Maybe those cucumber vines in your garden are growing heavy with fruit these days, though it’s not always easy to find the cucumbers amid the leaves and stems. At LA Green Grounds, we’ve got some productive plants trained to grow up a trellis, and we’ve been harvesting for a few weeks.

Many kinds of cucumbers are out there, for salads and snacks -- and of course for pickles. These could hardly be easier to make. Florence (Nishida) brought some homemade pickles to the garden recently, made from a Rachael Ray recipe. It’s below, tweaked just a bit. Try it, or find one that suits you; there are hundreds out there.

Remember, these pickles must be refrigerated, because they have not been processed to be shelf-stable. That’s why they are called “quick.” Feel free to change the spices, or to use other sorts of cucumbers, or other vegetables such as turnips, radishes or okra.

Quick Pickles (Rachael Ray)

Makes 4 servings

Ingredients:
½ cup white vinegar
2 rounded tsp sugar
1 tsp mustard seed
1 tsp salt
1 clove garlic, cracked
2 T. fresh dill
1 bay leaf
4 pickling (or other) cucumbers, cut into 1-inch slices on an angle

In a small saucepan set over medium-high heat, put vinegar, sugar, mustard seed, salt and garlic. Cook until the sugar dissolves, and bring the liquid to a simmer.
In a glass jar just big enough to hold them, add the cucumber pieces and the dill. Pour the simmering liquid into the jar, cover tightly and shake to spread the ingredients.

Cool to room temperature, then refrigerate after one day. You can eat these the next day, or a leave a few days -- your preference.

I became a volunteer at LA Green Grounds after the lockdowns of Covid-19 had changed everything. That meant I could work at the garden, but either alone or with one or two very distanced and masked people. It meant our meetings were on Zoom. And most important, it meant that a hallmark of the organization – Dig Ins – were off the table.

On Tuesday, June 8, I am so happy to say, I went to my first Dig In. And it was every bit as meaningful as promised by Florence Nishida, LA Green Grounds founder.

At a Dig-In, a resident in South Los Angeles invites family and friends. And LA Green Grounds brings volunteers. Together, they install a front-yard edible garden that offers the neighborhood fresh produce, a sense of community, and the knowledge of how wonderful it is to grow your own food.

“Dig-Ins are real work, but a heap of fun, too,” Florence says.

“It was hard work as always but just great what can be accomplished with many hands (and arms, backs and legs!),” said LA Green Grounds volunteer Grace Yamamura.

Dozens of Dig-In gardens have been installed around South LA, and on June 8, volunteers gathered to reboot the garden at the home of Sarah and Scott Yetter, just south of Pico Boulevard in the Pico Union neighborhood.

The garden was put in about six years ago, but needed some love – in the form of weeding and new plantings, including a hallmark of summer: tomatoes. It’s a garden that’s an integral part of the community. Sarah runs a preschool program at the First Free Evangelical Church that using the garden. They hold community dinners twice a month.

When the volunteers showed up, it was clearly a hub of activity. A teenager in the house was taking his AP calculus test. Kids came in and out of the house. Interns from next door were part of the work crew.

The LA Green Grounds team included Florence’s 16-year-old grandson, Kai Ogawa who was visiting and said he felt the experience made him a “real Angeleno.”

It may be a while still before we can schedule new Dig-Ins, but if you are interested in turning your front yard into an organic edible garden, complete a garden application.

Contributor: Mary MacVean

LA Green Gounds is joining a science project organized by the science writer at KPCC, Jacob Margolis. It’s called the Ozone Project, and will have LAGG and other volunteer growers all over the city growing beans to study the impact of ozone stress on plant health.

As Margolis wrote recently, the air above our city is among the country’s worst, specifically for ground-level ozone, which is an unhealthful byproduct “of the sun and heat baking all of the toxic emissions we pump into the sky.”

Margolis decided to set up a citizen science project in which people would receive beans to plant – one variety that shows ozone damage and one that does not. Of course, the growers won’t know which is which.

LAGG took beans to plant in our garden but also to distribute to growers in the adjacent community garden and to our volunteers.

