The lightbulb went off for Lara Hermanson, co-founder of Farmscape, the largest urban farming venture in the U.S., when she graduated college to an office job “and immediately got depressed.” She found solace volunteering on evenings and weekends at farms before becoming a landscaper full-time in 2008.

Outdoor kitchens, fire pits, and deep-seating sectionals aren't the only amenities gracing well-dressed backyards today. More and more homeowners are adding edible gardens to their outdoor living areas.

Ten year old Farmscape is the largest urban farming venture in the country with some of their biggest projects right here in the Bay Area. Projects that include The Garden at AT&T Park, Levi’s Stadium and gardens at corporate campuses including Oracle and The North Face.

One of the organic gardens that they built and maintain is at the Clif Bar Headquarters which provides ingredients for Clif’s employee-run Kali’s Kitchen (currently being removated). Kali’s was recently honored with ‘Gold’ certification in sustainability and nutrition from the USHFC.

When designing his current home, Andre Kim knew he wanted a garden.

Not just a few herbs or tomato plants, but a permanent feature that could change his family’s diet and help them all feel more connected to the land.

Kim, a real estate developer from Los Angeles, found Farmscape, an urban farming company in California, and hired the team to design his dream garden. Three years later, Kim’s family can’t imagine life without their four raised beds, full of organic vegetables. Each week, the garden is meticulously seeded, pruned and weeded by a Farmscape farmer. Over the two growing seasons each year, the family harvests more than a dozen crops.

Imagine, you come home from work, head out into the garden and pick your salad for supper. Or how about swinging past the neighbourhood urban farm at the weekend and pick some fruit for Sunday lunch.

Farmscape, California’s largest urban farm venture, has been building these kind of options for city-slickers and companies for over 10 years, but recently interest has exploded.

When designing his current home, Andre Kim knew he wanted a garden. Not just a few herbs or tomato plants, but a permanent feature that could change his family’s diet and help them feel more connected to the land.

Kim, a real estate developer from Los Angeles, found Farmscape, an urban farming company in California, and hired the team to design his dream garden. Three years later, Kim’s family can’t imagine life without their four raised beds, full of organic vegetables. Each week, the garden is meticulously seeded, pruned and weeded by a Farmscape farmer. Over the two growing seasons each year, the family harvests more than a dozen crops.

As farmhouse style moseys into town, galvanized-metal stock tanks — and the zinc-plated material in general — are following suit. These water and feed troughs for livestock find surprising uses in all kinds of landscapes, as shown below, and even inside the house.

When Niki Nakayama was house-hunting in Greater Los Angeles, she had one rule: “If there wasn’t room for a vegetable garden, it wasn’t right,” says the chef and co-owner, along with her wife and sous chef Carole Iida-Nakayama, of the wildly popular restaurant N/Naka. At the heart of their modern take on kaiseki—a traditional Japanese cuisine involving one- or two-bite courses and impeccable plating—are seasonal ingredients. And what could be fresher than food grown in the couple’s own yard?

Eventually they landed on a mid century modern home in Culver City. The back quickly became a playground for their three dogs, but they saw potential in a sunny, 700-square-foot front yard overgrown with hedges and patchy grass. Enter Dan Allen of L.A.- and Oakland-based urban-agriculture design firm Farmscape, who replaced the lawn and ornamental plants with raised beds and fruit trees.

Good news for anyone dreaming of summer vegetables: Even a postage stamp–size yard can grow plenty of food. “The trick is to prioritize favorites and properly appraise your land,” says Dan Allen, CEO of Farmscape. Here’s what you need to know to reap bounty from modest parcels.

Clif Bar headquarters in Emeryville, California, has added an organic corporate garden to their campus in recent years to promote employee wellness. They turned to Farmscape’s, Sara Gilligan, a seasoned head farmer, and Nick Smith, installation foreman for Bay area to lead this project.

Tucked away around the north side of his Ocean Park home, Conrad Clark has a very productive garden.

Cilantro, parsley, kale, arugula, lettuce and spinach plants produce enough vegetables for fresh soups and salads every week from the four-by-ten-foot raised bed. A nearby Satsuma tree is heavy with fruit.

It’s an impressive set-up for a 13-month-old amateur, who keeps his mom busy as he pulls out sticks and taste the soil for himself.

It’s easy enough to plant a seed and watch it grow if you’ve got the dirt. But an increasing number of businesses are bringing the joys of nurturing a green thumb (and scoring fresh-from-the-earth produce) to East Bay residents who have limited access to garden space.

Oakland’s Farmscape Gardens—the largest urban farming venture in California—scopes out, installs, and helps maintain gardens in greenery-challenged places. Farmscape specializes in raised beds, and can take the toil out of maintaining your soil with a weekly farming service that includes pest control, irrigation, and harvesting.

When looking to buy or rent a new home, there are many items on the future occupants' standard wish list: a state-of-the-art kitchen, two-car garage or a full gym space. But there's a new green item among the residents' most-wanted: urban farms.

