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Community Corner

How to Create Your Own Edible Garden

Whether you do it in your backyard, front yard or on your windowsill, the results will be every bit worth the effort.

When Ivette Soler first ventured into the garden of her landscape designer friend, Judy Kameon, she felt completely out of her element. "Judy kept trying to feed me figs off her tree," Soler recalled at a presentation she gave earlier this month at Potted, the bohemian-cool gardening store in nearby Atwater Village. "I just kept saying, ‘oh, no, no, no.’ If I were going to eat fruit, it had to come from the store, not a tree."

Today, Soler, an Eagle Rocker who lives just down the street from Eagle Rock High School, is a diehard proponent of the edible garden—and she has a blog (The Germinatrix) as well as a new book, The Edible Front Yard, to prove it. To a standing-room-only crowd of green-minded hipsters at Potted, she signed copies of her gorgeous new book and doled out essential and inspirational tips for the fertile patches around our homes.

Here are a few things I learned from Soler that night, along with a few Earth Day fun ideas of my own (culled from a childhood growing up on a half-acre of L.A. earth and in a house full of amateur botanists):

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  • If you want to cross the line between garden-phobe to garden freak, try planting edibles that bring you easy and bountiful results. Soler recommends basil and tomatoes for their prolific nature. "Tomatoes are the 'gateway drug' for gardeners," she told her Potted fans, evoking much laughter. "Once you grow them, you're hooked." Add an oregano plant to your plot of land and you've got all the makings of a homemade spaghetti sauce, sprung right from your own earth.
  • Start a garden right on your windowsill. Even if you're an apartment dweller you can give your green thumb a workout and put homegrown produce on your dinner table. Choose a sunny window and try plants that don't have large root runs, such as lettuce, basil, chives, and chamomile—all edibles that give a lot back for just a little effort. Both Potted and Eagle Rock’s have artful pots to dress up a windowsill garden. For another way to bring verdant life into the home, try Woolly Pockets, felted planters made from recycled bottles, that can hang from banisters or an apartment wall.
  • Create a spa garden. Cultivate herbs and plants that are favored elements of luxurious beauty treatments. Sage, rosemary, mint and lavender combined make a great beauty tonic. Try it as follows: Steep a bundle of the herbs in five glasses of boiling water and then let it cool for an hour. Pour four cups into the bath and then drink the last cup of the concoction while luxuriating in the tub. The mint cools you on hot days. Rosemary helps skin cells repair and heal. Sage flushes out toxins. And lavender, with its heavenly fragrance, soothes and calms. Consider it beauty from the inside out.
  • Consider planting trees that bear your favorite fruits or do an edibles trade with a neighbor who has a prolific tree.

Bonus “prolific tree” info and recipe: When we bought our house, we inherited the most generous lemon tree—for us, it's the gift that keeps on giving. As a result, I have developed a comprehensive collection of lemon-centric recipes, including a breaded tilapia with a butter and lemon sauce, lemon chicken, and ginger-spiked lemonade.

But our house favorite is our organic lemon custard pie. I often pluck mint leaves from our container garden and ask my daughter to decorate the pie with the leaves. Here's the recipe to try, with your own lemons. It’s super easy, especially if you cheat by using a premade graham cracker crust. Have the kids squeeze the lemons and grate the zest, and plan to chill the pie overnight.

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Alison’s Organic Lemon Tart
Makes 10 to 12 servings.

Ingredients:

5 large free-range organic eggs
1 cup organic sugar
3/4 cup organic heavy whipping cream
2/3 cup fresh lemon juice
, using lemons from a homegrown tree or your local farmer’s market
3 tablespoons grated lemon peel

Whisk eggs, sugar, cream, lemon juice and grated lemon peel in a medium-sized metal bowl. Set bowl over saucepan of simmering water (if possible, do not allow the bottom of the bowl to touch the bottom of the saucepan). Whisk occasionally and slowly until mixture thickens and reaches a temperature of 160°F, a process that should take about 30 minutes.

Remove the bowl. Cool the mixture to room temperature, whisking occasionally. Spread the mixture evenly in the crust. Chill overnight to allow mixture to set.

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