The Kitchen Garden - California Style

This week on “In the Garden with UC Master Gardeners”, Master Gardener host Katrina interviews fellow host Teena. The topic is “The Kitchen Garden - California Style” with an emphasis on Southern California and zeroing in on Orange County of course!  Learn about California cuisine and how to grow it! These two lovely ladies will provide a lively, and tasty, dialogue describing how you can enjoy growing your own fresh ingredients around the home. Start with perennial herbs. Rosemary, thyme, chives, and oregano. These are herbs you might use all the time depending on your taste and what you like to cook. Teena and Katrina have Southern California gardening and cooking down pat. You don’t need a lot of space. Fruit trees come in dwarf varieties. Citrus trees are so nice to have on hand for brightening up a simple fish or chicken dish. Teena starts with the simplest plan for your Southern California Kitchen Garden so if you are new to gardening, this show is for you.  And you’ll find ideas regardless of where you live.  

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Greetings everybody, this is Katrina Kirkabee, and I am your Master Gardener host today of In the Garden with Master Gardener. And how exciting it is because today I'm going to be interviewing my usual co-host, Tina Spindler, and I'm going to be interviewing her on Southern California Kitchen Garden. Welcome, Tina. Hi, Katrina. This will be so fun. One of my favorite topics. I am so excited. Tina has a whole show to talk about Southern California Kitchen Gardens, and I think I'm going to let her tell you what is a Southern California Kitchen Garden.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Well, you know, we we do a lot of shows on different veggies and some shows on fruit trees and so on and so forth. But the Southern California Kitchen Garden concept to me is more of a way of thinking about how you eat and about how you can incorporate super fresh things from your own garden. And what caused me to think about doing this is when I went on my first trip to Italy in my old age, noticing that everyone that lives out you know in the country has a garden that they just completely kind of take for granted and use every single day in every meal all year round. And I thought, we have the exact same climate as these folks. It would be so wonderful if we incorporated this kind of philosophy that we eat from our yards on a very casual basis. It's not something that we're devoting our whole life to, you know, creating this garden, but they have incorporated plants in their gardens that are there all the time that they can always use in their cooking. And of course, we all know what Italian cooking is like. It's awesome.

SPEAKER_02 1:53

Oh my goodness, yes. That's exciting. We're talking about doing this, and it's something we can do all year long. Could you tell us a little bit about um do we have to have a big yard? Can we have different size yards doing this? Or can we do it in apartments? Tell them tell us a little bit what you're thinking about here.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

I think that it is absolutely possible to do it in any size home, whether you have an apartment with just a balcony, or a townhouse, or a condo with just a patio, or you live in the typical suburban home with a small backyard. I think that anyone can incorporate this philosophy into where they live. The only constraint is you do need to have six hours of sun somewhere, either on a wall, a wall that faces the sun, where you get six hours, or a front doorstep, or you know, backyard or a patio. But most of us usually have six hours of sun in some spot, someplace where we live.

SPEAKER_02 2:59

So if we have some sun, and if you doesn't matter if we really live in an apartment, a condo, a small backyard, large backyard, this is something we can do.

SPEAKER_01 3:09

We we can. And and the way to think about it is okay, what we we're not going to get specific immediately about the plants, but what we want to think about having in our kitchen garden is we want to have a place where we have fresh, ripe ingredients all year. We want it to be suitable for our space, whether it's small like a balcony or large, like a bigger backyard. And we want it to have the plants that we use frequently. So think about things that you want to use frequently in your cooking. We want to think about our lifestyle. So this is this is a lifestyle exercise as much as it is growing veggie and fruit exercise. And then, of course, if we have a choice, we would like it to be located conveniently next to the kitchen because you are more likely to go out there and grab stuff if you don't have to go too far, especially in the winter when it's dark, right?

SPEAKER_02 4:06

So you're saying it doesn't have to have every single thing you're going to be eating winter, spring, summer, and fall, but it's something you can incorporate almost in every meal.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Exactly. And and um I think you and I do this because we've been gardening for so long. But what was interesting about going to Italy is it wasn't just people who were avid gardeners who seemed to do this. It was everybody. When they were making a sauce, they ran outside and they cut some rosemary and ran it back into the house to put in the sauce. You know what I'm saying? Or the or they had a lemon tree and you know they ran outside and and grabbed, you know, lemon to marinate the fish that they were serving in. It was it was just a part of their life. It wasn't uh, I'm going to garden this spring. It was a, oh yeah, I need a lemon, I'm gonna run out and get a lemon. Oh yeah, I need you know, some basil, I'm gonna go out and clip some fresh basil. So I think that it would just be so awesome if those of us who live in Southern California, where we can grow something all year, would end up having this kind of same thought process.

SPEAKER_02 5:16

You know, it while you're talking about this, it makes me think that some people think we have to have a garden. Yeah. And we really don't necessarily have to have the per se normal garden or vegetable garden that a lot of people have the pictures in their mind. We could just incorporate some of this stuff in our yards.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

Exactly. And that's why I'm calling calling the concept Southern California Kitchen Garden, because I don't want it to just be, you know, a vegetable garden, you know, it's it's April, and so I'm gonna plant tomatoes and peppers and beans, you know, right now, and I only do it in April, and you know, it's it's gonna be great, and I'm gonna harvest it all, and and then I'm done come August, you know. And there's nothing else that happens. Instead, if we think about the space where we live and we think about how we can incorporate edible plants in our whatever kind of landscape we have, whether it's up just in pots and containers or whether it's our landscaping, if we think about this and have our landscape be our kitchen garden, and we think about our cooking as always looking outside to see what we can grab from outside to make our meals more healthful and more flavorful, I think that's just a great way to think and a great way to live. And yet you don't have to feel chained to that vegetable garden, you know?

