For Gus, Milo, and Spenser.
May you always have a garden in your lives.
Foreword
by Suzanne Goin
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE: A Place to Begin
CHAPTER TWO: Good Garden Design
CHAPTER THREE: The Story Is in the Soil
CHAPTER FOUR: A Question of Water
Growing in New England
CHAPTER FIVE: Plant What You Love (and One Thing You Don’t)
CHAPTER SIX: Personal Best
CHAPTER SEVEN: Gardening with Wildlife
A Visit to Chase Farm
CHAPTER EIGHT: Community
Index of Searchable Terms
Acknowledgments
Seeing and feeling the plants growing there, being aware of them and where they are in their season, and cooking what’s fresh changed the way we thought about our food.
It was a lucky day for me and my family seven or eight years ago when Lauri Kranz—or “Garden Lauri,” as we call her—happened into our lives. Our children were at a new preschool in Los Angeles, and at the school’s fund-raising auction my husband, David, and I bid on a popular item that featured this mythical character everyone was oohing and aahing over: Lauri would come to the top bidder’s home to set up a kitchen garden. I will never forget the day of our first meeting when I opened our front door to find wispy and beautiful, dirt-dusted, oversize-hat-wearing Lauri at our threshold. She came in, truly like a ray of sunshine, swooping our kids up into her passion for gardening, vegetables, the land, and life itself.
As two chefs, we knew we wanted a garden, but we didn’t know how much we needed it. From a patch of dry chaparral high on a hill behind our house, Lauri created a place where we would read and dream up menus while the kids played. Whenever we needed herbs or berries or some Swiss chard for dinner, it was right there, just out the kitchen door. But it wasn’t just the handiness.
Our kids got to spend a lot of time with Lauri, as not only was she keeping our home garden but she also taught every week at the preschool, where they learned the joys of liquid seaweed, compost, and worms. As part of her curriculum, Lauri would garden and also cook with the kids—reinforcing that critical connection between garden and kitchen and making it so real, approachable, and necessary. Their lives have been forever changed for the better by the mastery Lauri brings to the subject of food and by her love of life and the earth. When we see her at the farmers market or on the street, all the kids run to her. What a joy that she has now put her love and lessons into this gorgeous book with the help of her husband, Dean, so that everyone can have Lauri and her garden wisdom in their lives.
—Suzanne Goin
Suzanne Goin is the chef and co-owner at Lucques, A.O.C., and Tavern in Los Angeles, and has earned multiple James Beard Foundation awards, including Outstanding Chef.
Farmers markets are a great way to connect with your community, and the farmers who grow our food are an invaluable source of information and inspiration for our own home gardens.
Sunflowers are said to be a bee’s favorite flower and bring these vital pollinators to the garden.
I am nearly breathless as I reach the ninety-second step up the steep hillside. I am following Suzanne and David and their three young children to a piece of land on their property in the Santa Monica Mountains that is flat and holds the sun. The children run ahead of us, laughing, excited to explore this territory relatively far from the house and the kitchen. They ask questions. Could there be a garden here? A place to grow food for family, friends, and possibly their restaurants? A place of secluded beauty?
Suzanne Goin and David Lentz are two of my favorite chefs. I have eaten delicious food for many years in their celebrated restaurants Lucques, A.O.C., Tavern, and the Hungry Cat. I take a good look around. We’re high up in the canyon, with no yards around, and Suzanne says she really wants the garden in the ground, not in raised beds, so it can have the feel and dignity and beauty of a farm. I check to see what kinds of trees are growing nearby and whether they might cause trouble for the garden. Eucalyptus and pine trees, for example, shed leaves and needles that can make the soil chemistry unfriendly to vegetables.
I take a seat on the ground.
The soil here is parched. It’s hard to tell what it could be, given some water, good compost, and other organic amendments such as alfalfa meal and phosphate rock. I dig up some soil with my spade and put it in a bag to take with me. I sit in this spot for a while longer, tracking the arc of the sun and the westerly breeze and feel what is gorgeous about this place. I notice that there are no bees. We need bees. Without bees, a lot of the vegetables we plant will simply not produce well, and some won’t produce at all. I also see some gopher holes and know that the moment we plant food, we will have many more. But I like this piece of land, so close to the California sky.
