Farmscape is excited to announce we are offering a class this weekend on starting a summer vegetable garden. The class will be hosted at the home of a Farmscape member in Atwater Village, and will focus on the process of starting a summer vegetable garden in Los Angeles. The event will take place from 9 AM - 12 PM, and will  cost $90. Tickets and more information about the location are available at our Eventbrite page.

Topics to be covered:

• Selecting a location in your yard.
• Evaluating the available sunlight.
• Preparing a location to grow food.
• Selecting plants for the summer season.
• Designing and laying out your garden with proper spacing.
• Companion and intensive planting methods.
• Early season pest management.

Farmer Meredith Kotelec will teach the course. Meredith has farmed Hollywood, Atwater Village, Silver Lake, and Los Feliz for Farmscape for over a year. She has a BS in Horticulture and Crop production from the University of Maryland, and previously worked maintaining the USDA people's garden in Washington, DC. She also has extensive experience working on organic farms.

Please email info@farmscapegardens.com if you have additional questions.

I can imagine my ideal tomato. It would be tarter than it is sweet--more Purple Calabash than Caspian Pink. It would taste very mildly “tomato-y”, but would be miles away from a one-note grocery store roma. The subtle tomato flavor would give way to a spicy, smoky and earthy complexity; I’m guessing it would be a “black” tomato variety, but I haven’t yet tasted one that hits the nail on the head.

The texture would be firm enough to withstand slicing--lately I’m enamored of BLTA sandwiches--but it needs to melt once it hits my mouth. Juice dribbling down my beard is a must. Unlike the tomatoes I’ve been eating over the cold winter months, it would never taste gritty or mealy.

I’m flexible on color, but I must admit that I’m partial to bicolor varieties, like Green Zebra, Ananas Noire, or Gold Medal. I could care less about shape, but I secretly hope that my dream tomato is as goofy as I am. Maybe I need to try out a Green Sausage...

We're in the process of planting summer gardens, but we're still getting a few final winter harvests. This harvest in Pasadena has a nice variety of winter veggies, ranging from root crops and brassicas to peas and spinach. 

Our farmers face a challenge as they switch our gardens from winter to summer seasons. During the month of March, our farmers must constantly ask themselves difficult questions. "Should I leave in that pea plant and wait for one last harvest, or should I clear trellis space to make way for beans? How many more side shoots will that broccoli produce--is it worth a bit of extra broccoli or should I give my tomatoes a head start?"

Harvests such as these are a testament to the thoughtfulness with which our farmers approach weekly farming. They've honed this skill over the course of numerous season switches, and it's a unique benefit our service provides over first-time gardeners, who often lack the knowledge about what should stay and what should go. Nothing about the season switch is chaotic or random--it's a meticulously planned process, with every plant receiving careful consideration.

Ask any Farmscape farmer--this process can be frustrating, and is far from easy. As this picture makes clear, however, the benefits easily justify the extra work.

Writing as a guest contributor on the Seedstock blog, Dan argues that the biggest barrier to urban agriculture businesses is land values, not training:

In most urban centers high land values are the biggest obstacle to large-scale adoption of urban agriculture, not a lack of professionalization. High land values translate to rent or mortgage payments that eat into margin and leave precious little revenue for the farmer. For example, even an optimistic gross profit projection of $6,000 per month is barely enough to rent half an acre in Los Angeles, Chicago or New York, much less pay a farmer a living wage. 

As a result, the crop of current urban farming ventures is led by those who creatively circumvent the high cost of land by using rooftops (like Gotham Greens in Brooklyn), backyards and schoolyards (like we do at Farmscape) or temporarily vacant lots (like Riverpark Farm in Manhattan). What is saved in rent shows up in the paychecks of farmers and bankrolls the growth of these ventures.

You can read the rest of Dan's article here.