Two Dog Organic Nursery and truly homegrown seedlings

Jo Anne Trigo has spent the last two years turning her 50-by-100-foot Mid-Wilshire backyard into an organic nursery, growing edible plants that she sells at farmers markets in Larchmont Village and La Cañada Flintridge. It was an unlikely decision for a woman who until 2009 hadn’t tended a vegetable garden since her college days in the mid-'70s.

Trigo’s organic nursery experiment began after a string of deaths in her family and the decline of her high-end furniture business, La Paloma Design. “I started planting things as a kind of horticulture therapy,” she said. And she hasn’t stopped.

She called her new business Two Dog Organic Nursery, and by July 2009, she was selling in farmers markets. That’s where most of her customers find her, but she also welcomes people to come by her house (by appointment only) to pick up the seedlings she grows under an attractive wood-frame shade structure that dominates her backyard. Before her plants leave with customers, they have circulated throughout her property: They are planted in the garage, baked under grow lights on shelves in a guest room or the dining room, and then moved out to the yard. In the summer, her big sellers are tomatoes, but this time of year her backyard is filled with kale, beets, broccoli, cauliflower and chard.

Like many of the professional edible gardeners popping up in Los Angeles, Trigo offers classes at her home on how to plant edibles. She’s become something of a container gardening specialist thanks to her two dogs, Jake and Lalo, who are inclined to rip up anything that’s not raised off the ground. Now she sells sub-irrigated plastic planters called Earth Boxes and felt containers called Smart Pots along with her plants.