“When plants take up carbon dioxide through tiny little holes in their leaves called stomata, they end up taking in the air pollution around them as well. Once the ozone enters the plant, it acts as if it’s being attacked by some sort of pathogen and works to drop the impacted leaves (usually the oldest), to stop the problem from spreading,” Margolis wrote.

He wants us citizen scientists to post updates every week – including photos on social media with hashtag #ozonebeans and @jacobmargolis. Margolis can be reached at [email protected].

In three Victory Garden classes on Zoom, Florence Nishida brought LA Green Grounds to life with pictures and descriptions. But with just days before the final class, we got word that classes could be held outdoors, in person. Limit 10 people. Distanced, with masks. Time to reshuffle the plans and welcome students in two groups to the garden.

Everyone knew how much better the experience would be for the students, who were split into two groups to abide by the rules. Kevin Ridley, Mary MacVean and Florence’s husband, Gordon, helped shepherd the students around the garden on a hot Sunday for demonstrations and chances to try weeding, watering, harvesting and more.

If you are interested in taking a Victory Garden class, offered through the Master Gardener program, watch this space or other gardening blogs for the fall dates.

Kevin Ridley brought a worm farm to class and explained how he feeds his wriggling castings creators.

One great aspect of growing fava beans or other legumes is that they are nitrogen powerhouses, fixing it in the soil with their roots and adding it when the stalks are chopped and “forked” into the soil, as these will be.

Success! Earwigs trapped.

An easy recipe for keeping insects away from plants

We imagine there can't be many gardens that haven't been invaded by snails or slugs, earwigs or roly polys. Many gardeners just turn away in annoyance, and sacrifice some of their harvest. But there are easy ways to fight back.

At LA Green Grounds, founder Florence Nishida made bait that appealed to the bugs' natural attraction to the smell of fermentation: a bit of vegetable oil and a bit of vinegar or soy sauce in an open-top shallow can, such as cat food or tuna. The oil keeps the insects from swimming on the top of the liquid and climbing out of the can.

If you water, watch for the traps, so you don't spill the contents out onto your plant beds. And move the can to various locations, best near the base of a chewed-up plant, or in the corners, or under the shade of large leaves.

Most of these invertebrates stay sheltered during sunny days, and come out and feed in the evenings.

When your trap is full, discard and refill it with the bait if necessary.

It was a very long May day at the garden - Gordon and I left at 8 pm (he was painstakingly cutting up all his prunings to fit in the trash can).  But it was worth staying late because I had the most splendid visitors! 

A mother and her two young children wandered into the garden, probably the children leading.  They were very spirited and sweet - a fine combination. The boy declared -"Are there vegetables here? I like vegetables!"  Of course I was delighted.  So, the children got a tour and taste of almost everything. I also gave a stern warning that they were never to eat anything unless it was given to them by a teacher (maybe that's not the best advice) or their mother - because some things are not safe to eat.  "You mean they're poisonous?" he asked. Yes! I said, and showed them the flowering pea, and showed them how to see the difference between them and edible peas. I hope they remember. 

The boy asked such good questions, and both were a real delight with their enthusiasm and good cheer and open nature.  I spoke to the mother, who is from Guatemala, in Spanish when I realized she wasn't catching everything - and she immediately relaxed and began to ask questions. She was interested in the compost.  All three were interested in the Pigeon pea.  

His first taste of loquat.  "A little sweet, like an apricot, but also a little sour like lemon".  He liked the sour.

A young couple wandered in at almost the same time.  She had been in the garden before, and was drawn to it because she was delighted in and taken a course about California native plants. But she also loved vegetables. So they also got tastes and surprises in the garden.  The two groups were totally unrelated - wandered in on their own - and live within 2-3 blocks away.  

I was so happy!

~ Florence

The weeds at LA Green Grounds may have thought they had us beat, but the weeding party on a recent Saturday let them know they were wrong.

Weeds had proliferated on the berm at the south edge of the farm and all around our orchard. And plenty of other spots, too. For a few weeks now, Garden Keepers have been pulling them whenever they could. But a whole group took them on and dug out heaps of weeds, which Chad crammed into two trash containers and several bags.