SPEAKER_02 6:43

Exactly. You know, a lot of us are in a box, so to speak. Yeah. We think, oh, this is so incalculable before, and then we have green lots, we have ornamental plants, and we're done with it, and we have to go to the grocery store.

SPEAKER_01 6:56

Yeah, and and I and I have a black thumb, you know, a lot of my friends say, Oh, you're such a great gardener, but I have a black thumb. Well, they don't have a black thumb because they have decent looking yards, and maybe their gardener does most of the work, but how about if they had lemon trees in their yard? How about if they had some orange trees in their yard? How about if they had some rosemary and some sage and some thyme? You know, what if they incorporated some of these things into their yards that weren't super high maintenance, and then they started using those in their kitchen, and then they got inspired and said, you know, I think I can grow a tomato in a pot.

SPEAKER_02 7:36

You know? You know, a lot of us think don't think about using these plants that you just talked about as beautiful ornamental plants, too. I when I go into when you come up to my house, I have these two tangerine trees that are in my front flower bed. And they're beautiful. Absolutely. And they're they don't get large, they're size controlled, and they're just perfect. And they're part of the landscape. Is that kind of what you're talking about? Making these things part of the landscape and part of what you do as far as decorating your yard?

SPEAKER_01 8:08

Part of the landscape, but even more than that, part of your lifestyle. So when you get ready to prepare a meal instead of, you know, choosing something from the freezer, uh, you know, it's it's not that much harder to take a chicken breast and squirt a lemon and some olive oil on top of it and chop up a little bit of rosemary and squeeze a clove of garlic. You've got a beautiful, fresh, super flavorful chicken dinner, you know, that you can either then broil in the oven or barbecue on the grill. But but if you have that lemon handy, if you have that rosemary handy, if you have some green onions that you're growing in a pot, um, you can now in a really short time create this very healthful and super delicious meal. And it can be simple. Simple, and and it hasn't required you to be a slave to your garden either. And and we'll talk about that more as we as we go through the hour. What are some of the strategies you can use and which things you should choose to grow? So if you don't have the time to be this end-all be-all gardener, we're gonna talk about, and we've already mentioned a lot of them, we're gonna talk about these things you can add to your landscape that are easy to grow, and then maybe you get a little more adventurous and you decide to have some pots of a few other things, which we'll talk about.

SPEAKER_02 9:41

Yeah, why don't we talk about some things that we can put in our landscape and you uh that they're simple to grow, that we could either maybe do you want to talk about spring, summer, winter, and fall? Or would you like to talk about it?

SPEAKER_01 9:53

Let's let's do it that way. Let's start out because I think it's kind of inspiring to talk about how you can eat a little bit out of your garden the whole year through. And of course, at different times, you know, there might be more things that that are available but in your garden. But at any time of the year where we live, uh in our Mediterranean climate, you can have something coming out of your garden, even if it's just an herb, you can have something coming out all year long. So let's talk about that. So in the winter, I actually love my winter veggie garden. I know you do too. And and one of the reasons I love it is for the greens. You can get so many different greens out of your garden in the winter. And we'll talk about strategies to grow them, but just quickly we'll go through the year. So in the winter, I I would harvest kale, spinach, arugula, tons of lettuces, root vegetables like carrots and beets. Wonderful winter meals using those veggies, right? And also, amazingly, in Southern California, if you have um naval orange trees, guess when they're ready to harvest. It's you know, in January, February, March. So, and sometimes a little earlier in in other areas. So, how cool is that to have fresh orange juice and use that as a marinade for a salmon, a nice piece of salmon. So if you have an orange tree and you've planted a few veg of these veggies, winter veggies, you've you've got a delicious meal.

SPEAKER_02 11:25

And you don't have to have a big orange tree. No, you know, it doesn't have to use prune that baby or get a dwarf.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

Get a dwarf. We're we're gonna talk about strategies to grow trees in small spaces, but let's continue going through the year. Now we're in spring. Oh, spring is wonderful, right? What what could we pick in spring? Well, in California, we plant our bull bean onions in January, right? You and I do it every year. And in spring, you've got these nice fresh spring onions that have formed their little bulbs, and there's nothing. You know, we we mostly get the dried, you know, the onions with the dry skin in the supermarket. The taste of an onion, the spring onions, when you put they are so sweet and juicy. Oh my goodness. They just they they leak liquid all over the countertop when you chop them. They're so full of that, you know.

SPEAKER_02 12:16

They're easy to grow.