I take the bag of soil to some trusted friends: to the family-owned nursery I frequent daily and to a couple of local organic farmers whose produce is legendary. We examine the soil together. We add some water; we hold it in our hands. We decide it’s good. I throw some random seeds in the ground as a test, a few kale and fava beans, water them, and come back in ten days: They have sprouted, which tells me this garden wants to grow. Then the work begins.
A garden begins and ends with a seed.
Runner beans add gorgeous color to the garden and a delicious snap to dinner.
Compost, alfalfa meal, and more are hauled up the ninety-two steps. Citrus trees from a cherished farmer arrive; we plant those to one side. We amend, a double dig, turning earth over and folding in rich compost. Turning it back in again. African basil is the soul of my gardens, and I plant some on both sides of the plot to attract bees; its aroma is an enchantment. I let the soil rest a few days and then it’s all hands in. Suzanne, David, and their kids join me in planting fava beans, lemon verbena, shiso, peas, broccoli, cauliflower, Swiss chard, purslane, and so much more. We find room for blackberries, boysenberries, golden raspberries. We water, we tend, and we grow. In time, tender pea tendrils make their way up the trellises, sunchokes reach for the sky, and arugula and other salad greens are ripe for picking. This garden surprises me with its sumptuous logic; it feels wild but there is order in this wildness—it has found its own rhythm. The outrageous colors and soul-gripping scents are as beautiful as that of any flower garden; there are wildflowers in the broccoli patch and poppies in the middle of pea shoots—no perfect rows of perfect plants here. There is food and magic bursting out onto the garden footpaths. It’s like an outburst of the canyon itself.
A couple of years into the garden’s growing, David is at the farmers market, and his order of sunchokes has not arrived. The restaurant’s evening menu has been planned around sunchokes. He and Suzanne discuss what to do: change the menu at this late moment? Suzanne remembers that we planted sunchokes in the garden at the beginning of the season, but she’s not sure how many. The blooms, which pop up high like sunflowers, had recently begun wilting. This is a sign that the sunchokes are ready to be dug up. Suzanne and David rush home and up the hillside with shovels. They begin digging, and within moments sunchokes are uncovered, a few at first and then hundreds. There are so many that friends and coworkers have to come over and help carry them down the hillside! Buried beneath the fertile ground, the handful of sunchokes we planted multiplied into enough to feed an entire community.
Nourishment and beauty were once separate goals for gardening, but not for me. From talking to the ever-increasing number of people who want gardens, I have learned that the combination of the two is what we really desire; not because all nourishment is beautiful in some abstract way, but because an edible garden should be as compelling to the senses as a flower or ornamental garden. This has brought a distinctive wild and connected style to my gardens that is deeply satisfying and easily achieved. A Garden Can Be Anywhere is a practical guide to both my personal philosophy and my essential methods for growing abundant organic food and unlocking this earthy beauty.
Suzanne and David’s story perfectly illustrates the connectedness of my work: Beneath the sensory beauty of the flowers lies plentiful food and a reaf-firmation of the abundance and trustworthiness of the earth, bringing families and communities together. In these pages, you will find the basic principles that guide my gardening choices:
Wildness
Formal or themed gardens feel out of touch with the natural world to me. My goal is to plant like nature plants. Plants occupy niches in the wild world thanks to sunlight, soil type, water, proximity to other plants, and more—and that’s all the order we need in the garden.
Cooperation with the wild world
The garden is not isolated from nature—it is part of it. Other plants, weeds, animals, and even people are going to be in it.
Plant choice
The plants I find most essential are always changing depending on the individual whose garden I am tending, but I have a roster of regulars. African basil is a great one; I use that in every garden. The fava bean is another—I think of it as a “magic” crop.
We must let the place tell us
We learn about a place over time. The season might reveal that we mis-planted a garden, or that one item (David’s sunchokes!) is a key ingredient we had previously overlooked.
