Small Potatoes : Old Town Tustin Backyard Gardeners Sell Produce the Old-Fashioned Way

Thursday is shopping day for Eve Domingo. She’ll head to the supermarket for milk, detergent and other essentials, but she’ll stroll through the streets of Tustin’s Old Town to find the best produce.

Turn down several avenues in this historic neighborhood, and you’ll run into a makeshift fruit or vegetable stand. Homeowners with a yen for gardening have turned bumper crops into ventures that are part smaller-than-small businesses and part communal free-for-all.

“It’s such a cool thing,” Domingo said as she took a bouquet of wildflowers then dropped a dollar into the pay slot. “The flowers and veggies are always fresh, and I love that it’s an honor system.”

The stands are almost always unattended, with signs saying how much everything is. Customers are expected to follow their consciences, and it’s a system that apparently works.

Barbara Ezell lives on the 300 block of 6th Street, where she and her husband, Ken, have a homemade stand, one of six in the area. The Ezells sell whatever grows in their quarter-acre backyard garden, from flowers, lemons and Brussels sprouts to chile peppers, bell peppers, lettuce, corn and tomatoes.

Ezell said it’s rare for someone to cheat. They’ve run the stand for five years and have had only one bad experience.

“It was vandalized once, with someone breaking in and taking the money,” she said. “People borrow [the produce] every now and then, but usually they’ll put a note in saying they’ll pay us back tomorrow.”

Sometimes the note works the other way.

“People will put in too much money and say we owe them,” Ezell said. “They’ll just come back later and get more flowers or fruit.

“I’ve had loyal customers tattle [thinking someone] was taking stuff, but I explained to them that we owed them this time.”

Regular customers to the area’s stands are drawn to the produce’s freshness and market-beating prices. Ezell pointed out that most of the items, including hers, are organically grown and inexpensive.

A small container of Brussels sprouts goes for 50 cents, chile peppers are 5 cents a piece, bell peppers 10 cents. A jar of wildflowers costs $1. Other stands sell avocados for 50 cents each, a bag of oranges for a buck and lemons for 10 cents each.

The Ezells have a few chickens and ducks. They sell a half-dozen chicken eggs for $1 and duck eggs for 75 cents a piece.

Nobody’s getting rich, Ezell said, but profit is only part of the reason for the stands.

“Of course you want to make a little money too,” she said. “If not, you’d just leave it out and let people take everything. But this is really a way to get to meet people.

“I go down the street and swap for strawberries because I don’t grow strawberries. You find out what’s happening on your street, their street. You talk about baby showers, other events.”

Most of the stands keep regular hours. Many are open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. But Ezell said she’s pretty casual about the whole affair and expects neighbors and other customers to understand that.

“It’s not like I’m a real store. . . . I’m pretty busy [doing day-care at home], and if I don’t feel like putting [produce] out, I just don’t.”

Mark Harris, another Tustin resident who frequents the stands, admitted he’s been disappointed when the shelves were empty.

“This stuff is just so much better. When I go home empty-handed, I have to come back the next day. Or I send my wife.”

Domingo, also of Tustin, gets disappointed too, but the easygoing attitude is one she understands.

“Sometimes they don’t have what I came for, and that can be a letdown,” she said. “But it doesn’t really bother me. This is suppose to be casual, and I like it that way.”

With that, she picked up her flowers and oranges.