Lauri Kranz, edible garden 'fairy godmother' of the Hollywood Hills

L.A. musician Jeff Martin wanted to grow his own vegetables, but his steep 2-acre property high up Laurel Canyon Boulevard has a seasonal stream that draws raccoons, opossums, deer, squirrels, rabbits and rats. “The battle with the critters is almost impossible,” he said.

So Martin called Lauri Kranz, above, a longtime singer-songwriter friend who built a second career as a go-to edible gardening consultant in the Hollywood Hills, helping clients cope with foraging wildlife, limited sun and not-so-flat land. Anne Litt, the KCRW DJ, called Kranz her “fairy godmother of gardening.”

What to plant: Kranz's five picks

At Martin's home, Kranz installed twin 3-by-10-foot raised beds inside a 225-square-foot redwood-framed cage screened with half-inch wire that let in light, bees and butterflies while blocking other wildlife, right.

“Now if I have rice and beans, I can totally survive on what's growing here,” Martin said, adding, “You don't get bored by tomatoes every day if they're this good.”

At Litt's home, perched on a steep slope a few canyons away from the Hollywood Bowl, Kranz put in terraced beds with onions, peas, corn and tomatoes. Her planting approach was old school: three seeds per hole, plus regular doses of fish emulsion and worm casings.

Even when things didn't go perfectly — if, say, Litt went for salad greens and found plants gnawed down to a nub — her fairy godmother was ready with advice. “I learned from Lauri that if the rabbits attacked your lettuce, you just have to come to peace with it,” Litt said.

The Global Garden: Amaranth, a crimson tide of seeds

Like quinoa, amaranth is one of the “lost crops” of the Americas. Before the arrival of the Conquistadors, the tall annual with the large crimson seed heads was a staple for the Aztecs, the Incas, the Hopi. Because of its association with indigenous rituals, however, the Spanish prohibited any domestic cultivation of the crop.

In some local community gardens, a similar injunction is in force but for different reasons. Some wild species are called pigweed and are considered to be invasive; the seeds scatter easily and require little attention (or water) to grow.

However, some gardeners consider this weed to be a good companion plant with corn, potatoes and onion. Birds come for the seeds, and beneficial ground beetles nest at the foot of the plant, feeding on pests, including slugs. Amaranth also is known to break up compacted soil and trap leaf miners, insects that can damage crop foliage.

At Proyecto Jardin, a community garden in Boyle Heights, green and magenta varieties are growing. The plant has cultural significance, said Irene Pena, the garden’s administrator.

“It’s a traditional crop, special," she said. "The seeds are sacred. It’s considered revolutionary to grow it. Leaves are harvested and used in moles and soups.”

Growing bigger, better bottle gourds

The bottle gourd has been grown and eaten from the Americas to Asia to Africa -- cultivated for more than 15,000 years, by some estimates. Thanks to the millenniums of cross-breeding, it comes in many shapes and can reach stunning proportions -- like a harbor buoy a couple of feet long.

The plant, also called the calabash, is thought to have originated in South Africa. It spread throughout the tropics globally, the giant pods floating on the ocean currents for months, intact, the seeds protected inside.

Bangladesh native Sayed Zaman, a gardener at the Salad Bowl Community Garden in Granada Hills, eats the flowers, the leaves and the younger fruit, skinned and enjoyed like zucchini. Bottle gourd is quite tasty, with a nutty flavor and a pleasingly crisp texture, ideal for soup, raita or curry. Unlike squash, it doesn’t get mushy when cooked.

Bottle gourd grows quickly, Zaman said. It starts easily from seed and flowers in about 60 days.

“It’s a summertime fruit that takes lots of water and loves to climb,” he said, noting his latticed space devoted to the plant. A west-facing "wall" of his gourd "room" is threaded with the vines, and pods hang down from the ceiling, swinging like chandeliers. It’s hot outside, but under the vine roof, covered in the foot-wide hairy leaves of the plant, it’s shady and slightly humid.

Growing minari, an exotic addition to the herb garden

Considering how popular the bitter herb minari is among Korean gardeners, it's surprising how difficult it is to find nurseries that sell it. The demand for the plant (botanical name Oenanthe javanica) stems from its use as flavoring for kimchi and fish soups and as a daily tonic.