SPEAKER_01 12:17

They're so easy to grow. They're stupidly easy to grow. Um, in late spring, you you have um your apricots. If you had an apricot tree, it just it's just there all year long being a tree, and then lo and behold, in late spring, you get these beautiful, delicious apricots. Uh, in early spring, and all through the winter, actually, you can grow snap peas. I love fresh snap peas. They're incredible, they're so sweet. And if you have kids, you won't ever get them inside for dinner because kids just love to go out there and chew on them right in the garden. One way to get your little ones to eat some vegetables. Exactly. And then, of course, uh all year long in my yard, uh, and yours too, probably, if you have a Meyer lemon tree, I have lemons on that tree all year long. So any month of the year I can make some sort of lemon marinade or, you know, for a fun evening, uh lemon drop martini. Um, you can marinate things with salad trussings. I mean, there's so many things. So many things you can do with the lemons. And then of course you get into into summer. Okay, well, if you're gonna have uh a a kitchen garden, summer you're gonna be eating constantly out of the kitchen garden. Um peaches, if you have a peach tree. Oh the the joy of having a fully ripe peach. I don't think most people ever get to taste a fully ripe peach, right? Because the farmers have to pick them so early because they bruise so easily, they're never fully ripe. But if you have them in your backyard, man, you eat them with the juice running down your elbows. They're just heavenly. Um, and then of course, there's the tomatoes and the peppers and the zucchini and on and on and on. We have, you know, such glorious summertime vegetables. Uh and of course, in California, our summer just kind of runs into our fall. And uh gosh, I usually have so much in the fall that I just end up, you know, making tomato sauce and freezing it. And we eat bruchetta or fresh salsa every single night in the late summer and early fall because the tomatoes, especially with the number that you planted this year, I heard it was upwards of 20 or 30. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:39

Between my husband and myself. He picks them out and I pick some out. Well, you just gotta have tomatoes. Yeah, I it's true. Uh I guess you're everybody's your best friend, too. I was gonna say, I guess you can have too many, but probably not. You can always find friends when you have tomatoes. Yeah. So you don't have to have that many. That's right. You don't have to eat.

SPEAKER_01 15:02

You can have, you can try one in a pot.

SPEAKER_00 15:04

You know. One in a pot. Give you a lot.

SPEAKER_01 15:06

A cherry tomato. It would be my favorite if I had to pick one in a pot. I'd probably go for a cherry tomato. Yeah. But anyway, that that gives you just some sense of, you know, the year in California. Um, you you can you can see that these vegetables and these fruits just kind of roll from one season to the next, and there's no stopping in in California.

SPEAKER_02 15:29

You know, and Tina, what you're saying, what I'm getting out of this, is that you don't have to be a major gardener. No, you just be a little bit here and a little bit there, but it adds a special tea to your dinner. It makes everything or to your meal, it makes everything just a little bit special, picking a little something out of your garden that doesn't take a lot of work to do.

SPEAKER_01 15:49

Exactly. And and that's I I'm hoping a few people are listening today who uh know people who aren't, you know, big time gardeners, and maybe they'll relay this kind of philosophy and get them started by you know giving them a gift of uh Meyer lemon, you know, that they that their their friends or family can grow in a pot, you know.

SPEAKER_02 16:09

Or even a rosemary plant. Exactly. But you don't have to start off with everything. Right. You can start off with something simple.

SPEAKER_01 16:16

Yeah. And let's talk about that. Let's talk about it by category, because um, you know, the accountant in me always wants to be organized, right? And so let's let's talk about it by category. And the three categories that I think are helpful for me to think about are herbs, because they do such wonderful things to flavor our meals and are stupidly easy to grow. Um, and then secondly, the seasonal vegetables, and then lastly the fruit. And when we think about those three categories, we can pick from each of those categories based on what our time commitment wants to be. We can pick the easiest thing from each of those categories, um, or we can pick more based on our space and how much time we want to invest in it, and also how we like to eat, you know? So let's talk about herbs first. Okay. What's your favorite herb to grow?

SPEAKER_02 17:16

Oh, uh, that's hard. Yeah. I have tomatoes and basil, and you know it. Oh my gosh. And I don't know what my favorite one is.

SPEAKER_01 17:30

Well, I'll tell you what, if if I was um advising a new gardener to have a California kitchen garden, I would advise them to start with rosemary. Rosemary's the must. Thyme, chives, and oregano. And the reason I pick those four is they're perennials. So they grow all year long from year to year. They can even share a big pot. And they're ones that you use that I use anyway in my cooking all the time.

SPEAKER_02 18:02

Now, could you repeat that for me? Sure.

SPEAKER_01 18:04

Rosemary, which is probably my number one. Rosemary, thyme. I like French thyme for cooking, oregano, because that's also great in uh Italian and Mexican dishes, and chives, because I love fresh chives on anything. You know, baked potatoes, in a sauce that you put on a steak. Uh you can put chives in so many things. And the plant is forever growing, it's it's a bulb, it's a part of the onion family, and so the clump just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and you only cut off the leaves, so you're never disturbing the roots. So it just grows and grows and grows. And then if I were gonna plant uh seasonally, you know, for summer, say, of course, you mentioned it, basil, that would be my favorite annual herb. And that's so popular that you even see it in markets now in pots, you know, that you can just bring home.

SPEAKER_02 19:05

You know, I bring home sometimes those pots and just stick the pot in the ground. Yeah, absolutely. The pot is the same price. As a bunch, too. As a bunch. I know. And I can either leave it in the pot. If you don't have time, you leave it in the pot. I just stick it in the ground and let it start growing and pick it as I need it.

SPEAKER_01 19:24

Then you get to use it all summer that way. Yeah. Um, one thing we should mention to to folks though is herbs always do better outside than inside. And I know that there are a lot of really cute herb-growing kits that are these little pots that are meant to sit on your windowsill. But honestly, instead invest in a bigger pot and keep it out on your doorstep or your patio and plant your herbs in this big pot, say a 12-inch wide pot, because they will not be happy inside.

SPEAKER_02 19:57

I've never had lunch outside.

SPEAKER_01 19:59

No, we're not.

SPEAKER_02 20:00

Yeah, they go so easy outside, you can almost forget about them.