On a warm, breezy summer morning on Bay Farm Island in Alameda, California, Farmer Lucas Murillo is on a mission to destroy cucumber beetles. These cunning predators are lurking in his cucurbits and damaging his carefully tended produce. Next up is picking a never-ending yellow and green bean harvest, clipping basil tops, and chopping zucchini and pattypan squash from the vine. After cleaning and organizing his harvest, he’ll bring it directly into the client’s kitchen next door, where the café team will prepare it for lunch that day.

Urban farming and growing your own gets more popular with each passing year. Along with it comes an increasing attraction to agrihood living for all income levels. But most urban farmers’ business model echoes that of the rural farm; growing food to sell. Farmscape, however, sells no produce. Still, they grow a mountain of fresh harvests for others around Los Angeles and Oakland, California.

Nine stories up, atop the roof of the SAP Tower of Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, is a thriving 7,000-square-foot organic vegetable and herb garden now going on two years old. Called the Faithful Farm, it is located on the tower’s 27,000-square-foot NRG Solar Terrace, high above the scrambles and scrimmages of the San Francisco 49ers football team on the field below.

Fresh vegetables and herbs, harvested steps away from the kitchen; that’s a chef’s dream.

In the Farm-to-Fork Capital, it’s also a sign that a business has thoroughly bought into an ethos of sustainability. Grow tomatoes at your doorstep – or on your roof – and patrons know those veggies are as local as they can get. So do employees who like to know their food source is just outside their windows.

Trends show that homebuyers are adding ‘edible gardens’ to their wish list when looking to move to a new home; they are as important as a luxury fridge and a granite bathroom

Incorporating agriculture into office and industrial parks can provide multiple benefits for developers, property owners and tenants, including expedited development approvals.

One could say Lara Hermanson has been preparing for her career since she was just a kid. While Hermanson was growing up in Chicago, her mother would pay her a penny for every weed she pulled out with the root attached.

When it comes to encouraging residential and commercial customers to garden, Farmscape has risen in the ranks along the West Coast. As edible landscaping continues to become more mainstream, more farm-to-table systems are being introduced to draw in consumers.

The farm-to-table movement, first popularized by restaurants and grocery stores wishing to showcase the freshness of their local ingredients and produce, is slowly gaining credence in residential real estate.

The trend is taking hold largely in the apartment market, where residents share in the bounty of a large garden plot that produces fruits and vegetables at no charge. In Northridge, California, for example, the Terrena complex features a produce garden just outside the leasing office, leaving a strong impression on would-be tenants.

Urban farming services cater to both homes and businesses that want home-grown produce but not the work involved in growing it. Clients include apartment complexes, grocery stories, schools, shopping malls, even ballparks.

Developers are bringing the farm closer to consumers’ tables in urban, rural, and suburban spaces. Learn how real estate pros work in communities that are organized around the availability of fresh, hyperlocal food.

Urban farms can help to attract new industrial businesses, accelerate property values, and engender camaraderie between co-workers.

Excellent landscaping can increase a property’s value by as much as 28 percent, according to a report in the National Association of Realtors’ online publication HouseLogic. Even good landscaping can boost a property’s value by 6 percent to 7 percent, the same report notes.

Restaurateurs, art galleries, and developers are among the growing number of Angelenos seeing urban farms bear fruit.

As edible landscaping continues to become more mainstream, more farm-to-table systems are being introduced to draw in consumers.

Communities that offer backyard gardens and urban farms as part of the neighborhood are known as agrihoods and are proving to be lucrative for builders and developers wanting to attract home buyers.

Farm-to-table-centered communities are a big draw for home buyers, but they can also mean more profits for builders and developers. With creative land planning, communities of all sizes can tap into the growing interest in fresh produce and backyard gardens.

A new project would bring 141 townhomes, a 93-room hotel and an urban farm to Hayward, in one of the largest new development proposals in the city.

How great, edible landscaping can increase property values up to 28% + bring urban, residential communities together.

As a result of creating fruit and vegetable landscapes within communities, agrihoods, developers have realized a 7% property value increase and draw in a wider demographic of buyers.

There’s never been a better time to open an urban farm. For starters, the UN reports that urban agriculture is on the rise the world over – more than 800 million people across the globe farm in urban environments, and up to 20% of the world’s food is grown in cities. In the US, cities are increasingly investing in creative ways to get things growing, from transforming disused rooftops to upcycling empty lots.

Why are food and agriculture becoming more important parts of real estate development projects? Attendees at a session at the 2016 ULI Fall Meeting in Dallas learned that growing, processing, and selling food in development projects can pay big dividends for savvy developers as well as for consumers, communities, and the environment. From rooftop gardens, to fresh food markets to urban grocery stores, to residential developments designed around working farms, food is providing a growing arena for innovation in real estate.

Urban farming is growing (see what we did there?) across the country, especially here in California. So, being the eco-conscious and tech-savvy place that we are, it was only a matter of time till we saw a stadium-sized garden sprout-up.

