Community Gardens Dispatch No. 17: Francis Avenue, Los Angeles

Although the Francis Avenue Community Garden is small  -- only 18 10-foot-by-10-foot plots—it's a Meso-America foodies' delight.

"This one is hot," said Marta Servin, the caretaker, pointing out a tiny green-brown ball-shaped chile pepper. "Chile bola. This round one is from Salvador, also very hot, muy picoso. They call it chiltepe, and they also have it in Oaxaca."

Located in the most densely populated neighborhood in Los Angeles, Francis Avenue Garden -- also known as the Moothart Collingnon Community Garden, after the land owners who made the space available -- is small, tidy and always busy. During the day, housewives come to sit on the mismatched park benches under the pergola just outside the fenced-in gardening area, trading gossip and watching one another's children. It's a true community meeting place, used for wedding parties, talks on domestic violence, arts and crafts classes for the kids. (In the photo below, that's Marta Servin on the left, showing varieties of peppers from states all over Mexico, Destiny Borrales at center eating and playing in the sugar cane, and Fernando Larios chatting with other community gardeners.)

Nearly all the plots are in raised beds, and everything has a use, either as food or as medicine. Most of the beds are surrounded with plastic mesh to keep out the chickens that shared the space until last year. Except for one Korean American gardener, everyone is from Mexico, Guatemala or El Salvador. In the summer, corn, tomatoes, epazote, chiles and squash dominate, but now, in winter, the beans are just starting to come up, planted neatly in rows, and the bananas that tower in the corners are mostly done, their stalks bare of fruit. That doesn't mean they're useless, however. The leaves are used to wrap tamales. The avocado leaves are similarly harvested, either for enclosing meat for roasting or to be ground into powder for flavoring the masa dough for tamales.

Community Gardens Dispatch No. 16: Fountain Community Gardens, Los Angeles

Only a few years ago, the tale of the 20,000-square-foot lot at the corner of Fountain Avenue and St. Andrews Place -- a stone's throw from the 101 Freeway in Hollywood -- was just plain sad.

Since the 1970s, it had been used as a city-owned parking lot for trailers offering temporary housing for the homeless and families in transition, mainly poor single mothers. That program ended in the '80s, but the trailers were left behind, and local gangs and meth cooks moved in, gardeners here say. After a fire that began on the lot burned down a neighboring house, the community demanded that the city take action. A higher fence was built, and the site was slated for a community center.

The recession shelved that project but in 2009 led to another solution: the Fountain Community Gardens, Hollywood's newest and largest collection of community plots.

Artist Alex Alferov, pictured at right, the site's first garden master, grew up in the neighborhood and was an altar boy at the landmark Russian Orthodox church down the street. He has seen the area's population shift from Eastern European and Italian to largely Central American, Mexican, Thai and Armenian, and the community garden, he says, has helped to bring back an invigorating, multicultural energy.

The vibe starts at the distinctive front gate, metal cut in in the Mexican folk-art style of papel picado. The work was done by east L.A. artist Michael Amescua, whose art also adorns Solano Canyon Community Garden.

Fountain Community Gardens has 67 immaculately tended plots, most 5-by-15-foot raised beds. (That's Michael Mapel cleaning up his parsley in the photo at top.) The land is nearly ringed by 25 native species and a few young citrus. Mature pines are scattered around the lot, and though the needles are left as mulch, the cones are gathered up neatly and arranged decoratively here and there.

The plots reflect the mix of gardeners: Chinese greens rise next to Italian basil; sugar cane and chayote grow next to artichoke and asparagus. At $10 a month, a plot here isn't not cheap compared with some other community gardens. Being Hollywood, the location attracts some gardeners who work in entertainment, some are homeless, and still others are in halfway houses.

Planting season in Southern California is rarely busier than midwinter, when nursery lots crammed with Christmas trees give way to displays of fruit trees and roses. If you're haunting stores to select an apricot tree, a flowering bramble, a hedge or even a specimen tree, plant pathologist Jim Downer has a message for you: "Good gardening starts with good plant selection."

By which he means: If the stock you find is root-bound, walk away.

The advisor for the UC Cooperative Extension in Ventura County further warns that bad plants can look good in nurseries. Constant watering and pruning can conceal a multitude of problems. If you see, say, a Santa Rosa plum tree three times the size of the new bare-root stock, or a big ficus tree in a small pot with a low price, it is probably root-bound. Rather than throw it away, less scrupulous nurseries might leave it around to see if they can sucker you into buying it.