Community
Beauty is made in relationships, both to the land and its inhabitants and to other people. Our families, friendships, and relationships throughout the neighborhood find expression in the garden.
Personal
Each garden is extraordinarily personal. People hire me to make gardens as an expression of their selves: their pleasures, their tastes, their desires. As the sole gardener at Edible Gardens LA, the only way I can know what the garden must be for a client is to develop a relationship to the land and interpret it. Then I plant and tend to each garden.
These principles have been born of many years’ work and hundreds of gardens. Even my clients who come to me purely for the earthy and luxuriant style of my gardens soon realize that this style is the result not only of my choices, but is also an expression of themselves in cooperation with their own piece of land. I wrote this book to help people use all the lessons I have learned in order to begin a new collaboration with a unique piece of earth.
Freshly harvested beets at the farmers market. Beets are nature’s candy, sweet but also healthy. They are packed with vitamin C, folate, and magnesium.
New garden, new beginnings. These raised beds are made of untreated cedar, freshly planted for the cool season with broccoli, kale, fava beans, Swiss chard, peas, and plenty of herbs. Raised garden beds should always be made from untreated wood.
I love beginnings. The start of something new gives us hope for what is possible. Beginnings harbor dreams. A garden is in a nearly constant state of beginning: turning the earth, the first seeds, the first flowers, the first harvest of a season. When I had just begun gardening, it seemed obvious that the first gesture was to focus on the soil, digging in and amending it, but after a decade in gardens I now know that the garden truly begins with the hunt for just the right place to put it.
Every week I walk into a new home, a new garden, and a new possibility. Sometimes it is easy to see where the garden will go: a bright, sunny patch just off the kitchen or an easily accessible area by a side door. But more often the ideal location for the garden is harder to find. If we’re going to open up the earth, it needs to be exposed to full, all-day sun, and often that spot eludes us at first glance. Maybe there is too much shade just off the kitchen; perhaps the sunniest part of the yard is where the pool is located. When I meet with new clients, they often have a feeling about where they want the garden to go and we’ll look there first: They may hope to put the garden in a little-used space at the back of the property or to bring new life to long-forgotten planters taken over by bamboo or other ornamentals. But in the end, the sun determines where the garden will go.
When assessing your outdoor space, take a walk around. Walk the back, the sides, and the front of your property, keeping an open mind about every spot.
Rule out any areas you know to be shady most of the day. Look again at the sunny spots. Sit in them for a while. Will a garden work there with your lifestyle? If there are children, can this garden coexist with the way they use the yard? How about pets or wildlife? How can the garden become a focal point or a destination where you and your family can gather? I try to find a space that is close to the kitchen or near the house in some way. For many of us, if we can’t see the garden, it will be forgotten.
Sometimes the only truly sunny place is far away from the house, and that can be OK, too. This could be a destination garden (like Suzanne and David’s spot high up on their hill—see this page), a garden that beckons us to visit and that we can enhance with comforts such as an outdoor sofa or chairs to lounge and read in.
A garden house in the canyon protects heirloom tomatoes and beans from critters such as opossums, raccoons, and deer.
Landscape designer Christine London designed this tiered hillside garden, where we grow herbs such as lemon verbena, sage, chives, and parsley in abundance.
Gardens bring people together—here, Lauri sets the table for friends with freshly harvested herbs and limes from the garden.
This plot of earth is “felicitious” space—a part of the home and a place for daydreams.
If there are several places that are viable for the garden, I figure in other considerations. How will you live with this garden? A garden is not simply a place to put plants, like a storage shed or a parking space. This plot of opened earth is what philosopher Gaston Bachelard referred to as “felicitous space”—a space, like the rest of the home, where significant events take place and with which we have a kind of poetic engagement. This is a space where we daydream, where we connect to the soil we mostly ignore elsewhere in our lives, where we are rewarded with beauty we co-create with the earth, where we begin memorable meals, and which we map in our minds as a place filled with sweet memories that we revisit in dreams. The layout of the garden, like the layout of the house, becomes embedded in our minds. For children, in particular, the garden is part of the house, which forms their first universe.
