A Los Feliz Family Shares a Passion for Growing Organic Produce

Robyn Bennett doesn’t make her children eat vegetables. She doesn’t need to. In fact, trouble might start if she tried separating Scout, 9, or Willa, 5, from their favorite lettuces, broccoli and string beans, some of which they’ve raised from seeds. This, Bennett admits, is her benevolent secret--teaching the kids to grow their own. “They’ve always liked vegetables,” she explains, “but now they’re excited about them and see eating them as fun.”

Most nights at Robyn and Bill Bennett’s Los Feliz house, dinner begins with a trip outside to the garden, where the girls pluck what appeals to them from several overflowing stone-edged beds. Then Robyn props a pair of stools against the kitchen sink, gets out cutting boards and butter knives, and her daughters go to work. The results--neatly carved-up peppers, zucchini and other five-a-day picks--go into soups, sautes and stews that the entire family, including Bill, a record-company executive, enjoys throughout the year.

Located outside the kitchen of a 1918 Spanish-style house designed by architects Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey, the vegetable garden all but sold the Bennetts on the property two years ago. When they first toured the place, pumpkins lolled in the raised beds and apples weighed down the trees. For Robyn, a New Yorker who’d previously gardened only in pots, the picture was irresistible. After she and her husband bought the house, she discontinued the former owner’s landscape service--which had tended the vegetable plots--and took the job on with her kids.

Now, before each of the two main growing seasons, summer and winter, the family gathers for a planning meeting. How many people will be eating string beans? Robyn asks. Who wants tomatoes? “We only plant what we like and use,” she notes, thereby avoiding the late-season plagues of bat-size squash and withered peas.

The chores of planting, weeding and watering are shared by all, and no esoteric methods are employed. Companion planting is a matter of aesthetics--placing flame-red cockscomb, for example, next to ruby-toned peppers. Soil-boosting consists of periodically ladling on compost. So far, bugs haven’t been a problem. But Scout, just to be safe, arranged a family trip to a local nursery to buy aphid-eating ladybugs after learning about them at school.

For Robyn, the garden’s rewards are hard to count. In addition to her totally organic fresh greens, which cut her produce shopping by a third, she has a constant supply of flowers for the house--from delphiniums and foxgloves to sunflowers and artichoke thistles. She doesn’t have to worry about pesticides, and she gets to share the thrill of gardening with her girls. “It’s such a treat for us,” she says, “to watch a seed sprout and grow and finally turn into something we can eat.”