One way to check if a plant has outgrown its pot is to look down at the root ball and feel along the side of the pot to see if circularized roots are creeping up in search of space.

Another method is to ask staff to gently tilt the plant and briefly slide it from its can. A thin film of feeder roots lining the bottom can be acceptable. A coil of thick roots growing in a corkscrew around the side means that the plant is a dud.

Spare time being short and freeways being long, many of you may be tempted, as I was recently, to buy last year's bare-root trees because of their size. More plums! Faster!

As soon as I got them home and found most of them to be dramatically root-bound, I was reminded of the real bottom line: more problems, sooner.

Community Gardens dispatch No. 15: Norman Harriton / Franklin Hills

Location is not everything. Just look at the Norman Harriton / Franklin Hills Community Garden, perched at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, west of the landmark Shakespeare Bridge in one of Los Angeles' lovely neighborhoods. The garden sits on land owned by the Lycee International de Los Angeles school, near the classrooms and soccer field of Lycee's Los Feliz campus. It has an eye-popping view of the city, spanning  the foothills of Silver Lake west to the hump of the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

The view within the garden, however, is less evocative. Bougainvillea and grapevines do their best to camouflage a chain-link fence. Although the rules call for year-round maintenance, it's obvious that some plots haven't been visited since summer, possibly earlier.

For a city where gardeners may wait two years for a plot to open, the waiting list here is surprisingly short, though given the condition of the place, perhaps the bigger surprise is that there's any waiting list at all. Membership to the tiny garden -- 7,000 square feet divided into 26 plots, six reserved for Lycee gardening classes -- costs $50 a year. Plots with active gardeners are easy to spot: You actually can see the soil. Everywhere else you'll see a carpeting of pine needles or an equally thick layer of invasive Johnson grass.

The garden is named after its founder, the late Norman Harriton, a local resident who worked with the Franklin Hills Residents Assn. and the Lycee to tear up asphalt, cut down mature palms and put in watering stands. Some of the earliest supporters were local real estate agents who recognized that community gardens are great for property values. The result was a secret garden that few newcomers know exists. But Harriton passed away in 2004 and things have not been the same since.

Nowadays when garden coordinator Michele Flynn stops in to tend her plot, the one thing she notices is neglect. 

"There should be one main rule: Once you get a plot, you have to use it," she says, admitting that she's frustrated by the lax enforcement. "If you don't use it, you're out. You're supposed to garden all year, but most people don't."

There are no restrictions on watering timers — verboten at many community gardens — and during the downpours last month, timers in the garden were still operating as usual, irrigating plots in the rain, Flynn says.

In case you've missed Jeff Spurrier's weekly dispatches from community gardens -- the people and the plantings, the experiments and the solutions -- let us help you catch up:

Dispatches No. 1 and 2: Our kickoff feature on dynamo Milli Macen-Moore and the follow-up on the Milagro Allegro garden's uplifting history

Dispatch No. 3: For those waiting for a plot, garden sharing proves to be a good alternative

Dispatch No. 4: The Main Street garden in Santa Monica, a pioneer in the movement

Dispatch No. 5: A smart design for wheelchairs at Park Drive in Santa Monica

Dispatch No. 6: At Solano Canyon, gardening in the shadow of Dodger Stadium

Dispatch No. 7: On Skid Row, ingeniously gardening by the bucket

Dispatches No. 8 and 9: Ocean View Farms, true to its name and composting like crazy

Dispatch No. 10: How raised beds have made the Rockdale garden in Eagle Rock

Dispatch No. 11: In Silver Lake, community garden as pocket park

Dispatch No. 12: Veteran seed savers at the Altadena Community Garden keep their harvests going, and going, and ...

Dispatches 13 and 14: At the Learning Garden in Venice, Spurrier checks out the Seed Library of Los Angeles and watches a grafting master in action

Stay tuned for new installments every Wednesday. Bookmark L.A. at Home and join us on Facebook, where we have a page dedicated to gardening in the West.

Photo: Eagle Rockdale Community Garden, better known as just Rockdale. Credit: Ann Summa

The online seed store Tomato Fest is extending its annual heirloom tomato sale, which had been scheduled to end Jan. 11 but is now running through Jan. 18.