SPEAKER_01 20:03

They do, and you know, put it right by your sliding door to your kitchen or your, you know, uh entryway from your backyard. If you have it right there, right outside the door, and you have little scissors in your kitchen drawer, you just open the door and snip off what you need and bring it in and cook away.

SPEAKER_02 20:20

You know, I'm easy even lazier than that. That's pretty bad. I want to water the pot. So I just put it in the ground by my front door in my flower bed. There you go. There it is, the rosemary's growing on the side of the house right there. Yeah. Then I have my thyme and my oregano and chives, and in the summertime I have my basil and I just stick it in the ground and the sprinkles sprinklers water it. That that's actually better, I think. And it's easier for I forget to water things, but some people are much better than myself.

SPEAKER_01 20:53

But and and that's absolutely true. There's something for everybody, yeah. Whatever works for you. And if if you have uh, you know, a little house um or a little apartment or patio home that has a planter, you know, outside your door, go ahead and stick those herbs in there. And as Katrina said, they're much more likely to survive when they're on an automatic sprinkler system than if they're in a pot you have to water.

SPEAKER_02 21:18

You know, some people are good at watering. Yeah, some people love to water. It's like the sprinkler thing is just great for me, and I just put it there and it works for me. And uh, I have a few things in pots, but not too much.

SPEAKER_01 21:30

But you know, it all I guess it all depends. Yeah. Whatever works. Whatever works for you. And and of course, if you have an apartment and you're on a balcony, you wouldn't have a sprinkler system, so you would want to put yours in a pot that you could put on your balcony, and you would have to remember to water it. But you know, you do what you have to do given your particular situation. But to finish up on the herbs, um the ones that I like to plant in the wintertime would be parsley and cilantro because they like cooler weather, and I actually try and nurture. The parsley through the summer. I plant some in a shadier area because I use parsley virtually every day. And so I just get six packs of it throughout the year, and I just plop it here and I plop it there, and some of it's in pots and some of it's in the ground, and hopefully some of it will be around at the particular time that I need it. So it's also, of course, appropriate to plant what you use. If you don't like cilantro, don't plant cilantro. If you love, say, um, dill, plant dill. Plant whatever you like. If you like ethnic cooking, if there's some herb that you particularly like in, you know, a traditional dish that you like to make, plant that herb. But herbs especially are some of the most foolproof and hardy plants that you can grow.

SPEAKER_02 22:54

And cost efficient.

SPEAKER_01 22:55

Oh, it kills me to pay $3.99 for one of those little plastic containers of herbs. And and especially I I most often do it for dill, because most of the other herbs I uh I have, but for some reason I tend to kill dill. And so I'll be making salmon and I'll think, oh darn, I just killed my dill. I have to go buy dill and it kills me.

SPEAKER_00 23:19

My dill is all over my yard.

SPEAKER_01 23:22

I think I need to plant more of it, because I I typically will plant one plant because dill gets kind of big. Yeah. And so I'll just plant one, and then of course, when that one bites the dust, then I have no more dill. So we need to plant more than one.

SPEAKER_02 23:35

Just stick it off in the corner and not pay attention to it.

SPEAKER_01 23:38

That's what I should do. I need to get more. Isn't that funny? Yeah. So anyway, that about takes care of it for herbs. Let's move on to seasonal veggies. And uh, for our regular listeners, they they already know that we typically only have two seasons in California, the warm season and the cool season, and the veggies that we plant follow those seasons. So in the warm season, we plant veggies like uh beans and melons and squash and tomatoes and eggplant and cucumbers, and those would be our warm season, oh, and peppers, how can I forget peppers? Those would be our warm season veggies, and then in the cool season, the fall, winter, and early spring, we would grow broccoli and lots of lettuces, spinach, cauliflower, peas, carrots, root vegetables, other root vegetables. Um, but again, in the California kitchen garden, if we're wanting to make this be just part of our lifestyle, choose to plant only as much as you really want to take care of. So if I was just starting out, I would have lots of herbs because those are super easy. But maybe I'd only plant one tomato and one pepper in the summertime, just to see if I was embracing this, you know, whole lifestyle. Get a pot, plant a tomato, plant a pepper. If you like it, if it's fun, the next year you can plant more. And in the wintertime, I would always plant a large pot of lettuce because lettuce is, again, stupidly easy to grow. And you can harvest it over a really long period of time because when the plants are I plant from seed in, say, like a wine barrel size big pot, and I just sprinkle the seed all over the soil, and then tons of these lettuce seedlings grow, and the way I harvest them and eat them is when they get about four inches tall, I pull out the whole plant, and I pull out a bunch of them until eventually I have only single plants spaced about four to six inches apart. And in the meantime, when I'm pulling out those little ones, I'm having gourmet baby lettuces for salad. Yeah. And then the ones that you leave to grow to full size, then you just harvest the outer leaves and you keep letting the inner leaves continue to grow and keep harvesting the outer leaves. And you have lettuce and salads for months, probably three, four months that way.

SPEAKER_02 26:16

So, you know, what you're saying is, you know, a lot of times we talk about having these big vegetable gardens and what to do. But we're kind of downsizing it a little bit and saying, yeah, we got a busy schedule, our lives are hectic, we don't want to take care of a full-blown garden. What are a few things that we can have that are easy on a really busy schedule and that we could pull out of our garden that's really easy to do, or out of our flower beds, or off our deck, or on our patio that's easy to do and doesn't take much time.

