me, possibly still in denial but starting to realize that things are growing fast and are planted too closely. 

Also, that I better get my s%#t together re: the drip system.

Goodbye, Lawn. Hello, Wood Chips and Drought Tolerant Plants.

From that point on, I became determined to get rid of all the grass. I had a good workout applying newspaper, filling wheelbarrows, emptying their fragrant wood-chippy contents onto my feet.  We used medium-sized chips. Any smaller and the chips would have flown all over the place. Any larger and it would have been kind of clunky.

Two years later, only the Salvia and Westringa have become enormous. The Flax and Licorice died.

I wanted drought tolerant plants that would attract bees where we did not plant vegetables. To be honest, I was not convinced the vegetable beds would look that good in the winter and I wanted pretty.

Applying newspaper over the lawn followed by wood chips. The lawn (and weeds) forever disappeared.

Wood chips are soft underfoot and make a lovely, fragrant ground cover. Over time, it decomposes and adds organic matter.

Gone With the Lawn

DWP is offering us an offer I can't resist. They're paying us. Paying us! to remove our lawn and replace it with a drought tolerant landscape.  How much will they pay? A whooping $3.75 per square foot of lawn removed. Please pardon the delay as I rub my eyes and pinch myself. That's square foot, not square yard!

Joe and I measured and it seems that between our back lawn and the grass on the parking strip we have about 1,500 square feet of lawn. Actually more than that, but we badly want vegetable beds and those cannot be included in the financial incentive.

So we made our design, measured a million times, calculated, measured some more, cursed, pouted, tried again and found out that once we remove the surface that the raised beds would occupy, it comes to 1142 square feet.

Once the landscaping is complete (now that the project was approved by DWP we need to complete it by mid May) DWP will reimburse us $1142 x $3.75 = $5572.5

Ploc.

That was the sound of me fainting.

No, this is not an alien's design to take over the Earth one crop circle at a time. It's my hideous, not to scale design. 

Basically, the idea is to remove the lawn and the existing water-siphoning sprinkler system, replace those with a drought tolerant landscape mighty enough to thrive in our Southern California climate (add to this the gift of a super arid microclimate in our town) and a drip system, and finance all this with the DWP incentive.

You can see above that we are removing a total of 1810 square feet of lawn, but we are deducting a 344 square feet area (the circle above) to create raised beds. In those raise beds we'll plant a permaculture style (more on that later) vegetable crop.

I found this circle/medicine wheel design on Pinterest and fell in love.  I wish I could give proper credit to the people who made this garden, but I could not find it anywhere. If you know, please email me.

You know what it's like. Fall in love first, think later. The decision is made. So let's go! 

Here is the before, so that you know what we're starting with. These pictures were taken in the middle of winter, so the summer grass had died in patches. It's pretty bad I admit.  In the background, you can see a few Echium, Euphorbia, and Phormium. Clearly, when given just the right amount of neglect, drought loving plants love it here.

Lawn, I will not be missing you.