Many thanks to Veronica, Gordon, Suzanne, Chad, Naba, Catherine and Florence. A special "Shout Out" to Mr. Forte, a 93 year-old long-time Good Earth Community Garden member who grubbed out those weeds with a hand mattock, and had previously weed-whacked a bunch of unsightly and vigorous weeds in "No Man's Land" near our LAGG teaching garden. Also, thanks to Jay, whose guitar playing helped keep everyone in tune. And finally to the ice cream vendor whose paletas de Michoacan eased the effort for everyone, with flavors including coconut, walnut, jamaica, guanabana, strawberry, coffee and mango.

See photos in the “April 2021 The Great Weed Out!” gallery.

Next: covering the ground with mulch to keep the weeds from returning.

_____________________

Contributor: Garden Keeper Mary M.

It’s easy to take for granted the plants that grow in abundance without much human work, but a new set of eyes often can see those plants in a new way. So it went with the LA Green Grounds patches of New Zealand spinach.

New Zealand spinach is not native to this continent, but comes from New Zealand and Australia, South America and some Pacific islands. It’s drought-tolerant and often used as an edible landscape plant because it forms a lush green carpet.

One of our LAGG Garden Keepers, Veronica Anderson, took some home from LA Green Grounds to try. She found this website that's full of New Zealand spinach recipes: http://recipesfortom.blogspot.com/2012/09/tsuruna-new-zealand-spinach.html. Thanks, Veronica! It’s also good steamed or stir-fried with a bit of olive oil, garlic and salt; and on pasta or pizza. Some people eat it raw.

While it’s not actually a spinach, the taste is similar, especially when cooked. It’s high in vitamins A and C and a good source of calcium.

The famous Capt. Cook took New Zealand spinach onto one of his ships, where people ate it to prevent scurvy; and Sir Joseph Banks, an explorer and botanist, introduced it to England in 1772.

The plant is a halophyte, meaning it is salt-tolerant. It likes heat, and seems unaffected by most pests. If you plant it, give it room to spread.

~ Contributed by LAGG Garden Keeper Mary M.

These lovely orange flowers have become a not uncommon sight in salads, in part because they're a beautiful contrast to lettuces and in part because they're delicious -- a little sweet and peppery. They're Nasturtium flowers, and they grow freely in gardens and in uncultivated places, bringing color and liveliness as they climb the sides of buildings, fences, slopes and in many spots at LA Green Grounds. But many people don't know that the rest of the plant is edible, too. The stems and leaves can go in a stir-fry, and the seed pods can be pickled like capers or tossed into salads. LA Green Grounds volunteer Kat shows various ways she cooked the plant in these pictures.

“Pruning is an art,” says Florence Nishida, the founder of LA Green Grounds.

And a daunting one at that.

Fruit trees are pruned in their dormant stage, and several needed winter pruning at the garden, including the fig, stone fruit and pomegranate trees. So, with attention to Covid-19 social distancing, three people gathered with Florence to do some pruning.

Pruning is done to keep a tree at a particular size, to keep the tree healthy and to ensure bountiful fruit. And that’s just the start. Particular branches should be cut – as Florence noted, the three Ds: dead, deranged and diseased branches. And the cuts need to be made in particular ways. For instance, cuts should be made cleanly, just above a node of new growth.

It’s important to learn from someone who knows how to prune, or to hire an experienced person. If you want to learn more, we recommend taking a look at a book called, reasonably enough, How to Prune Fruit Trees, by R. Sanford Martin. It’s a small book, originally published in 1944, and covers dozens of varieties.

Founders

LA Green Grounds Co-Founder Florence Nishida, botanist, mycologist and life-long gardener, joined the Master Gardeners of Los Angeles County in 2008 after retiring from careers in teaching (English- LAUSD), editorial research at Time Inc., and research in mycology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM).

In 2010, as one of the initial Master Gardeners tasked with setting up gardening classes in Los Angeles, Nishida was daunted at the lack of suitable sites: schools and churches preferred asphalted grounds for parking. Thus, she proposed creating a teaching garden to the museum. It became a prototype for the Erika J. Glazer edible garden.

As a child, Nishida moved to the south Los Angeles neighborhood of the Natural History Museum following release from a WWII Japanese/Japanese-American internment camp. Aware that South Los Angeles suffers from high rates of diet-related disease, exacerbated by the lack of healthy food resources, i.e. aka a “food desert,” her principal goals as a gardening teacher was to provide opportunities for residents to access better diet, health, and food security.

