GARDENING : You Just Can’t Get It Fresher : Enjoying Fruits and Veggies of Their Labor
When Ed Fishburn of Tustin says he likes his corn fresh, he isn’t kidding.
First he turns the fire on under a kettle of water on his stove. Then he goes out to his half-acre fruits and vegetables garden, picks a few ears of corn and shucks them. By then, the water is boiling and he drops the corn in.
Fishburn’s friends and neighbors say they’ve never tasted better.
“The minute you pull an ear of corn, the sugar in it starts turning to starch,” Fishburn says. “The longer it sets, the harder and drier it gets and the starchier it gets.”
Because of his convenient back-yard garden, Fishburn doesn’t have a problem with starchy corn on the cob.
And almost every morning, he has grapefruit freshly picked from his 30-year-old tree. Sometimes he has strawberries or blackberries, also from his garden.
He’s not alone.
Bill Gelling of Fullerton enjoys grafting as a hobby. As a result, he has an apple tree in his front yard with six different kinds of apples on it, all ripening at different times of the year. He also grows citrus and he has added banana plants to his yard. His wife, Grace, also tends their garden, which is chock-full of tomatoes, beets, Swiss chard, squash, beans and pungent herbs--one of her favorites.
Eunice Messner of Anaheim Hills says she harvests at least $15 worth of food from her half-acre garden every day. She spends six to seven hours a day tending her mini-farm which yields guavas, sapote, pears, kiwi, grapefruit, bananas, corn, shell beans, persimmons, cherimoyas, ollaberries, mangoes, squash, cantaloupe, carrots, tomatoes, zucchini, peppers and much more.
Messner gardens on a hillside behind her house. And she tends another quarter of an acre for a next-door neighbor. She has gradually terraced the slope herself, moving dirt and using concrete blocks and bricks to create retaining walls and planters.
There are 155 steps from the top of her garden to the bottom. The test for visitors is making it back from the bottom to the top without puffing too hard. Messner can and she is 70.
All of these people are practicing a sensual pleasure lost to much of suburban Orange County--enjoying the fresh, succulent taste of home-grown fruits and vegetables.
Growing a few vegetables or maintaining a fruit tree or two is not all that unusual. But these three families are so successful at gardening that they harvest more than they can consume from what could really be called suburban mini-farms.
What they can’t eat, freeze or can, they share with family, friends and neighbors.
Fishburn and his wife, Dell, own a large double lot, plus they use his mother’s small back yard next door for added gardening space. Visitors often refer to their garden as a “farm,” but Fishburn, a 69-year-old retired bank loan officer who grew up on a farm in Kansas, says it’s certainly not what he would consider a farm. To him, it’s a small garden.
The ground in Fishburn’s garden is flat. And he prefers the type of gardening that usually requires no more than an hour or two a day to maintain. That leaves plenty of time to enjoy welcome breezes under a canopy of shade created by three large elms behind his house.
The shade beckons him on warm days and “makes it hard to get anything done. I go out there and work for 20 minutes and then sit in the shade for an hour.”
But his garden isn’t neglected.
It is an abundant mix of fruit trees and carefully tended plots of berry vines, cantaloupe vines and vegetables. He staggers his vegetable planting. When one crop of corn, beans or beets is finished, another is ready to pick. With this approach, Fishburn is able to enjoy his home-grown corn almost year-round, except for winter months.
“I plant a lot of stock in small patches,” he said. This increases his chances of success, because if one patch of zucchini or beets doesn’t do well, he always has another coming along that probably will.
One of his favorite trees is an 18-foot high tangerine he planted 25 years ago at the entry to his garden. Fishburn says the fruit is sweet and juicy.
Nearby is a pumpkin patch where Fishburn is growing a jack-o-lantern crop for his grandchildren. And cantaloupe is just starting to bloom. Farther into the garden is the corn patch, which seems to get more planting area than the other vegetables.
There are also green peppers, cucumbers (Dell Fishburn has canned 17 quarts of sweet pickles so far this season), green beans, lima beans, a plum tree, fig trees, Jerusalem artichokes, Swiss chard and several patches of zucchini. He even grows rhubarb, though he says it isn’t completely successful and never lasts very long.
