Huauzontle, a Mexican staple in L.A. edible gardens

You can find huauzontle in the produce section of large supermarkets throughout Mexico, the bunches of thin stalks topped with hundreds of green flower buds. The sprigs are best blanched, tied in a bundle, wrapped with Oaxacan string cheese and dipped in an egg-flour-water batter for deep-frying like chile rellenos. You don’t need a fork. You eat it like a crispy vegetarian hot dog on a stick, drizzled with a simple tomato sauce.

Which explains why gardeners here are growing their own huauzontle. Although the plant's cousin, lambsquarters (Chenopodium albun), is considered an invasive weed by many, huauzontle (Chenopodium berlandieri, subspecies nuttalliae) is semi-domesticated.

 

Papalo in the garden: A wild 'summer cilantro'

Thanks to its tolerance for heat, this garden green is sometimes called "summer cilantro." Bolivian coriander is another name, although it’s not at all related to that herb. No, this plant -- papalo (Porophyllum ruderale) -- is actually part of the daisy family and originated in South America, predating the arrival of Asian coriander by thousands of years.

Papalo is a type of quelite, the wild greens of Meso-America, and it's popular among the Quechua of Bolivia as well as the people of southern Mexico. In restaurants in Puebla state, it’s common to find a sprig of papalo stuck in a vase on the table, next to the salt, pepper and salsas -- ready to be added raw to soups, tacos, tortas or beans.

Mosquito traps and repellents: Gear to take the bite out of summer

The most lethal predator in the world is a female that lives only a few weeks, hunts by following plumes of carbon dioxide and thinks the smell of decaying bacteria is delicious. “Mosquitoes cause 1 to 2 million deaths a year,” said Ray Anandasankar, an assistant professor in UC Riverside's entomology department. “It's a human-finding guided missile.”

The 176 mosquito species in the U.S. are more of a pest than a lethal threat, but when it feels like every single one has congregated in your backyard to join you for dinner, the need for solutions remains great.

A bevy of new products purport to keep mosquitoes away without having to slather repellent on your skin. The designs come in different forms — fans, misters, lanterns and more — but ultimately they fall into two categories: traps and repellents. How do they work? More important, do they work?

Lambsquarters: Weed harvested as wild food

Lambsquarters (Chenopodium album) is such a common weed that it’s vanished into the visual background, invisible by its ubiquitousness. Humans ate it before the Stone Age, and modern-day foragers seek it out for its taste, abundance and usefulness. But it is an invasive plant that not all  gardeners want in their space, explaining why common names vary from Allgood and Baconweed to Dirtweed.

Spring is the best time for collecting wild lambsquarters, but you can eat it as a backyard crop through the summer. The plant prefers partial sun or shade, and with a little water and almost no care, it will thrive. One purple-tinged variety called giant goosefoot (Chenopodium gigantium) is easily available in seed form as Magentaspreen. In the garden it grows far more easily than spinach (a close relative) and can get 6 feet high. It’s sometimes called tree spinach, with good reason.

This is a fast-growing, cut-and-come-again vegetable that can be harvested within a month of sowing. It's a nitrogen fixer, improving the soil. But more important, you can pick off the tenderest leaves from the top and sides, blanch them briefly in water to remove the oxalic acid and use them just like spinach, kale or collard greens.

Grow your own chipilín for tamales, pupusas

There’s a secret to sprouting the notoriously difficult chipilín seed. Los Angeles gardener Victor Diego says the best approach is to put the seed in an oven’s warming tray for a week. Let it dry. Then plant.

“It will open,” he promised.

Chipilín (Crotalaria longirostrata) has been called one of the most important edible leaves used by humans globally. Native to southern Mexico and Central America, it's used in tamale masa, soups, omelets and pupusas. It has the flavor of watercress or sour clover mixed with spinach -- a flavor improved by cooking (which explains why it's not usually eaten raw). Besides being a staple in cooking, it’s a nitrogen-fixer, helping to enrich soil. And it makes a decent licuado, the Latin American equivalent of a smoothie.

But chipilín also grows like a weed, popping up in abandoned places. Frank Mangan, a professor in the department of plant and soil sciences at the University of Massachusetts, is overseeing a research project focusing on immigrant populations and the crops they grow. For his group of farmers growing chipilín, he had to get the seed approved for importation from El Salvador by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It’s considered an invasive plant, and it's banned in Australia and Hawaii, where it has gained a toehold. Mangan's project allows for sale of the crop -- at $4 a pound -- and he said the farmers can’t grow it fast enough.

Tomato cages: Readers see red over pros' picks

This is what happens when you ask gardeners to vote on their favorite tomato cage. Well, maybe not this bad. But close.

After we asked six garden pros to reveal their favorite ways to support tomato plants -- from cheap Home Depot wire cages to somewhat pricey and chic catalog buys -- we asked readers to chime in too. (This is where things got a little messy.)

No frenzy of tomato flinging. Not yet. But tomato lovers did let us know they have some strong opinions.

Some of you slapped your head and wondered why none of our experts suggested the Florida Weave, a system in which plants are propped between twine strung between posts. The Florida Weave may sound like a bad hairpiece, reader Linda Ly said, but it works.

She supplied a photo, above right, and even an illustration, below right, to elaborate.

As she wrote on her Garden Betty blog: "This is an aerial view of what the Florida Weave should look like. The top illustration shows my current setup of three plants across an 8-foot bed. The bottom illustration shows an efficient setup that can be repeated for longer rows."

