The Secret Gardens : Lifestyle: As urbanization continues to clog open space, some residents are getting back to the area’s farming roots in their own back yards.
With its concrete grid of tract homes, shopping centers and miles of roads and freeways, the Valley often seems a barren place incapable of producing much beauty, not to mention anything edible.
But as any back-yard gardener can tell you, its weary, urbanized soil still rallies with a little coaxing, compost and, as always, water.
From pound-size tomatoes in Topanga to North Hollywood hydroponics, the summer’s bounty of home-grown fruits and vegetables serves as a colorful reminder of why farmers settled in the San Fernando Valley in the first place.
“The ground here is so fertile and wonderful when really worked with compost,” said Edith Bridges, who with her husband, Robert, cultivates half an acre beside their comfortable Northridge home.
The Bridges began gardening on a modest scale more than 30 years ago, when their three children were young and they had little time for anything too ambitious. Then “we bought a little hand tractor,” Edith Bridges recalled, “so gradually we got less and less lawn and more and more growing space.”
Once they began composting--saving all their organic garbage for fertilizer--there was no turning back to the days of a tomato plant here, a pepper pot there.
Today, the Bridges oversee an Eden-like orchard of apples and figs, oranges, grapefruit, tangelos and limes, apricots, peaches and plums, as well as seasonal vegetable plots. And their seven grandchildren are learning the pleasures of gardening the way their parents did--by eating the results.
“The little kids know all about fresh peas and beans. They love all that stuff, especially fresh blackberries and strawberries,” said their grandmother.
A garden like the Bridges’ has its price--water bills of $750 for the last two months. But as Edith Bridges noted, some of their neighbors this summer have had higher bills and no vegetables. And maintenance consists of little more than a few hours a week of weeding, she said.
In Topanga, Martin Rodriguez devotes half of each Saturday to weeding and fertilizing his and his landlord’s plots. But the effort has paid off handsomely, in palookas of pound-size tomatoes he turns into salsa and salads.
Rodriguez has an advantage. He’s a landscaper for Sassafras Farm and Nursery in Topanga who picks up discounted seedlings there as well as tricks of the trade. But Rodriguez, who is also an electronics student and horse groomer, mainly credits the hothouse environment of his mountaintop home, where the sun beats down mercilessly on west Topanga Canyon’s rugged landscape.
“We live pretty high up, and the sun is pretty bright up there,” Rodriguez said.
On the Valley floor, the summer heat is so unforgiving that Boris Isaacson of North Hollywood brings his hydroponic garden of wheat grass, buckwheat greens and sunflower greens indoors until the fall.
Isaacson, who follows a strictly vegetarian, raw-food diet, also grows tomatoes, melons, chard and other produce in soil. But it is his delicate, water-based sprout garden that occupies most of his time and serves as the basis of his and his 100-year-old father’s health regimen.
“I was very sick in 1980--arthritis, ulcers, a bad heart--and today I’m healthier than when I was 16 years old,” said Isaacson, 66, a semi-retired real estate agent and plumbing contractor who lives with his father, Frank.
Isaacson put his father on the diet 2 1/2 years ago “after years of frantic runs to the emergency room with seizures, heart attacks and strokes, and since I put him on this diet . . . he hasn’t been sick one day. Not one day. Incredible.”
Because the Isaacsons eat or drink the tender shoots every day, they’re constantly engaged in a cycle of growing and harvesting. They soak the seeds in water; cover them in a colander or tray until they sprout in the darkness; then feed them with an enriched water solution until they grow to be a few inches tall and are ready to be cut.
“We’re always sprouting,” Isaacson said.
They also make cheese out of cashews and lentils, “pickled herring” and “bologna” from eggplant, and shun all forms of cooking except mild heating in a microwave.
“We don’t have a stove. I threw the stove out years ago,” Isaacson said.
If Isaacson’s ascetic lifestyle prompted his garden, then Jerry Sims’ back-yard vineyard above Studio City was inspired by a healthy dose of indolence--his love of wine and the realization that he had to keep clearing his hillside property anyway to avoid brush fires.
“We used to drink a lot of wine around here--we still do--so one of the neighbors said, ‘Why don’t you clear your land and do something with it?’ ” recalled Sims, a semi-retired film producer and director.
“So I finally said: ‘Why don’t I just do that? Why don’t I put in some railroad ties and put in some grapes?’ ”
A dozen years later, Sims has about 300 vines of automatically watered Cabernet, Merlot and Zinfandel grapes, plus an orchard that includes 18 avocado trees. He makes his own wine, as well as mead, the spiced liquor made from fermented honey.
Though his hobby involves an ongoing battle against birds--who eat the grapes as soon as they’re ripe--and the plant disease powdery mildew, Sims says it’s deeply gratifying.
“It’s lots of work, but it’s good for the soul.”
