Room to Grow : Finding Place for a Garden Presents Special Challenge to Gardeners With Small Yards

Everyone becomes a gardener in April--it’s just in the air. People can’t stay away from nurseries or wait to get their hands in the soil. As a result, more gardens get planted at this time of the year than at any other.

But for many gardeners, the trick is finding the room to do some planting. The car trunk may be full of shrubs and flowers but there’s no place around the house to plant them.

Some new homes have surprisingly small back yards. Some older homes have been enlarged at the expense of the garden. Perhaps a swimming pool fills the back yard. Many gardens have matured and are now too shady for those tomatoes you were looking forward to.

Or maybe you’re just one of those gardeners who never has enough room no matter how big or sunny the garden is, or who covets his neighbor’s empty back yard or that vacant lot a few blocks away.

During the past year we’ve seen some pretty clever solutions to this problem--people who have found a place for a garden, even in cramped quarters. Sometimes, they’re surprising or unlikely places.

Not enough sun for tomatoes in the back yard? Use the front yard. Although many homes have small back yards, most have ample city-mandated fronts, usually 20 feet deep.

Janie Malloy runs a small business in Pasadena called Home Grown that installs and even maintains vegetable gardens for those who haven’t the time or the expertise--or the energy.

For architect Mike Kent, who filled his back yard with a garage big enough to build an airplane in (which he plans to do), Malloy designed and planted a huge vegetable garden in the front yard.

In a modern-day version of plowing up the prairie, she rented a sod-cutter and carted off the old lawn.

Then she laid out a series of raised beds, made of 2x6-inch lumber. She didn’t use treated lumber or railroad ties because she’s suspicious of the chemicals in them.

She also fenced the garden to protect the vegetables (a three-foot fence in front yards is allowed in most communities) and built an arbor for edible grapes. She carefully worked around an existing citrus tree.

She left the soil alone where the paths between the beds would be, but she laboriously double-dug the ground under every bed. Double-digging is the ultimate way to prepare a garden bed that’s going to be used a lot, for instance, growing crop after crop of vegetables. You dig twice as deep as normal when turning the soil, in this case about 2 feet deep. No mechanical tillers are allowed, everything is done with a spade.

Only the top foot-deep layer is amended; the bottom is simply broken up so roots and water can penetrate.

Malloy’s gardens are completely organic, so she added special organic fertilizers, cow manure and compost.

The beds are irrigated with drip tubing, a double row running down each bed. Usually she puts gravel on the paths between the beds to keep feet dry, but in this case she’s trying to get chamomile to grow in the paths.

When the photographs were taken this past month, the bed closest to the sidewalk was filled with potatoes, and broccoli was just finishing up in the beds behind. There were carrots and lettuce and a handsome red mustard that added a little peppery taste to salads. Soon the beds will be replanted with summer crops, including tomatoes. In the front yard, there’s no shortage of sun.

Fill in the pool.

Gerry and Eva Silver wanted a smaller, easier-to-fill pool and got a flower-filled garden in the bargain.

They had Robert Moore of Brentwood Engineering & Pools make their big old pool into a sleek new lap pool and were going to pave over the unused portion when Jack Wheeler of Jack’s Unique Gardens in Van Nuys said, “Wait!”

He figured out how to plant an exuberant garden inside the walls of the old pool, by drilling drainage holes in the bottom, then filling it with rubble, gravel and soil so it became a giant container.

To keep the dirt from sifting down into the rubble, he used weed control fabric on top of the gravel. Remarkably, the plants grow in only 18 inches of soil, all the city would allow. They are regularly irrigated with automatic sprinklers.

Wheeler really knows his plants, having worked at just about every nursery in the San Fernando Valley, starting when he was only 12, and this garden filled with unusual plants shows the breadth of his experience.

The small garden is packed with an astounding collection of perennials, from the tall Verbena bonariensis and Sidalcea malviflora to the low coreopsis ‘Moonbeam’ and brachycomb at the front of the bed. Plants even grow on, and in, a quaint birdhouse at one end of the bed.

It is basically a pastel pink and blue scheme, with touches of soft gray foliage and pale yellow. He says that the mix of perennials provides color for 11 out of 12 months.

Eva Silver says you can’t imagine how wonderful it is to swim among all the flowers--”It’s a touch of paradise”-- and she’s glad they didn’t pave it over.

Kick out the horses.

Cas Sermack, who owns Cavalier Landscape & Design, was not short of space exactly, but he picked a rather unusual spot for his giant vegetable garden. It suggests that there are some none-too-obvious places for gardens.

He had two acres in an equestrian area of Sunland to play with. But along with a barn, he inherited a riding arena from the previous owner, that was smack in the middle of his front yard.

Instead of tearing it down, he decided to put a vegetable garden inside the arena’s fence and then surround it with beds of flowers. It was the sunniest place on the shady property.

Preparing the soil for planting was a particular challenge because the riding arena was a very heavy clay with several inches of gritty sand on top. A soil test turned up lots of salt in the soil from the horses’ urine.

First he tilled the entire area to break up the clay and mix the sand into the soil. Then he brought in 40 yards of soil amendments.

He spread a six-inch layer of amendments on top of the soil, then tilled it in, making the tiller dig as deep as it could. He used mushroom compost in half of the garden, and fir shavings in the other half, just to see which worked best.

A year later, he has decided that they had the same effect, though the mushroom compost was higher in salt. To get rid of the salt in the soil, and in the mushroom compost, he planned on leaching them out with heavy irrigation, but along came the 1992 “March miracle” rains and saved him the trouble.

The garden is laid out inside raised beds, with decomposed gravel paths between and benches at the end. It is irrigated with drip tubing, but he uses portable sprinklers to get plants started.

He planted the garden in April, with several kinds of corn and carrots, six different tomatoes (‘Sweet 100’ was his favorite), seven kinds of peppers, Chinese eggplant, Hungarian cucumbers, pumpkins, squash, melons of all kinds, bush and pole beans, strawberries and sunflowers. The photograph shows the garden in late June.

He had very few insect problems, even though the garden is entirely organic and he thinks that the beds of flowers surrounding the garden helped by attracting beneficial insects.

Who ate all of the produce from the huge garden? His family of five, neighbors and, fittingly, neighborhood horses, who consumed quantities of carrots, grown in what used to be a riding arena.

All of which proves that gardens are not always where you find them--sometimes you have to look at the unlikely places.