Vegetable Garden!

Finally, a real garden! After all the fun Beatrice and I had with last summer's forays into vegetable gardening I couldn't wait to have a full-fledged garden this year, and thanks to Dev now I do. With help from our gardener Jose and his crew, we cleared the back of the yard of its mixture of roses, weeds, discarded plant pots, dry leaves, and black widow spiders, and replaced them all with two large planting beds that Dev built for me. Each one is 4 x 10 feet, with trellises along the back wall for climbing vegetables.

BEFORE

AFTER

We are still planning on re-landscaping the entire front and back yard this year but until that big project kicks off I can now stay busy with edible gardening (my favorite kind of gardening).



For summer crops we planted:
Bull's Blood beets
St. Valery carrots
Shishito peppers*
California Wonder bell peppers
Florida Market eggplants
Clemson Spineless okra
Black Beauty zucchini
Golden zucchini
Small Sugar pumpkins
Blue Lake pole beans
Kentucky Wonder pole beans
Amish Pie squash
Waltham butternut squash


In the fall we'll start some winter crops like asparagus, broccoli, kale, lettuce, radishes, and spinach, and maybe second rounds of the more successful summer crops (since in Los Angeles there's not that much difference between summer and winter).

Everything's organic and almost everything is hierloom: we got all of our seeds online from Baker Creek Hierloom Seeds and Sustainable Seed Company.

I've spent the last few weeks immersing myself in information about crop rotation, companion planting, and pollination (did you know you have to soak okra seeds in water for 24 hours before planting them?), and I'm sure I have tons more to learn, but I'm going to look at this year's garden as a test run. By planting a wide variety of vegetables, I can hopefully figure out what grows best where.

Meanwhile Beatrice is beside herself with excitement and wants to check the yard every day to "harvest vegetables." Maybe this year she'll have a pumpkin that isn't a fraud.

*Recently Dev and I went out to dinner at the Lazy Ox Canteen downtown with our friends Chris and Nadia and I had Japanese shishito peppers for the first time. They are now one of my all-time favorite things. Nadia said she started growing them herself after first tasting them at a sushi restaurant. I simply cannot recommend them highly enough, they are so delicious.