More than 120 varieties from around the world -- yellow cherry tomatoes from eastern Germany, purple beefsteaks cultivated by a Cherokee tribe in Tennessee -- are discounted. Most seeds are nearly 50% off, at $2 per pack; others are discounted 30%.

All packs contain 30 seeds unless otherwise noted and are certified organic. Free seeds come with every order of at least $15, and seeds will last three to five years if stored properly.

-- Lisa Boone

Photo credit: Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times

RELATED:

The Dry Garden: Heirloom tomatoes by trial and error

Master in Training: 60 tomato plants later

Community Gardens dispatch No. 14: The Learning Garden, Venice

Grafting -- the joining of two plants to make a single new one -- is a complicated procedure, a mixture of surgery and carpentry for the gardener attempting the procedure. The nutrition-gathering roots of one plant play host to the scion, usually a year-old stem containing buds that's attached on top. When it's done right, the results can be downright inspirational, as David King learned in the 1980s, when he visited the former Montecito mansion of chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley Jr.

The architect positioned the house around two large oaks, but in the 1940s, one of the trees began to die, said King, who was studying plant propagation at the time. "He planted two young oaks on either side of the dying oak, and after about 10 years, he grafted them onto it," King said. "And more than 30 years later, it was still alive. I get goose bumps to this day -- what skill."

This month, King will start cutting back the trees and vines at the Learning Garden at Venice High School, gathering scions and cuttings for his classes in plant propagation. He has some rootstock already prepped in the greenhouse and more on order from Raintree Nursery in Washington state.

Preparations call for the sharpening of knives, the cleaning of pruners and inspection of the Thompson seedless grapevines blanketing a rebar trellis in the Venice garden. Some of those vines soon will be pruned away in King's UCLA Extension class. Older cane will be cut into four-node-long sections, heavily deleafed and planted in cactus mix -- two nodes in the soil, two nodes out. Grapevines are satisfyingly easy to propagate as long as the cuttings are kept moist by regular misting for the first few months, until new leaves appear.

"Water loss is the big enemy when a plant has no roots," he says.

Grafting cuts vary: simple splice, saddle graft, cleft and wedge, whip and tongue. The key to successful grafting is making an even cut on both sections of plant, King says. It's possible to do this with just a box cutter, rubber bands and a plastic bag, but special grafting wax and Parafilm (a type of medical tape that stretches, seals to itself and eventually withers away) help to achieve a tight fit. Keep reading for more on King, his garden and upcoming classes open to the public ...

Community Gardens dispatch No. 13: Learning Garden, Venice

The Learning Garden at Venice High School is not an official community garden but rather an educational lab open to the community. Gardeners from Beethoven Street Elementary School and UCLA Extension mix with the Venice High gardening club and students from Yo San University and Emperor's College of Traditional Oriental Medicine.

On a cold Saturday a few weeks ago, garden master David King hosted the first meeting of the Seed Library of Los Angeles, believed to be L.A.'s first regional seed bank. For the $10 membership fee, gardeners can "borrow" the seeds of specific edibles -- heirloom Waltham 29 broccoli, for example. Part of the resulting crop must then be allowed to flower and go to seed, allowing the borrower to return fresh seed stock to the library.

"As seeds grow out repeatedly in our soil and microclimates, they adapt," says King, whose background is in plant propagation, mainly of fruit trees. (That's him at left, with his dog, Tree.)

Far more quickly than one could achieve at home, a variation of Waltham broccoli specific to Los Angeles or even specific to Venice can be developed, better suited to local conditions.

It's a locavore's dream.

Community Gardens dispatch No. 12: Altadena

Even though it's almost Christmas, Marie Yeseta is still harvesting tomatoes at her plot in Altadena Community Garden. One vibrant Italian heirloom — Costoluto Genovese, an acidic late-bloomer that is good for sauces and canning — has produced about 200 tomatoes thus far, she says.

And because Yeseta is an avid seed saver, that's one tomato whose seed she will be keeping, stored someplace dry, cool and dark — no hot garages or dank shelves under sinks. It will go into a dated, annotated envelope, which then goes into a tin labeled by season.

Saving seeds is a natural extension of gardening, Yeseta says, and the best way to educate your taste buds and discover the world beyond Early Girl tomatoes and head lettuce. Best of all, it costs almost nothing to continue a particular flavor in your garden.

