Natural Perspectives:

I am so addicted to buying vegetable seeds and plants for my garden it’s pathetic.

Vic and I have had vegetable gardens off and on since 1976, the year we lived on a small farm in Connecticut. We gardened every March through November until we earned our doctorates in 1981 and moved to Huntington Beach. Our homegrown produce supplemented our meager food budget as we struggled through graduate school on our pitiful stipends.

Although gardening was pretty much a necessity then, it instilled a life-long love of working the soil, and eating the fruits of our labors.

The soil in Huntington Beach is great for gardening. And with our Mediterranean climate, things will grow year round. Our first house in Huntington Beach, on Golden Gate Lane, had a sunny backyard. Vic spaded the soil, and I planted, weeded and harvested vegetables.

We grew broccoli, peas and salad greens in the winter, and tomatoes, squash and green beans in the summer. But in 1988 we moved to our current house near Central Park. The back yard was in full shade, and very little grew except ferns.

When Vic was mayor of Huntington Beach in 1995, we visited Anjo, our sister city in Japan.

One of the many things that impressed me there was the houses had crops growing right up to their foundations. Sometimes it was rice paddies, and sometimes it was vegetables. The people there utilized every square foot of ground. That idea stuck in my brain and incubated, waiting for a time to become relevant for us.

At that time, I was gardening at the now closed community gardens at Golden West College. It was there that I learned the ins and outs of organic gardening. I became a convert. Going organic, whether in your own garden, the grocery store or farmers market, helps the environment in many ways. Using organic amendments is better for the soil. It builds tilth, improving the texture and fertility of the soil. And not using pesticides benefits invertebrates and bird life.

I farmed happily at Golden West College for five or six years, growing plenty of fresh organic veggies. But two plots were really too much for me to maintain while getting my home-based writing business off the ground. At the end of 1997, I reluctantly gave up my community garden plots.

I had tried to grow some vegetables in our current backyard, but our huge cypress trees cast too much shade. Finally, the trees became too diseased to keep, and we had them cut down. That opened up a new world for me.

Vic wanted to try gardening in the front as well, using a 6-by-12 raised bed by the driveway.

We had no sooner begun gardening again in earnest when two things happened. Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” came out in 2006, focusing public attention on the looming disaster of greenhouse gases and global warming. We had been railing about this for years in our columns, trying to raise awareness of this planetary crisis that will affect us all. And then I read Barbara Kingsolver’s 2007 book, “Animal, Vegetable and Miracle: A Year of Food Life,” which points out that eating locally grown foods can help combat global warming by reducing the greenhouse gases used in transport. And growing your own organic food is even better — no transport, and no pesticides.

I became a woman on fire. I wanted to be even more self-sufficient in food production. I looked around the yard and began to think more like the homeowners we had seen in Anjo. Landscaping isn’t permanent; it can change. Spaces that held mere ornamentals were converted to food production. In every place where I could find a square foot of sunny space, I put in another bell pepper or a few lettuce plants. Vegetables don’t have to be grown in straight rows.

I moved ornamental plants around, eliminating some of them. I found space I didn’t know I had. But I still didn’t have space to grow everything that I wanted, especially in the winter when the yard was more shaded.

I finally bit the bullet and recognized I’m not landscaping my yard to be on the cover of Sunset Magazine. I ripped out a bunch of fortnight lilies next to the front sidewalk and put a 3-by-15 vegetable garden there. Over the winter, we grew cauliflower, red cabbage, Stuttgart onions, Japanese mustard greens, arugula, black-seeded Simpson lettuce, Chioggia beets, Milan turnips and some terrific white radishes. We were amazed at how productive that sunny little plot was. And we were thrilled at how much interest it generated in the neighborhood, especially among the children.

Our yard seems to be producing almost as many fruits and vegetables as it reasonably can. Unfortunately, I’ve become an addict. Vic sent me to Home Depot to pick out a new kitchen faucet yesterday. I came back with two flame seedless grapevines, two more tomato plants, and packets of cucumber and sunflower seeds. Help me!

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].