SPEAKER_01 26:47

Exactly. And you may find that eventually you love this so much, like Katrina and I, and you turn into crazy gardeners and you have, you know, bigger vegetable gardens. But the point is you don't have to. Everyone can have a California kitchen garden. Just make it be as much or as little as you want. But the point is have things that you can incorporate into your cooking because it will make you eat more healthily if you have a few things that are coming in from your garden. Because if nothing else, it makes you aware of fresh things. And so when you do go shopping, you're more in tune to including those fresh things as part of your diet. So, one of my other favorite things to grow, if I was only going to grow one kind of green, I'd grow arugula. A ru arugula is so fast to germinate, you throw those seeds out, toss a little soil over them, and they come up in like three days. And in, you know, two weeks, you can start harvesting the leaves. And even if you don't have enough for a whole salad, you get a bag of pre-cut salad and you throw some arugula leaves, fresh arug arugula leaves in it. Oh my gosh, that just adds so much flavor to that salad. Even if it's just special. It makes it special. So you have, you know, eight or ten arugula leaves from your little pot of arugula. It makes it special. It gives it that extra boost of flavor, gives you something to talk about at dinner. Um, if you have children and you send them out to harvest those ten arugula leaves, you can bet they're gonna eat that salad because they picked the arugula. Maybe they could plant it too. They could plant it too. So it again kids on this? Yeah, absolutely. Kids are the most natural gardeners.

SPEAKER_02 28:37

So, see that at one point in my life I was really working full-time and really busy, and just the thought of thinking, well, I don't have to have a full garden, and I could just have a pot of arugula at that and when I come home and just add that to it to make it special. The whole thing doesn't have to be coming out of the garden.

SPEAKER_01 28:57

No, and you go cut a few, a few sprigs of the the chives and cut those up in your salad. Now you have a little tiny bit of uh an onion-y flavor, but real delicate from your chives. You have a little bit of that peppery arugula, and it's in your store-bought bag of romaine lettuce. But now all of a sudden you've created this very tasty, uh, unique kind of flavor instead of just, you know, boring store-bought lettuce. So I think it's better to think about this incrementally than, you know, we have to have this whole big, huge veggie garden. Lifetime commitment kind of thing. Yeah. So I I think that wraps it up for the seasonal veggies. We do a lot of shows on on growing veggies and we talk about that a lot. And instead of having folks get too hung up on, you know, the whole how can I have this veggie garden thing, I really want today to more focus on how I can incorporate some of these things into my life and create my own personal kitchen garden, whether it's large or small. Um, and I'll give some examples in a little while, but let's move on to the last category. We talked about herbs, we talked about seasonal veggies, let's talk for a minute about fruit trees.

SPEAKER_00 30:13

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 30:14

And when you start talking about fruit trees, have you ever discovered when you when you start talking about that to your friends who don't garden, they just say, Oh yeah, I don't garden, I don't grow fruit trees. Yes. And and they just dismiss them like they're way too complicated. Yes. And they're not. They're not any more complicated than any other tree you have in your yard.

SPEAKER_02 30:34

And a lot of times they're prettier.

SPEAKER_01 30:35

They're prettier and you get something back.

SPEAKER_02 30:38

Yeah. That precious little water you have, I want something back.

SPEAKER_00 30:42

Yeah. And it it kills me that people are like, oh no, I couldn't grow a fruit tree.

SPEAKER_01 30:47

It's like, wait a second. I know you have trees in your yard. If you can have those trees, you can have a fruit tree. There's no difference, you know, in in their care. Now, if you take a little bit of care with the fruit trees and give them a little bit of fertilizer, you'll get more fruit, probably. But but they're still trees, you know. You if you can grow a plain old landscape tree, you can grow a fruit tree in your garden. So that is something I really and that's what I noticed in Italy, is everybody had a lemon tree. I didn't see one house that didn't have a lemon tree.

SPEAKER_02 31:24

I hope you get it.

SPEAKER_01 31:25

And and some people had pomegranates and some people had figs, and you know, they had a variety of them, but it was part of their landscape. It wasn't an orchard, you know, it was just part of how they landscaped their properties.

SPEAKER_02 31:40

I have two lemon trees in my backyard next to all my flowers. Yeah. And they're beautiful. And I haven't bought a lemon and I don't know when.

SPEAKER_01 31:50

I I haven't bought a lemon since I've lived in this house 11 years.

SPEAKER_02 31:54

And uh and it's pretty. They're pretty all the green reeds and these beautiful lemons, the yellow on them.

SPEAKER_01 32:03

Oh my goodness. They are gorgeous. And I actually, because you know I have flowers around my fruit trees too, I actually choose the flowers that I plant around that lemon tree so that they complement the lemons. You know, like I love to plant blue iris next to my lemon tree because I love the contrast of the blue with the yellow of the lemons. So these adding trees to your landscape that are fruit trees, to me is a no-brainer that they're beautiful to look at, they give you something to eat, and they're really not any harder to grow than any other kind of tree by and large.

SPEAKER_02 32:39

Now let me ask you a question, Tina. If everybody doesn't listening to the show, doesn't have a big yard to plant a lemon tree. Can they plant a lemon tree in something else?