Glendora reader Tom Matkey seconded the effectiveness of the Florida Weave but also sent photos of his PVC cages, declaring that "the circular, cone-shaped cages are virtually worthless."

Best tomato cages: Six picks from the pros

Brandywine or San Marzano? Cherokee Purple or Early Girl? Once you get past the questions of what kind of tomatoes to plant, you quickly reach question No. 2: What kind of support is best? We surveyed six L.A. garden pros about their favorite tomato cage and got six different answers, including some clever tweaks on garden-store staples:

Scott Daigre: The owner of Powerplant Garden Design in Ojai and the organizer of the Tomatomania! events said tomato vines are more flexible than you might think.

He wrote an article titled “Your Tomatoes Deserve Better Support” for Fine Gardening magazine last year in which he explained how he likes to train tomato plants across trellises made of concrete reinforcing wire or heavy galvanized animal fencing, often called hog wire, sold at feed stores.

The effect is a bit like espalier — a sort of living fence, a surprisingly elegant strategy for corralling one of summer’s most gangly crops.

(Photo credit: Scott Daigre)

 

Rhett Beavers: The Los Angeles landscape architect offered his own artwork to illustrate his design.

“I take the standard cages and stack them, using a bamboo pole as a support,” Beavers said.

His arrangement of basic, cone-shaped cages was born out of his method for planting tomatoes: Seedlings go in a deep layer of compost — so deep that “they develop roots along the stem that would normally be above ground. With all the new roots to support the plant, the plants grow really tall.”

The stacked tower accommodates the plants' height and helps to give a new look to a common form.

For more pros' favorites, keep reading ...

Mulberry trees: A race with squirrels for sweet fruit

On the wall of Majid Jahanbin’s office at Paradise Nursery in Chatsworth hang photos of long, fat mulberries lined up with tape measures to show their size -- a gardener’s equivalent of big game trophies. The juicy berries from the Pakistani-Afghan mulberry tree, his biggest seller, can reach more than 3.5 inches.

Most mulberries ripen in spring, and by now most growers have either collected the short-lived fruit or seen it get eaten by squirrels. For Kris Topaz, it’s the latter. Shortly after listing her 11-year old mulberry tree as ready for picking on the Altadena RIPE harvest-sharing website, she removed the offer. The squirrels had arrived first.

“This is the first year I had a problem,” she said. “New mulberries ripen everyday, so for about six weeks I would have four cups of them a day if it’s a good year. They’re very sweet and don’t have seeds, so they’re heavenly. But now the squirrels come every day and have lunch on the new ones.”

Shade-loving edible: yuki-no-shita, a.k.a. strawberry begonia

In Janice Kubo’s backyard garden in West Covina, she has dedicated part of the space to edibles from her native Japan. Some, such as the Japanese mikan (tangerine) and shungiku (edible chrysanthemum) are familiar. But the bed of a ground cover that looks like begonia is not an obvious edible. It’s yuki-no-shita, which translates to "under the snow,” a plant whose slightly furry, scalloped leaves are eaten raw or cooked in dishes such as tempura.

This fast-spreading ground cover (Saxifraga stolonifera) is commonly called strawberry geranium or strawberry begonia, although it’s not related to strawberries, geraniums or begonias.

“As a child we always had it in the garden but we didn’t eat it then as much as we do now,” said Kubo, whose mitsuba we featured last week. She added that some people believe that yuki-no-shita has medicinal properties. Extracts made from yuki-no-shita and related plants are used in skin conditioning creams that promise to smooth wrinkles and improve skin color, as well as in concealers, foundation and other cosmetics.

As the Japanese name suggests, this plant is pretty low maintenance. It likes shady and moist locations and tolerates frosts. It’s often sold as a houseplant, bought for its cascades of flowers, but it does its best outdoors, thriving vigorously for years if maintained. In the 1970s and '80s, saxifrages were a trendy plant for landscapers to use for dark garden spots. In late spring and into summer, the plants send out tall clustered blooms -- white, red and all hues in between.

Mitsuba, a Japanese edible grown for so many reasons

For Janice Kubo of West Covina, one garden essential is mitsuba, also called wild Japanese parsley (Cryptotaenia japonica). It looks like a flat-leaf parsley but is more like shiso, the Asian herb with a clean, wild flavor and few substitutes. The taste of mitsuba is chervil-meets-celery leaf.

All parts of the plant — seeds, flowers, roots — are edible, but the leaves are most commonly used. The name mitsuba means “three leaves” in Japanese, a reference to the way foliage appears in stems. The leaves can become bitter if cooked too long, so they are added as a garnish in miso soup, on top of rice bowl dishes or with stir-fry. They are put raw in salads or sushi.

Kubo was born in Chigasaki, within sight of Mt. Fuji in Japan, and mixed in with her Mexican primrose and chayote, her sunchokes and her tomatoes, are plants that reflect her culinary heritage. Kubo has 14 raised beds — nearly 100 edibles in all, from herbs to trees. An animator and graphics artist by training, she became an urban farmer by necessity, finding home-grown organic produce to be a solution for her son’s multiple food allergies (engagingly documented on her blog). The family gets 90% of its produce from the backyard.

Kubo got her first mitsuba plants in the produce section of her grocery. Mitsuba are shipped “live” with their roots encased in a foam medium to retain freshness. She and her mom replaced the foam with dirt and grew out those first plants to collect seeds. You can also find seeds or seedlings at Tabuchi Nursery, (310) 478-8338, or Hashimoto Nursery, (310) 473-6232, which are within a block of each other on Sawtelle Avenue in West L.A.