Levi's Stadium, home of the San Francisco 49ers and Black Lives Matter hero Colin Kaepernick, is now scoring big in the sustainable agriculture category with its recently unveiled 4,000-square-foot herb and vegetable garden, dubbed Faithful Farm, on the stadium's roof. The roof itself actually comprises 27,000 square feet of total green space, and even produces its own renewable energy through a grid of solar panels.

Levi’s Stadium, the winner of the 2015 SportsBusiness Journal award for Sports Facility of the Year and the home of the San Francisco 49ers, recently unveiled the first-ever rooftop farm on a professional sports arena.

The “Faithful Farm” is a vegetable and herb garden that will generate 150 pounds of produce per week, featuring nearly 40 rotating crops that will be used for dishes served in club spaces at the stadium in addition to 200-plus private events every year.

The home of the San Francisco 49ers has unveiled a new urban farm on the roof of the football stadium. It's expected to generate 150 pounds of produce each week that will be used to cook up food items for club spaces and private events at the stadium.

Levi’s Stadium took farm-to-fork to new heights.

The $1.2 billion Santa Clara home of the 49ers unveiled a rooftop farm Thursday that will help supply fresh produce and herbs to the facility’s club level food service.

Dubbed “Faithful Farm” in honor of Niners’ fans, the 4,000-square-foot organic garden is the first-ever rooftop farm at a major professional sports venue, according to team and stadium officials. Fresh-picked shishito peppers, special “49ers Squash” and much more will be served to patrons at games.

Farming could be coming to a neighborhood near you.

A concept in housing development planning known as "Agrihoods" is gaining ground.

Agrihood's are similar to housing developments built around golf courses. Both preserve open views, promote outdoor living, and provide a sense of community in a hectic world.

"Instead of the central marketing and community feature being a club or golf course, it's the farm," said Lara Hermanson, principal of Farmscape LLC., a farmscape landscaper and panelist for the upcoming Nevada Economic Development Conference session, Agrihoods, at the University of Nevada, Reno in September.

Matthew Geldin is an expert at making beds — and not just any old garden variety.

Actually, they can be found in the garden just off patios or in what once might have been seldom-used side yards now reclaimed. These are raised beds, designed for ease in planting, maintaining and harvesting backyard crops. They’re not new, but they’ve suddenly become garden darlings by choice.

The Getty Salad Garden, an installation of organic heirloom vegetables and salad greens growing in graphically rendered raised beds, emerged on the Getty Center grounds from October 2015 to January 2016.

Presented as a three way collaboration between the landscape architecture studio Terremoto, the artist and writer Julia Sherman, and the urban agricultural garden company Farmscape, the Getty Salad Garden was conceived as a dynamic platform for conversations and education, and drew together a wide variety of creative voices.

As the sun begins to inch above the San Francisco skyline on a see-your-breath November morning, farmers and kitchen staff are already moving across the rooftop at STEM Kitchen|Garden, a farm-to-table restaurant topped with an on-site farm.

Providence restaurant at 5955 Melrose Ave. is one of many restaurants growing up -- as in to the roof where they garden and then use the fresh ingredients in the Hollywood eatery pictured Dec. 8, 2015.

If the Getty Center in Los Angeles is going to treat salad as art, then you can bet iceberg lettuce is not part of the equation. And indeed, from now through January 11, the Salad Garden performance art stage features artists making salads from more than 50 exquisite heirloom herbs, vegetables and edible flowers.

It's no secret that a number of Getty Center visitors spend little time in the galleries and a lot of it in the photogenic gardens designed by artist Robert Irwin, meandering along the descending tree-lined walkway, through the bougainvillea arbor and around the geometric arrangement of azalea floats hovering over a vast, circular pool.

At Debbie Goldwasser’s home in the San Francisco area, the grass was brown, sacrificed to the drought that’s slowly suffocating California. But, she and her husband wondered, might there be a landscaping alternative both sustainable and practical?

The garden was designed by Lara Hermanson (of Farmscape Gardens) and has raised beds arranged in artful patterns, drawing the eye towards the Bay.

It provides work for a local urban farming venture called Farmscape Gardens, whose farmers plant the Jonathan Club's seeds, compost the beds and rotate the crops.

Farmscape is a local company that specializes in building urban gardens. Company rep Dan Allen says L.A.'s high-rise rooftops are actually an ideal place for herbs, vegetables and even fruit trees.

Daniel Allen, CEO of farming company Farmscape, believes more gardens will crop up as developers add rooftop gardens to new condo and apartment buildings.

“We can’t feed everyone by doing this, but it’s a start,” said Lara Hermanson, owner of Farmscape, an urban gardening and landscaping company in Oakland.

Farmscape Gardens is California’s largest urban farming company, bringing edible gardens to residential and commercial customers alike.

In her modest backyard, with the help of Dan Allen of urban garden design outfit Farmscape, she cultivates Japanese vegetable and herb varietals, as well as other plants, to exacting specifications.

The day I came to visit, Daniel Allen was there helping out. He works for Farmscape, a company that builds organic gardens for residential spaces, schools and restaurants.

A company called Farmscape is proving that there's enough of an appetite for farming on residential land to turn the proposition into a high-growth business.