SPEAKER_01 32:50

Yes. There are classes of fruit trees based on their height. And so most fruit trees have a dwarf variety that still gets the same size fruit as what's called the standard tree, which would be a full-size tree. So if you live in a small yard or you only have a patio or a balcony and you have to grow things in pots, you can get a dwarf fruit tree and put it in a large pot and you'll get fruit. They are perfectly happy to grow in large pots, but they do have to be large. And when I say large, think of a half wine barrel. A half wine barrel is an ideal container for growing a dwarf fruit tree. About how many inches across is that they are two feet across and they're 18 inches deep. And so you can see that's a pretty good sized pot. And now it doesn't have to be a wine barrel if, particularly if you live in an apartment or a townhome where you only have your patio and that's very visible from your living room, say, uh, you might want to spend the money and get a beautiful, you know, ceramic pot that matches your decor, you know, so that it becomes part of your uh accessories for for where you live. But just make sure that that it is a you know large enough pot, and I would say two feet in diameter and 18 inches deep is a good size. But we've had uh dwarf um orange trees, as you know, out at the demonstration garden at the great park, and those have been in wine barrels uh for six years, and they're doing great. And we probably should uh take them out and you know root prune them and put new soil and put them back in their in their wine barrels. But you only need to do that, you know, every six years or so.

SPEAKER_02 34:39

Yeah, I've seen some beautiful fruit trees, I mean beautiful fruit trees in beautiful pots, and it just it's a decoration. It is a decoration, a beautiful ceramic pot, maybe two of them uh in your yard that patio. Uh you don't need a lot of room, they don't need a lot of care, and they're pretty blooming the smell of the blossoms when they of citrus, especially.

SPEAKER_01 35:05

Oh my gosh. And and the way that you keep them looking tidy is um you you can put mulch on top of them, you know, just some really nice um small bark chips, you know, look beautiful on top of that uh potting soil, and it it gives a real finished look, you know, if you if you have really elegant.

SPEAKER_02 35:26

Very elegant. Very country. Yeah. You you can do whatever you want to do with it. You can dress them up or dress them down.

SPEAKER_01 35:31

Yeah. So anyway, I I really encourage folks to think about having fruit trees, even if they have very small spaces. Another way that you can have fruit trees in small spaces is to consider espoliing the fruit tree. And I know that's kind of a scary word for people who aren't familiar with it. It's a French word that just means to grow the tree flat against a wall. So instead of letting it form a round head, you prune it so that you only allow the branches that are growing horizontal to exist. Any other branches that are coming out at a different direction, you cut them off. And so you want them to lie flat against the wall. And I know it sounds like it's really tricky and really hard to do, but it is not. If you can use a clippers, you can espaliere. You can go out to the farm and food lab at the Orange County Great Park in Irvine because there are about 90 or so espaliered fruit trees out there.

SPEAKER_02 36:31

That is a beautiful place to look at espalier fruit trees.

SPEAKER_01 36:34

Yeah. We have about 60 apples, I think, a couple different varieties, and then there are um apricots and peaches and pluats and plums. Um, so there's a whole variety. There's both uh stone fruits and the poem fruits, which are that the apple trees out there. So, and you can also espalier citrus, although we don't have citrus espaliate out there. Citrus is very easy to espalier.

SPEAKER_02 37:05

You know, but uh what makes me think of espalium right now is we live here in Orange County and there's a lot of properties with very small yards. Yes. And most people have a fence or a wall. And you if you espalize against that fence or wall, you're only taking up, you know what, a foot foot? Yeah. So you could have a beautiful fruit tree against a wall that's only one foot in depth. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 37:32

And they're gorgeous. They're gorgeous, and you know, these block walls that we have or these, you know, wooden fences that we have that separate our property are often not the most attractive things to look at. And so why not put a trellis in front of that wall and a spalier, a fruit tree across it? That would be much prettier to look at than a blank wall. So and once you do it, it's it's very low maintenance.

SPEAKER_02 38:00

It it is. And can you buy them like that all the time?

SPEAKER_01 38:02

You can actually um I just bought one uh at uh last month, but you can also go to you know, most nurseries if they don't have a tree that's been a spoliade, they can order one for you. Uh they're more expensive.

SPEAKER_02 38:18

But it's already done.

SPEAKER_01 38:19

But it's already done. Uh, you can do it yourself by getting a very, very young tree that doesn't have that many branches on it.

SPEAKER_02 38:26

And there it goes, depends on how much work you want to do. If you're really busy, you can just go buy one, put it in your yard, and you're done with it.

SPEAKER_01 38:32

The one I got uh last month that was $60 in a pot already, beginning to be trained as an asphalier. Um, so that is a fabulous way in a small area to have fruit tree. Um, some other ways to get fruit in small yards is how many people have a patio cover? Almost everybody, right? Even if you're in a townhome. Odds are you have a patio cover. Why not grow grow grapes or thornless boysenberries up and over that patio cover? Great way to have something that is edible and beautiful. And can you imagine having a dinner party out on your patio when the grapes are in full harvest, you know, hanging down from the I mean people will pay to come have dinner at your patio.

SPEAKER_02 39:26

It's absolutely gorgeous. Yeah, how fun is that? Yeah, yeah, it's gorgeous. Yeah. Those grapes that fall down and just hanging there.

SPEAKER_01 39:35

It doesn't matter if you ever eat them, just just the ambiance, right? You'll think that you're in a vineyard in Tuscany or something. So and then, of course, there's always strawberries. You can grow strawberries anywhere. They love to be grown in pots, and there's even a special pot for them, the strawberry pot, that you know, two-foot-tall pot that has the little cutouts around the sides of it. You can get about a dozen strawberry plants in a typical strawberry pot. And you know, if you had three or four strawberry pots, you'd have enough strawberries for strawberry shortcake. So, and of course, that can be done on an apartment balcony or a patio or anywhere. It's your front doorstep. Um, I have I have a uh friend uh from elementary school that I now see on Facebook I lost touch with for many years. She posted a picture a couple of days ago. She's growing potatoes in those fabric bags that you can grow things in on her front walkway because that's where she has sun. And so she has these little fabric bags, you know, marching down her front walkway, and she's growing potatoes. Bless her heart. So here she's having her kitchen garden along her front walkway. Love it. Yeah. So there's a lot of different options, and and you can keep it simple or you can start getting more elaborate.