Minari can be hard to find, but it's easy to raise. It's a cut-and-come-again plant, a fast grower in sun or shade as long as its footing is kept damp, even boggy. At Jardín del Rio Community Garden in the Elysian Valley neighborhood of Los Angeles, some gardeners have dedicated an entire 10-by-5-foot plot to minari.

Gardener Woo Chul Chong said they mostly use the stems of the plant for juice. "We like other plants, but this is what we started off with," Chong said through an interpreter. "It cleans the liver."

Another gardener, Lily Kim, added: "You only drink a little bit every day." Minari grows slowly in the winter, but in summer it rises fast. "It grows itself," she said.

In Japan, minari is known as seri and used in sukiyaki. In the West, a common name is water dropwart. It's a cousin to a type of hemlock (Oenanthe crocata), the toxic herb. Some people call minari by the name water celery; that's how you may find it labeled at stores selling pond fish and water garden supplies.

The scoop on cherimoya, the ice cream fruit

Chilean-born Isabel Barkman paused as she sliced into a mammoth cherimoya, often called the ice cream fruit and native to the Andes and other high-elevation locales. “I grew up among fruit trees," Barkman said. "I cannot live without them.”

Indeed, as a master gardener and member of the Orange County chapter of the California Rare Fruit Growers, Barkman is best known for her persimmon tree collection. But she does cherish the lone cherimoya tree in her yard -- a Chaffey variety, which is adapted to coastal conditions and bears fruit with a tart, lemony flavor. When Barkman put in her tree decades ago, it was one of the few varieties readily available.

Now, cherimoya gardeners have a wide choice, as was evident at the Cherimoya Festival 10 days ago at the UC South Coast Research & Extension Center in Irvine. Gardeners can find favorites such as El Bumpo, pictured here, a nubbly green grenade of complex flavor, the sweet perfume delivered with a creamy mouth-feel. The nickname ice cream fruit doesn’t come close to describing the custardy flesh surrounding the smooth seeds. (El Bumpo’s skin is too soft for commercial production, so you’re not likely to find it at Whole Foods or even a farmers market.)

California is the cherimoya capital of the U.S., with more varieties available here than anywhere else, in the nursery or in store produce aisles. Since the 1920s, rare fruit fans and growers from Southern California have been bringing back seeds and scions (cuttings) from Mexico and points south to propagate in backyards. Cherimoya does well here even though it originated at high elevations. (The name means “cold seed” in Quechua, a reference to its tolerance for chilly temperatures at high altitude.)

It’s easy to start plants from the penny-sized seeds, but you may not see fruit for 15 years -- if ever.

Broccoli, beets and more 'Breaking Through Concrete'

City sidewalks with weeds poking through the cracks might be what most people think of when they hear the title of the new book "Breaking Through Concrete." But that’s not what the authors have in mind.

The book chronicles a 2010 road trip to a dozen of the hundreds of urban farms that have sprouted recently, and those that have survived for years around the country -- farms that, the authors say, are the think tanks of a food revolution.

"Breaking Through Concrete," by David Hanson and Edwin Marty with photographs by Michael Hanson, David's brother, presents stories of hope and triumph over homelessness, over difficult municipal regulations, over hunger.

Growing guava of a different color

When Gina Thomas was looking for some guava to plant, she didn’t want the typical pineapple guava. So she asked David Silber at Papaya Tree Nursery in Granada Hills for advice. Silber was her tree guru and offered her varieties with different-colored flesh, taste and size -- guavas from Hawaii, Malayasia, India.

“I told him I wanted one of each,” says Thomas, right, recalling that exchange more than 20 years ago. “In India they grow them like apples.”

One of her favorites is from Malaysia, with pastel pink flesh and soft crunchy seeds. She likes it enough to propagate it, employing a layering method: She bends down a low-hanging branch so it sits below the soil surface. The partially submerged section is held in place with bricks and a stake until it sends out roots. After a few years, once it’s established, the connection to the mother plant is cut, and the new tree can be transplanted.

Guavas originated in Central America. The sweet flesh of the pear-shaped fruit is grown in the tropics and used in jams, drinks, baby food, chutney and desserts.

Rishi Kumar at the Growing Home and Learning Center community-supported agriculture project in Diamond Bar has a green-skinned, white-flesh Indian variety.

