Natural Perspectives:

At the beginning of summer, I swore to Vic that this was going to be my best gardening season ever. It wasn’t.

At least it hasn’t been so far. There are still a few weeks left to pull a rabbit out of the hat. Or a carrot out of the ground. And then it will be mid-September and time to start the fall garden with cool weather crops such as peas, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts and salad greens.

Our home garden is just barely adequate in terms of volume of produce generated. Nothing I’ve done in this yard has been able to top the productivity of my plot at the now defunct community garden at Goldenwest College. There I had ample space and that all-important essential for gardens — sunlight.

Due to shade from trees in our yard and our neighbor’s yard, there just isn’t enough sunshine to grow a decent amount of food here. That seems to have doomed my harvest to mainly greens and root crops, which will grow in limited sun. Fruiting crops such as tomatoes, squash, peppers and eggplant need more than the six hours of sunlight that most of our garden area gets. We need a community garden plot again.

Earlier this month, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack declared the week of Aug. 23 to 29 National Community Garden Week. The goals are to connect people with the land, help people understand how food grows, and encourage healthy eating. Terrific ideas! All we need now is a local community garden so we can all get growing.

Fortunately, a group of citizens is already working on it. Joanne Rasmussen and Annette Parsons formed a group called the Beach Community Victory Garden. They’ve formed a 501(c)3, written bylaws, elected officers, opened a bank account, and researched potential locations.

The site that is most likely to become a new community garden for Huntington Beach is at the end of Atlanta Street by the Santa Ana River. The city, Southern California Edison, and the garden group are in negotiations for leasing the property. Contact Joanne Rasmussen at (714) 593-1700 or [email protected] to join the group and reserve your plot.

Meanwhile, Vic and I struggle to grow food in our small and shady yard. We’ve had some successes and inevitable failures. This was our best season yet for producing fruit, with small but tasty harvests of peaches, nectarines, plums, apricots, blueberries, blackberries, lemons and limes, all organic. The apple and orange crops are still ripening. The avocado and Asian pear trees chose to not produce anything this year, and our grape vines are too young to bear fruit. Given how young most of our trees are, we really can’t fault our yard for its production of fruit.

But our garden sure fell down in the vegetable category this summer. We had a decent crop of tomatoes early in the season, but those plants inexplicably quit producing in late June. They were varieties that should have kept growing well into fall. Maybe they weren’t getting enough sun. I gave up on them and replanted in a different location. My second planting of tomatoes gave us a few Romas and heirloom varieties called Big Zebra and Cherokee Chocolate, but I have yet to harvest a yellow pear tomato. The plants are still flowering, but they had better hurry because we’re running out of summer.

Normally Vic dreads summer because it is a time of endless squash dishes. I have to admit that serving up everything that my squash vines produce can get tiresome. Not this summer. We got a half dozen patty pan and yellow squash before the vines up and died.

Every garden season is different, each with its own vagaries, especially in these times of changing climate. For example, this was a great year for onions in our garden. It’s kept us supplied with all the green onions that we’ve needed, and many of the yellow onions as well. Our garden also produced as much chard, collards, kale, beets, turnips and radishes as we needed, but I have to admit that our need for these vegetables is modest. We harvested some eggplants, cucumbers, carrots, snow peas and green beans.

I planted a second crop of Blue Lake pole beans in July and trained the vines up a teepee that I made out of six bamboo poles. They’re flowering now, so I’m anticipating a bumper crop of late green beans. I also made a second planting of cucumbers in containers and a late planting of scarlet runner beans, hoping that I didn’t start them too late in the season to bear a crop.

I keep learning and trying new things. Last week, I picked up a book from the library called “Fresh Food From Small Spaces: The square inch gardener’s guide to year-round growing, fermenting and sprouting,” by R. J. Ruppenthal.

Ruppenthal suggests making every square inch count by using vertical space to grow things on trellises, growing food in containers, and sprouting seeds in the kitchen. At various times, we’ve tried all of these things. We’ve successfully grown green bunching onions, eggplants, cucumbers and sugar snap peas in containers. We use a 1-by-4-foot strip of dirt by our gas and electric meters to grow green beans up a trellis. And in the past, we’ve sprouted alfalfa, broccoli and mung bean seeds in the kitchen. Sprouts of various kinds are a great addition to salads, sandwiches and stir-fries.

Some of Ruppenthal’s other suggestions include keeping chickens and honeybees in the yard, growing your own mushrooms, and composting. But what we really need is a community garden in Huntington Beach. A place where people can grow some of their own food. A place with plenty of sunshine. By next spring, we may have it.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected] .