City Gardening

Some of my earliest memories are of being in the Victory Garden my grandpa had during WW ll. In those years, it was every American’s duty to conserve on generally everything. Food and gasoline were particularly needed for the war effort, and rationing, through the use of “meat stamps” and “gas stamps,” was in effect. It was almost un-American not to have a vegetable garden, called a Victory Garden, if you possibly could, and it saved gas stamps to not have to make those extra trips to the store.

In the cities and towns, if there was no backyard at your house or apartment, the Victory Garden was in the front yard. Often both front and backyards were in vegetable gardens. With the end of the war and the on-set of large housing tracts, rapidly expanding suburbs and general prosperity, the Victory Gardens of the cities and towns were turned into lawns and decorative shrubs. Now you could buy anything you wanted at the big grocery store nearby. You could even buy the gas to drive there without guilt or gas stamps.

Today we read and hear about e-coli in the lettuce, chemical pesticides on pretty much everything, and questionable sanitary practices of those who handle our food. The stories seem endless. Why is it then that so many people who appear to be so health conscious in every other way, don’t plant a tomato or little lettuce patch? I see gorgeous roses and hydrangeas, which take as much or more time and money to produce than it would to grow the best organic tomato most of the current generation has ever tasted.

Our home is on a hillside lot at the northeast edge of Los Angeles, between Glendale and Pasadena. The place was very rundown when we moved in over 20 years ago, and dirt from the hillside was starting to drift into the kitchen windows. Lawn was impractical for the slope of the lot, so I started building flowerbeds. Most of the flowers did okay, as long as I watered them every day. It finally dawned on me, after eating store bought tomato, that there was no reason not to use a little of my space to grow a few vegetables.

The first year was a disaster. My tomatoes only got a couple feet high, every tomato got blossom-end rot before it ripened, the Japanese eggplant roots didn’t spread beyond the exact size and shape of the original plastic container they came in, and 2 months later the plants hadn’t grown one inch. The kind of soil where I’d always had gardens was always good, fertile ground. Los Angeles isn’t generally known for it’s rich farmland. What I had was clay-hard, cold, clay.

I almost accidentally happened upon some books by the man credited with bringing the organic gardening practices from centuries gone by into the modern era, Robert Rodale. With that newfound knowledge, I came to understand some vital facts: 1) Given 6-8 hours of direct sunlight per day and adequate water, the soil is everything one really needs to know. 2) Strong healthy plants come from strong healthy soil. Those plants defend themselves, to a very large extent, from harmful insects and disease.

Californians alone spend Six Billion Dollars per year on pesticides, I’ve read. That equals $150 for every man, woman and child in the state. Let’s hope that all isn’t going into our bodies and our bodies of water. I spend about $15 per year on pesticides; Bacillus Thurengensis, commonly abbreviated and simply called BT, a bacteria, harmless to people and animals, completely rids plants of all the various little destructive green worms and tomato hornworms. I also confess to carefully using a little slug bait, not in contact with my soil, but between two pieces of dampened cardboard, when my seedlings are about to emerge from the soil. I’ve not found a cost effective nor foolproof organic method to stop slugs from wiping out my crops before they even get started. Once the plants are up several inches, slugs don’t do enough damage to be a problem. It only takes one application of Snarol, or some such, between 2 pieces of dampened cardboard near the seedlings for the first week or two after the plant has emerged. After that, the plants aren’t damaged much by slugs or snails. Once a week I spray BT on plants susceptible to inch worms, hornworms, cabbage loopers, etc. I spray about 3 times during only about the 2nd month of the plants life. I’ve used Insecticidal Soap for scale insects or some such, but I haven’t even needed that in the last 2 years. No doubt I’ll use it again in the future, as different insect problems arise from year to year.

Beneficial insects are more common and more numerous than the destructive ones. My rule is that if I can’t identify a bug or worm as harmful, and if I don’t see it actually causing damage, I don’t bother it. Ladybug larvae look like tiny gila monsters, Lacewings can be mistaken for moths at night, Lacewing larvae can be mistaken for inchworms, and each of the 3 eat almost their own weight of aphids and other harmful pests every day.