All this makes it hard to believe Fishburn doesn’t spend all day toiling, but big gardens don’t have to be worked all the time.
The Gellings use their side yards, a 35-foot-by-100-foot back yard and a landscaped front yard with no lawn to accommodate about 50 fruit trees, strawberries, ollaberries and baba berries in addition to the hearty crop of vegetables.
“There really isn’t that much work involved,” Bill Gelling, a retired civil engineer, says of his garden.
Watering, for instance, doesn’t take the Gellings much time at all. Even the container plants are on a microsprinkler drip system, which has the added advantage of using less water than other methods. (Messner has a drip system for all but her vegetables. Fishburn prefers to use a hose.)
Bill and Grace Gelling do say, however, that there is more work in the fall when they have to prune the fruit trees and in the spring when they fertilize to encourage an abundance of fruit.
Fruit trees in the Gellings’ back yard include a dwarf peach, a plum with graftings of several varieties on it, an oroblanco grapefruit, a seedless tangerine, a ruby blood orange and a blood orange, figs and a small surinam cherry.
The berries are planted in the large plastic barrels that are halves of 55-gallon plastic drums. Wire cages stand inside the barrels. Gelling says this is a good way of containing vines that would otherwise run all over the yard. Openings in the cages have been enlarged in a few places to make it easier to reach in and harvest berries.
The Gellings also grow peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers in barrels with wire cages. Grace Gelling says one of the big advantages of this is that it’s easier to keep pests such as sow bugs off of the plants.
A large raised planter runs from a rear fence and along a side yard. The concrete wall of the planter is about waist high and serves as a retaining wall, holding in soil that slopes up against a fence.
Strawberries, onions, squash, beets, string beans, tomatoes, daisies, a Valencia orange tree, a Washington navel orange tree, butternut squash, marigolds, collards, mint, several types of guava trees, oregano, thyme, carrots, beets, an avocado tree Bill Gelling hopes will bear “football-size fruit,” borage (an herb with a blue flower that attracts bees) and much more share the planter bed.
Growing plants from seeds is another skill practiced by these suburban farmers.
Fishburn built a 9-by-10-foot greenhouse that he uses in the fall and winter, when it’s cooler. He uses the greenhouse to start his seedlings and to grow tomatoes.
Messner has a covered area where she grows her seedlings in what she calls a foolproof manner. She plants seeds in tiny plastic pots filled with granulated pure pumice. She then sits the pot in a saucer of water. Fruit trees may take as long as six weeks to germinate, but vegetables sprout within a few days.
She says this method prevents a fungus called damp-off that causes seedlings to die at soil level. Once a seedling has sprouted, she may take it into her garden and use half a plastic milk carton as a miniature green house to protect it while it grows. Or, she may take the seedling and place it in a long plastic tube with a light planting mixture to encourage growth and leave it protected in the covered area.
The unusual terrain of Messner’s garden is one reason she spends so much time there. When she orders a ton of chicken manure as fertilizer, she has to carry it down 50 pounds at a time in two buckets.
Once in a while, she feels there’s too much to do, but she plans to keep at it because “it keeps me younger.” And, she says, it gives her something to show for her effort, rather than just exercising for the sake of exercising.
She even has adventures in her hillside garden because all kinds of wildlife are attracted there. She’s had a coyote on her patio, peering in a window, and a bobcat has appeared in the yard. And then there are the snakes.
Messner says she has five kinds of snakes in her garden, including rattlers. She doesn’t mind them so much because they do their job--keeping the rodent population down. But sometimes, the snakes get too bold.
“I saw the biggest rattlesnake this summer that I’ve ever seen,” she says. “I thought it was a python he was so huge. The cat had it cornered.”
The snake was coiled and rattling.
Unshaken, Messner got a hose and turned it on the cat, who dashed out of the snake’s reach. Luckily, the snake was scared off too.
“Once I was picking strawberries and I ran across this snake and I couldn’t see its head to tell if it was a rattlesnake or not,” she said. “So I got a big long 2-by-4 to try to determine what it was and I still couldn’t. Finally, I just said, ‘It’s my garden and I’m gonna pick those strawberries.’ ”
Apparently the snake agreed. It disappeared.