Which spot will add most to the beauty and warmth of this home? Is there space to build in a small table or seating area? If you can relax in your garden, you spend more time in your garden. The more time we spend in our gardens, the more productive and healthy they become.
Putting a worktable and comfortable chairs in a greenhouse makes it an extension of the home, a place for seed-starting, a meal, or a conversation.
Queen Anne’s lace and carrot flowers planted together attract pollinators and people to the garden.
School gardens are places for learning and wonder.
Look up and around; landscaping and trees may determine if a spot will work. Too many pine trees or eucalyptus trees can cause problems, as their needles and leaves can alter the fertility of the soil.
Many landscaping features can also impact the soil. Railroad ties, commonly used on our properties as borders or to hold back hillsides, are filled with dangerous chemicals and carcinogens. So is pressure-treated lumber designed to prevent rot and termites. The chemicals in this lumber make their way into the soil and can make an area unsafe for growing food. If there are railroad ties or other chemical concerns in the area (for instance, old lead paint chipping off a fence or the house itself), raised beds might be an option. We need to keep our food away from any source of toxins. What goes into the soil goes into our food and into our bodies.
The screen walls of a garden house are good trellises for climbers such as blackberries and peas.
Harvesting lettuce, tatsoi, broccoli, and more in a garden house built to keep the deer out.
Place your new garden where it will get the most hours of sun per day.
The last step is to measure the actual sunlight the spot receives. A place we think of as sunny might actually be in shade for part of the day.
How to Do a Sun Study
I have an easy method for doing a sun study, and I ask my clients to follow these steps before we begin work on their garden:
1. Take a photo of the garden space being considered every two hours between 8:00 A.M. and 4:00 P.M. It doesn’t need to be done on the same day, but all days should be sunny without any clouds.
2. After you take a photograph of the area, email it to yourself with the time in the subject line. Repeat this until you have documented a full day’s worth of sun hours.
3. When you have all the photos, line them up to accurately determine how many hours of sun the space gets per day. Take into consideration the time of year. In the winter there will be less light and in the summer months, more. Is there going to be more or less light as you move forward in the year?
To find out how much sun a potential garden site gets per day, take a photo of that area every two hours between 8:00 A.M. and 4:00 P.M. on a sunny day.
Maggie has asked me to meet with her about planting a new garden, and that means coming to her home. It means walking into her house, into her family and their place in the world. It means looking at how they live and then at the earth that lies under it all and finding the patch of dirt we’ll open up to the sun, expanding their lives with new beauty. My assessment doesn’t start with a square of designated dirt; it starts with Maggie waving hello at the front door.
She walks me through her modernist home and its chef’s kitchen, telling me she’s excited to be able to cook straight out of the garden. What’s going on inside the home tells me a lot about what’s going on outside; I have a good feeling she’s going to use what we grow. The grounds around the house are luxuriantly landscaped, and I can see that this family is open to the wild, unpredictable communication of a garden; they’re not going to hide the garden away somewhere and ignore it. They’re going to make it part of their lives.
The property has a lot of outdoor space, and I start to deconstruct it—big yards surround the house, and the property is edged by all manner of decorative trees, including peppers and oaks and some huge eucalyptus trees that shade the grass. I make a note of a doorway to the lower level that might give us quick access to the house. Maggie leads me to an existing garden space no longer cultivated, somewhat remote from the house, but she wonders if it’s in the wrong place. I suspect her instincts are right and I begin an assessment of the light to see where our dig should really go.
I start with the light because the vegetable garden needs sun to thrive—dark or shady places are simply not an option. When Maggie and I discuss the light and she really thinks about where she sees sun, it’s not at the old garden space at the back of the property. That place is not only remote but also shaded part of the day. We realize together the garden probably needs to be moved to a side yard near the lower doorway. Once we truly consider this new spot for a while, I start taking my photos. Maggie continues the study and emails me photos throughout the day. It turns out this side yard spot has full, hot sun eight hours a day.