SPEAKER_02 41:00

You know, and the front walkway too is where you could put in pots and you could put you know a pot here and a pot there, and just put in some herbs and put in whatever you might like.

SPEAKER_01 41:10

Or if you wander right down your picture if you have a long walkway that that you had potted citrus all, you know, one on each step, you know, down your down your walkway. How cool would that be? It's beautiful. Yeah. So that's the way we have to try and start thinking is, you know, how can I incorporate this in my landscape in a fun, beautiful way, and then when it's time to make dinner, I can run out there and get some fresh veggies and fruit. Yeah, that's a good time to do that. Six wine barrels. It's one of my I I did this for a friend, and um I call it my wine barrel recipe garden. And it's a recipe for a California kitchen garden. And what you need, you know, just picture a recipe card, right? And the first ingredient is six wine barrels, and then of course you have to get the potting soil and some fertilizer uh for the uh veggies and trees that we're gonna grow. Um, and then this is how I would design this six wine barrel garden, and and this is just what I want. Uh, you might want something different, but for me, in barrel number one, I would plant a dwarfmeyer lemon tree because I use my Meijer lemons every day, either in drinks or in some recipe. So one of my barrels would have uh a dwarf Meyer lemon tree. And then in barrel number two, I'd put a blueberry shrub, and I would surround that blueberry shrub with strawberry plants.

SPEAKER_02 42:48

Oh, that's beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 42:50

And it's so pretty, and when they're in season, you have this gorgeous fruit, and when it's not in season, you just have this beautiful shrub with this little ground cover around it. And then in barrel number three, I would have I would have the whole thing planted in herbs. And so I would put a rosemary plant in there, I would put thyme, I would put uh basil if it was summertime, or parsley if it was wintertime. So I would plant all my favorite herbs. And in a wine barrel, remember it's two feet wide, you can get a lot of herbs in a two-foot wine barrel. So one of those wine barrels would be my herb garden. And then in barrel number four, I would plant green onions, bunching onions, otherwise known as bunching onions, and I would do the whole barrel in bunching onions. And the reason is I love to cook with green onions, and I hate to buy them because I only use like two or three from the bunch, and then the rest turn into slime in my refrigerator. But if I have them out in my garden, I can just go out and harvest two or three for that particular meal, and the rest of them just keep growing.

SPEAKER_02 43:56

And I understand they're very easy to grow.

SPEAKER_01 43:58

I grow them from seed, so I just get a package of they're either called scallions or bunching onions or green onions and I just you know sprinkle the seed out and I do that twice a year and I have green onions all year uh you know for a little while while you're waiting for them to grow um you might be out but what I what I would do in a wine barrel is I would harvest one half and then I would let the other half keep growing while I sprinkled new seeds on the half that was finished and that that way you would have hopefully green onions all the time.

SPEAKER_02 44:32

And can you grow those all year long?

SPEAKER_01 44:33

You can yeah they they prefer cooler weather but I managed to grow them in the summertime too. And then in my fifth and sixth wine barrels that's where I would put my seasonal plant so plants. So if it was summertime I'd put a probably two tomato plants uh one in each wine barrel and probably two pepper plants along with each tomato so that I would have two tomatoes and four peppers and that's what I would have in my summer and then in my winter one I would have a barrel full of lettuce and in the other barrel I would probably plant snap peas on a teepee trellis you know with some bamboo poles because I love snap peas. And that's six wine barrels it takes up virtually no space.

SPEAKER_02 45:21

It takes up no space it's easy it's low maintenance. Yeah and and you could plant anything you want if you're not into snap peas you could plant some kale.

SPEAKER_01 45:30

Yeah exactly you do do kale do if you like root vegetables make one of your barrels a root vegetable barrel plant half of it with carrots and half of it with radishes maybe. You know and if it's too much of a commitment do one barrel. Do one barrel. If all you want is one barrel of herbs do one barrel of herbs. That's special. That is special or do your your lemon tree because I want everybody to have a Meyer lemon tree do your Meyer lemon tree in one barrel or in the ground if you have a spot and one barrel of herbs. And even with just those two you'll be cooking out of your garden an awful lot.

SPEAKER_02 46:08

Yeah I think if it was me and I only got two barrels I would do a Meyer's lemon in my herbs. There you go. And it doesn't take any work.

SPEAKER_01 46:17

Yeah no work. Yeah it doesn't gotta water them. If you have water that's it though.

SPEAKER_02 46:22

That's yeah and like you said Meyer lemons you can use all the time. It makes it special you have someone come over and you give them glass water some iced seed and threw a little bit of Meyer lemon in and if you're making something you go pick those those herbs out of your garden. Oh yeah and it's and the herb it doesn't even have to be a wine barrel.

SPEAKER_01 46:42

Oh no it could be a pot or I like to also plant I give as housewarming gifts often a strawberry pot planted with herbs. Because they have all of those little openings and you can put twelve different plants in they make perfect herb gardens. I put the rosemary in the top because it gets you know tall and then I just put the other herbs in the little cut out openings and and they get you know parsley and basil and you know whatever else thyme whatever else I happen to find at the the nursery but but folks love it as a houseworming gift because they can just set it outside their kitchen door and and go out and snip herbs whenever they need them.