She recruited her museum students, community members, and USC students from the fall 2010 Grow LA Victory Garden class to join her in starting the non-profit she envisioned.  This became LA Green Grounds whose mission was to teach south Los Angeles residents how to grow their own food in easily visible front yard gardens, with the intent that homeowners would mutually share their bounty; thus ending the "food desert" in the neighborhood. Bringing together neighbors and volunteers from greater Los Angeles, LA Green Grounds promotes access to fresh food, gardening knowledge and healthy eating habits to the community.

Co-founder Vanessa Vobis was a TA at Nishida's first Grow LA Victory Garden class held at the Natural History Museum.  Among other roles, Vobis successfully recruited participants for LAGG events, e.g., Nature Fest and Sustainable Sundays. Initial meetings were held at Vobis' home, located near the USC campus.

Co-founder Ron Finley was a local resident and activist who was keenly interested in gardening and attended the first year's gardening fall class. Known for his outspoken and gregarious nature, many became aware of LA Green Grounds through Finley's TED Talk about the parkway garden controversy.  This talk has been viewed over four millions times. Finley has since moved on to his own initiatives and founded Ron Finley Projects.

In 2016, LA Green Grounds started its own teaching garden in Los Angeles with monthly workshops, e.g., container gardening, growing and using herbs, pruning, children’s workshops and hand-on learning-while-volunteering gardening opportunities. LAGG’s Teaching Garden is unique in several ways: a variety of uncommon or ‘ethnic’ vegetables and herbs expose people to new foods; native plants provide habitat for wildlife in a natural setting, a succulent and native plants border present attractive drought-tolerant landscaping, and the open, unfenced green space is enjoyed by neighbors, visitors, and gardening students as a sanctuary.

Board of Directors

In 2021, LA Green Grounds filed for and was accepted as its own standalone 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization. The Board of Directors is comprised of the following:

• Florence Nishida Hendler - Executive Director
• Mary MacVean - Secretary
• Grace Yamamura - Treasurer
• Catherine Fuller - Director

Messages to LA Green Grounds can be sent to [email protected].

LA Green Grounds is unfunded by large grants, and is a 100% volunteer organization, relying upon donations to fulfill our mission. We invite you to donate to support our ending food deserts. Tax ID #86-2413933.

LA Green Grounds is blooming as the new year begins. Everywhere you look there are flowers, frequently with bees or hummingbirds feasting on them. The white and purple fava flowers that soon will yield delicious beans, the marigolds that were planted into the garden after the holiday of Dia de los Meurtos, the vibrant pigeon pea bushes and so many more. Come by, take a look, but of course wear a mask and make sure there are not many people around.

The summer squash plants at LA Green Grounds spread on the ground, with a couple of zucchinis growing unnoticed till they were nearly the size of a hefty baguette. So it's understandable that the long green fruit on a nearby vine seemed like just another sort of squash.

Ah, but it wasn't. We've produced our first luffah (or loofah), and on the vine they look quite a bit like summer squash. But it’s another story once harvested.

"It was a lot of fun, peeling back the skin and voila, there was a sponge!" said Florence Nishida, the garden founder.

Luffah is in the gourd family, and can be eaten if cut when it’s young and abut 6 inches long. But leave the fruit to mature, which can mean two feet long, and you’ve got a bathtub accessory. It’s a scruffy sponge, often used to exfoliate the skin. Make sure to rinse it and dry it out after use to keep it free of bacteria.

Let the luffah dry out in the sun before using it. You can save the seeds for next season.

- Contributed by LAGG Garden Keeper Mary M.

I'm not sure why the usually dark-red-skinned Japanese sweet potato that we planted in the LAGG Teaching Garden grew to be light-colored potatoes, but their taste was great!  It is also known as satsumaimo.

I finally baked mine last night.

We pulled them about three weeks ago.

Remember: sweet potatoes should be allowed to cure for at least two weeks after harvested. Don't wash the skin or scrub it hard to remove soil. The skin is very tender for a few weeks. To keep them in storage to cure without drying out, wrap each in two layers of newspaper, or a paper bag might work.

When ready, wash the skin well. Scrub lightly.