“We had a lot of trouble with it not getting a lot of fruit, but since we've started to do a lot of [soil] amending, we got maybe 200 pounds last year from one tree,” he says.

Not all guavas sold at nurseries are the same. The popular pineapple guava (Feijoa sellowiana) is different from the tropical guavas (Psidium guajava) that Thomas grows. The latter taste better, have fewer seeds and are self-propagating. Usually pineapple guavas need a mate to produce fruit.

How to grow sugar cane: Some sweet choices

As he pours fresh sugar cane juice through a filter, John Guettler says it’s important not to confuse the plant with what it becomes after processing. “Sugar cane has been demonized in Western cultures because it is turned into sugar,” Guettler, right, says.

He pours a glass of sugar cane juice, skimmed of foam. The juice has a consistency like water but is slightly thicker and sweet, with a caramel undertone. It’s grassy too. And filling -- partly why it has become a favorite drink for fasts. Robby Whitelaw, co-owner of Raw Cane SuperJuice Bar in Hollywood, says sugar cane juice is full of fiber and minerals, like wheat grass.

Last week we wrote about gardeners growing sugar cane as a source of juice, as a chewy snack, perhaps even as a windbreak around the yard. This week we continue the conversation with some advice on propagation and a discussion about how sugar canes are not all the same. The varieties used in juicing contain less sucrose than the type processed into sugar. Juicing canes are bred to have long straight sections with fewer nodes; chewing canes are bred for easy peeling.

In Louisiana and Florida, where sugar cane has a long history of commercial production, heirloom varieties come in a rainbow of colors: Georgia Red, Louisiana Purple, a green-yellow variety called Home Green.

Sugar cane, a sweet crop that's easy to grow

When Rey Koo and Robby Whitelaw were starting up their sugar cane juice business in Hollywood five years ago, they were worried that they wouldn’t find a large enough supply of the long, green canes for their juice crusher. Fresh raw cane juice is the basis for many of the drinks they sell at farmers markets and Raw Cane SuperJuice, their juice bar.

“We discovered there are a lot of people who grow this — not as a cash crop but for a wind guard or for cultural or ritual reasons,” Koo says. “If you take the [Metro] Blue Line to Long Beach, from the train you’ll see a lot of homes with sugar cane growing in the backyard.”

She’s adept at spotting the distinctive, feathery plumage of sugar cane. Born in Taiwan and raised in San Jose, Koo remembers childhood holidays marked with treats of chewable sugar cane, fresh from the Central Valley. Sugar cane would be on the altars for Chinese New Year and Day of the Dead.

Whitelaw is a native of KwaZulu-Natal province, the so-called sugar cane coast of South Africa.

In 2007, the two started producing sugar cane juice for natural foods stores. They found a network of growers, mostly Hmong in Fresno and Vietnamese in San Diego. The best plants for crushing out juice are straight, with long sections between the nodes. Different hybrids have different tastes.

“We look for a minimal dense juice, a dark color with a finish that is a little bitter and very grassy,” Koo says.

When she gets her stalks from her grower, she adds, all the buds — the embryonic shoots at the nodes — have been cut out.

Sugar cane is easy to grow and propagate, a highly efficient plant with an extensive root system. It can be grown as a windbreak, as Koo suggests, along perimeters of gardens. When young, sugar cane can be inter-planted with veggies.

How to grow asparagus: Another lesson from the Global Garden

Asparagus hardly ranks as an exotic edible, but harvesting this imported favorite of Thomas Jefferson in my own yard has been something of a dream. Two years ago, while taking the UC Cooperative Extension's master gardener class, I learned how to transplant asparagus seedlings, holding the delicate plant by the leaves, not the stem. But when I transplanted the seedlings into a bed, they lasted about a year, sending out a few anemic new shoots but never maturing into the leafy mini-forests I had seen in others’ gardens. No rhizome ever developed underground to provide the energy for the shoots of springtime.

In contrast, I talked to community gardeners from the beach to the valley who complained that their asparagus grew out of control. It was on the verge of becoming invasive, they said.

At Ocean View Farms on the Westside of L.A., Maurice Haber had put in two asparagus plants but said one would have been enough. After slightly more than a year, he had more spears than he could eat.

Why the different results?