SPEAKER_02 47:23

You know it's a nice gift together.

SPEAKER_01 47:24

It's a nice gift to get yeah it absolutely is yeah and I've also planted lettuce in strawberry pots. I love strawberry pots I think they're so fun. You can plant a lettuce you know a different lettuce plant in each and that's actually what I've got in my strawberry plant right now. And I purposely chose uh even though it's the end of the season I have kind of a shady spot and so I thought I would give the lettuce a try in this shadier spot. And so I chose purple and that bright lime green color of lettuces and so I alternated you know one row of the hose holes has the bright green lettuce and then one has the purple and then the green and so it's it's a decorative pot as well as an edible pot too so there's so many fun things you can do.

SPEAKER_02 48:12

Yeah it doesn't matter what size you have I was over at a house um very small backyard and they had I couldn't believe how they espaliate around the the yard and they the everything was small and there really was a lot of work to do with it.

SPEAKER_01 48:30

Yeah I mean that is the advantage I always lust after more ground and then I finally got the big yard and I love it but man it's a lot of work. So small can be better because it's less work small.

SPEAKER_02 48:42

Yeah instead of trying to take tackle you know if you're working full time and you got kids instead of tackling a big yard like you and I have tackle a lemon tree. Exactly you know or tackle oh just a a basket of herbs. So tackle something and it really it can change it sometimes you get around it and it just for me I just relax. Oh you know I think I got something fresh out of the earth.

SPEAKER_01 49:06

I just read an article that people who live in nature live longer. And so even if your nature is just a few pots of of plants that you're growing for your kitchen garden, it's still nature. It's still likely to calm you down and bring your mind to a a happy peaceful place. But I'm glad you said the word baskets because that's something else I wanted to mention is you can absolutely include in your kitchen garden, you know those really cool moss lined hanging baskets that we most often see flowers growing in.

SPEAKER_02 49:39

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 49:40

They look stunning planted with strawberries and you know you could also put herbs in them but I especially like them with strawberries because the strawberries will hang over the edges and that's right at eye level when you have them hanging. And how cool is that to walk out on your patio and and see those happy little red strawberries hanging there.

SPEAKER_02 50:01

So if you're gonna have a hanging plant on your balcony or on your porch or on your deck why not make it something you can eat.

SPEAKER_01 50:08

Right and you get and lettuce is great in those hanging baskets. The only thing you have to remember with the hanging baskets is they do dry out fast. So you would have to be one of those people who likes to water if you're gonna do the hanging basket thing. But a couple there's a couple of other ideas for small spaces and one of them is the vertical planters those are good. I don't know if you if you just Google vertical planters gosh there's so many on the internet you can get some great ideas but particularly if you have just a small patio or a balcony vertical planters can be great because you can put them against your sunny wall and grow your veggies in those vertical planters. We talked about hanging pots and baskets and and then one thing that I like to do with kids that's really fun is what I call bucket gardens and that's where you get a big bucket it can be plastic or metal and you drill some holes in it and you fill it up and you plant it with whatever you want your kids to grow. So it could be strawberries it could be carrot seeds it could be lettuce but what's cool is they can decorate the bucket with their name and draw a picture on it with you know markers or some paint and that way it becomes a personalized project for their bucket. It's their bucket and the cool thing about buckets is you can move them so if they're not getting enough sun in one spot you just pick up the handle and move it to a sunnier spot. So all kinds of ways to incorporate some edibles into your yard so that you have your own Southern California kitchen garden.

SPEAKER_02 51:50

Oh my gosh that's wonderful you know I really like talking about this today because it's something for everybody. You know if you even have a dorm room that has some sun a lot a lot of people don't have the room you just you could plant something. You can you could hang something on the rail of the of your balcony.

SPEAKER_01 52:08

Yeah absolutely grow something grow some herbs and and then if you get into this a little bit like Katrina and and I have you you can then you know branch out and invest in building some raised beds because that makes it a little easier to grow your veggies is if you do it in raised beds. And I think we have some information on that on our website. But as Katrina said start small maybe with just a you know one lemon tree and a a pot of herbs and go from there but more importantly just have the mindset that where we live we can have things right outside our door that we can use in preparing our meals all the time. And don't make it complicated. Keep it simple.

SPEAKER_02 52:56

Keep it simple. You know we're here in Southern California and a lot of people live in places in the country where they can't do that. That's right. We forget that sometimes and so it I think what I my takeaway here is we could do it as big as we want and we could do it as small as we want. But we we should be able to do something. Yeah and and it's it's a little bit of time or a lot of time.

SPEAKER_01 53:17

And it really particularly if you just plant a tree in the ground and you plant your herbs in the ground like Katrina does and you let your automatic sprinkler systems water them it's pretty much no time at all. It's like the rest of your landscape you just let it exist you tend to it a little bit to keep it tidy and with a fruit tree maybe give it some fertilizer at the appropriate times of year and that's pretty much it. So you don't have to think of yourself as being tied to this big garden. You just think of your garden as being tied to you and giving you something you can use.

SPEAKER_00 53:57

Well said well said with that I think we're about at the end of our time. Cool well this is fun I hope everybody plants a little something out there and cooks up some great meals.

SPEAKER_02 54:09

Plant a little something until next time with Katrina and Tina and thank you so much for listening.