Heart Beet Gardening
January 07 2008
We just had a visit from the garden elves at Heart Beet Gardening and are completely blown away by the trio’s heartfelt dedication to sustainable urban agriculture—i.e. growing food at home. The Heart Beet girls have their hands in the dirt so you don’t have to, which is music to the ears of a green girl with a black thumb whose children who are starting to believe that vegetables and fruit are born in plastic bags.
These Los Angeles-based green garden visionaries work with kids at the community garden at a local high school, hold free workshops on composting, are establishing a seed bank of plants that have adapted to Southern California ecosystem and are creating a seed exchange program so gardeners never have to buy from a nursery again—they just bring in their surplus and exchange it for a new variety.
With all this community action going on, it’s a wonder the three twenty-somethings at Heart Beet have the time to pursue their real business, which is designing, building and maintaining organic vegetable gardens in the yards of Angelenos with neither the time (check), energy (check) nor talent (check) to do it themselves. Because although it may seem simple—take soil and seeds, add water and sun, and you’ve got yourself a garden—anyone who has single-handedly killed as many plants as we have can be a bit gun-shy when it comes to committing to a 12x12 space full of them.
So they come in for a consultation (it’s free), measure your space, talk with you about whether you want to create your own compost (which definitely cuts down on your landfill-destined trash, even if you don’t have a garden to spread it on) or have them deliver it from their super high-octane, worm-fueled, giant Heart Beet composter.
They discuss what you and your family will eat (green beans, yes; eggplant, no) and how many hours of sun your garden will get, then present you with a list of plant options to choose from. An added bonus: All of their gardens include flowers because they attract pollinators like bees. And they’re designed to put into the soil what the previous crop has taken out of it—so, for example, you’d plant a crop of beans, which add nitrogen, after a crop of corn, which depletes it.
Design and installation of the garden costs from $200 to $2,500, depending on the space and amount of building required—for example, if your neighbor likes his Round-Up it’s going to leach into your garden soil, so you’d need to build a raised bed garden, in which the soil stays separate.
After that, it’s $75 per month for the Heart Beet team to come in once a week for maintenance, which basically means weeding, watering, controlling pests (naturally) and replanting. If you break it down over the course of a year, a small garden costs about $25 per week—which is about what you’d pay at the Farmer’s Market, and a lot more fun.
Ask the Heart Beet girls why they choose to build organic gardens and they look at each other and shrug, like, “Is there any other choice?” In their eyes, an organic garden designed to be a closed loop system that naturally sustains itself without chemical fertilizers is truly the only logical choice. Damn straight.