"I spent $3.50 for a package of squash seeds, and I'll get maybe 10 squash, and each will have more than 50 seeds," she says. She just needs to rinse them clean of fibers and lay them out in a single layer on a screen or plate to dry thoroughly for about a month. "I'll never have to buy those seeds again."

Yeseta has taught classes in seed saving at the Altadena garden. Letting plants go to flower is one essential step, especially for lettuces. Shake off the flower head into a paper bag and let the seeds dry for about two weeks, then replant if you want.

A few plots away, Margaret Jones is harvesting her Christmas beans, heirloom limas with a splash of red on the pale skin. She saves her seeds too, particularly the ones that show the most color. Before she began growing limas, she never knew she could eat them fresh, when their buttery, chestnut-like flavor is best. Now the only ones she saves are for seed, giving them away to other gardeners before the bugs get to them.

We can't all be Virginia Paca, the gardener profiled on this blog in October who grows food and donates it to food banks. But this winter those of us with orange trees laden with fruit might take a page from the book of that Pasadenan. What more fitting holiday activity could there be than to glean our home orchards and donate fresh fruit to local pantries?

As winter closes in, that fruit very well may be oranges. It is pure serendipity that an activity that feeds people is also good for the orange trees.

Homeowners can figure out where to take harvests by going to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank's pantry locator. This column is about how best to pick and pack the fruit.

The citrus most likely to be hanging about in Southern California gardens include mandarins, early navels and late Valencias, said Mary Lu Arpaia, a UC Riverside Extension specialist. But she warns that color itself isn't necessarily a reliable indicator of ripeness.

Though navels and mandarins will probably be ready to pick, Valencias can fake out amateur orchardists. New fruit can turn orange with the onset of cool autumn weather, but it won't have achieved the delectable balance of sweetness and acidity until spring. When you find ripe Valencia oranges on a tree in December, they are last year's fruit. They will be utterly delicious and begging for harvest.

As it happens, it's good for the tree to remove these ultra-ripe oranges. Leaving old fruit on the tree saps energy that is best marshaled for next spring's bloom and successive crops.

Community gardens dispatch No. 11: Manzanita Street, Silver Lake

Manzanita Street is the smallest community garden in Los Angeles: 13 irregularly shaped plots terraced into a hill and bisected by stairs linking Sunset Boulevard to a cul-de-sac below. It's near the heart of Sunset Junction yet largely invisible, unless you're looking for it.

The neighborhood can be a hard place to garden. Car traffic on Sunset is heavy, and the odd syringe or crack pipe may litter the stairs. The soil is thick clay, with traces of arsenic in one section, and the terraced layout means a constant battle with rainwater runoff.

Despite all that, Manzanita has its charms and the turnover in plots here is low. It's a true urban pocket garden, like something you'd see in lower Manhattan except Cali-style, with a surprising burst of roses and chamomile, asparagus and artichoke, blossoming along the cracked 1920s concrete stairs.

"We really want to paint these steps," says Trina Calderon, right, the garden's coordinator, adding that a sign would be nice too. She's not holding her breath. It took the city three years to fix a broken streetlight above the garden's twin gates.

Still, she's not complaining. The microclimate is ideal for some plants that typically suffer in the heat of summer. Lettuces, artichoke and flowers all thrive here, and the succulents attract tours from the Southern California Horticultural Society. Calderon planted two artichoke plants a few years ago and wound up with a bumper crop this year. "I got sick of eating them," she says.

Her neighbor, Phyllis Hauser, pictured at top, took an organic gardening class to learn how to fix the soil in her 70-square-foot plot. She built a no-dig, lasagna-style bed made of chicken-wire topped with layers of newspaper, fertilizer, compost, straw and planting mix. The results were so good that when the bugs began eating one of her cauliflowers, she could be philosophical and let them feed.

 
We recently wrote about a 2.5-acre parcel in Watts where some people are growing food and other plants. It's called Mudtown Farms, and the owners are looking at ways the land, adjacent to the Jordan Downs housing development, can become a more integral part of the community.

The Watts Labor Community Action Committee, which owns the property, has been working with Michael Pinto and his students at the Southern California Institute of Architecture to come up with some ideas -- including a farmers market and classes to teach people how to grow some food of their own.

On Saturday, a group of bloggers from Food Bloggers Los Angeles toured the land with Pinto, as noted by Times blog Daily Dish.

-- Mary MacVean

Photo: Bloogers walk through Mudtown Farm. Credit: Patti Londre of Worth the Whisk