Bake in oven at 350 degrees until you can smell it cooking. Depending on the size and thickness, this is about 30 to 45 minutes. Squeeze it (through a pot holder, or use a fork) and remove from the oven when tender. Try not to over cook.

To serve, slice in half and add a bit of butter and eat hot. Delicious.

- Florence Nishida/Master Gardener & LAGG Founder
12/18/2020

For existing LAGG Garden Keeper Volunteers ONLY

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These hearty plants, with their delicate flowers, are popping up all over LA Green Grounds, in the beds set aside for plants, in the paths, around the compost. They are fava bean plants, and they do much more than produce beans.

Favas, also called broad beans, come in many colors and are delicious when cooked, but many people plant them as a cover crop because they are good at fixing nitrogen in the soil. Cover crops are used to protect and improve the soil – a great, inexpensive alternative to fertilizers.

When Florence Nishida began LA Green Grounds, the soil was "packed down, never cultivated before, and who knows whatever spilled or was used there," she said. "Our garden didn’t even have weeds growing – oh, a couple of bindweed."

She decided the garden needed plants that would add nutrients, would penetrate the ground with their roots and would provide food.

But before planting the favas, she and other volunteers used shovels and pick-axes to open the cement-hard ground, she said. They added city-made compost, about 6 inches thick, and mulch. On that, Nishida scattered beans in January 2016.

"It was surprising how many germinated," she said. "That spring, we had a pretty good crop of fava beans, scattered throughout the garden."

The beans – along with California poppies – were dropped without regard to what was a bed or what was a path.

Growers don’t always wait for their cover crops to produce food; often, they cut the plants down before that so they can plant other things. But at LA Green Grounds, the favas were left growing until they went to seed.

"After that year, we had an abundant fava bean crop - so much that it was nearly a fava bean jungle" each of the next three or four years, Nishida said. In 2019, gardeners cut many of them down to make way for other things. Nishida said her philosophy is to let them grow unless the space is needed.

Once the plant produces its seed pods, the nitrogen is being used by the plant, rather than collecting in the roots. But if the plants are pruned, as they are now, the cut pieces can be chopped for compost or used as mulch.

"Anyway, it's like the welcome guest who came for dinner and never left," she said.

The black and white flowers on the plant, if left, will mature into thick pods. The beans are flat seeds found in the pods.

If you are intrigued, fava is a cool-weather crop that can be planted in fall for spring harvest, and at home you don’t need to spread them everywhere.

The pods are edible when young, and one year, volunteer Beth Goldfarb roasted them for the garden volunteers.

It’s more common to eat the beans. They’re a bit labor intensive to prepare because once you’ve shelled them, there’s another skin on each bean to remove. In spring, they’re delicious with spring onions and mint. They can be sauteed or pureed as a dip. They star in the traditional Egyptian dish called ful. Here’s one of many ways to prepare it.

- LAGG Garden Keeper Mary M.

LA Green Grounds found a couple of ways to celebrate the end of a year that made us feel unmoored at best. We considered authorities’ advice to remain at a distance. And we tried to look ahead, with a wishing tree and seeds.

In a red, decorated box at the garden, there are seeds for the taking if you would like to plant fava beans, which are delicious and great for fixing nitrogen in the soil, or if you would like a pigeon pea bush that provides beautiful flowers as well as food.

And in a less concrete but deeply felt way, we are looking toward 2021 with a wishing tree, or in our case it’s a bush. Florence and volunteer Ruth set it up at the eastern edge of the garden, with small slips of paper hanging from branches. Each one carries someone’s wish.

If you want to hang a wish but find the supply of paper out, just use what you have. And then tie it on to one of the twiggy branches of the Mulefat shrub (Baccheris salicifolia).  That's the graceful, tall shrub at the curve of Carmona Avenue and Boden Street. 

I left my wish last week, but I’d happily endorse the others I read, too. One asked for “less divisiveness and more kindness in the world.” Another: “peace in your thoughts, strength in your words, joy in your heart.”

When it’s time for the paper to come down from the bush, it will go into our compost pile.

Like the wishing tree idea? Check out the one at Descanso Gardens in La Canada Flintridge, which has more than 10,000 wishes on it.

COMPOSTING

Waste is a bad word, certainly when it comes to food.