Gardens to Tables

July is time to:

Keep Weeds and Pesky Pests at Bay 

As the days grow warmer, weeds and pests increase so keep weeding, create an environment that attracts the beneficial insects, and apply insecticidal soap or neem oil as needed.

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The Garden Blog

Garden ideas and insights from our crew of intrepid garden bloggers:

  • The Community Gardener, the adventures of a community gardener in Santa Monica
  • The Accidental Gardener, the caretaker of an urban garden and fruit trees
  • Tales from the Bar Garden, yes, you heard us, the bar gardener
Ann Shepphird, The Community Gardener
After years of being limited in my gardening to a back porch and houseplants, I came into a real garden of my own in May of 2008. That’s when I became a landowner. Well, actually, I became the proud lessee of a plot in the Santa Monica Community Gardens – a 200-square-foot piece of dirt that for $60 a year I can call my own. After some jumping up and down, I thought: what now?  200 square feet of dirt doesn’t sound like a lot but, truth be told, there’s a heckuva lot you can do with 200 square feet of dirt.

So I started with tomatoes (who doesn’t in the spring?) and basil -- and marigolds to keep the bugs away -- and I also put in a little watermelon plant I found at a nursery. It was so cute, so petite (maybe four inches in diameter) that the thought of a big ole watermelon coming from it was quite humorous to me. It got funnier when it became “the watermelon that ate Cleveland” ultimately taking over almost every square inch of the plot (in and around the other plants) and growing a total of 10 30-pound puppies.

At each step along the way, I had questions – what do I do with this vine growing all over the garden? How do you know when to harvest a watermelon? What does a couple DO with a 30-pound watermelon? I mean, I know you eat them but are there perhaps some, er, different ways to eat them? The answers – especially on the gardening side – were harder to come by than I thought they would be. There were a lot of food and recipe sites but not many garden sites that aren’t either university agriculture departments or professional nurseries – not the place I was seeking, which would provide a community for newbie gardeners to come together to help each other to grow better produce and make it into better food.

So hopefully we will provide that here, along with fun stories about the community gardening scene. I mean, how can I not talk about the gardener who put garden gnomes (ends up they were the seven dwarves and he has toddlers) in his community garden? Or the guy hardly anybody ever sees and a number of other gardeners warned me about who has the six-foot fence surrounding his “community” garden. When I would run into him, he would offer cryptic comments about my now-famous (at the community garden, anyway) watermelons and leave me notes asking for seeds and, in response, would leave some of his award-winning tomatoes (theories as to how he came up with the tomatoes from the other gardeners ranged from him stealing compost to raiding horse stables for the manure).

When I’m not gardening, I work as a travel writer and editor and, in the past have worked in the film and television industry, taught communication studies and even had a stint working for a private investigator. I’m sure they’ll all show up in one way or another in the blog, even though the focus will continue to be the idea of supporting the growing community of sustainable gardeners.  



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