Lauri Kranz - A Garden can be anywhere: creating bountiful and beautiful edible gardens

For Gus, Milo, and Spenser.
May you always have a garden in your lives.

Seeing and feeling the plants growing there, being aware of them and where they are in their season, and cooking whats fresh changed the way we thought about our food.

It was a lucky day for me and my family seven or eight years ago when Lauri Kranzor Garden Lauri, as we call herhappened into our lives. Our children were at a new preschool in Los Angeles, and at the schools fund-raising auction my husband, David, and I bid on a popular item that featured this mythical character everyone was oohing and aahing over: Lauri would come to the top bidders home to set up a kitchen garden. I will never forget the day of our first meeting when I opened our front door to find wispy and beautiful, dirt-dusted, oversize-hat-wearing Lauri at our threshold. She came in, truly like a ray of sunshine, swooping our kids up into her passion for gardening, vegetables, the land, and life itself.

As two chefs, we knew we wanted a garden, but we didnt know how much we needed it. From a patch of dry chaparral high on a hill behind our house, Lauri created a place where we would read and dream up menus while the kids played. Whenever we needed herbs or berries or some Swiss chard for dinner, it was right there, just out the kitchen door. But it wasnt just the handiness.

Our kids got to spend a lot of time with Lauri, as not only was she keeping our home garden but she also taught every week at the preschool, where they learned the joys of liquid seaweed, compost, and worms. As part of her curriculum, Lauri would garden and also cook with the kidsreinforcing that critical connection between garden and kitchen and making it so real, approachable, and necessary. Their lives have been forever changed for the better by the mastery Lauri brings to the subject of food and by her love of life and the earth. When we see her at the farmers market or on the street, all the kids run to her. What a joy that she has now put her love and lessons into this gorgeous book with the help of her husband, Dean, so that everyone can have Lauri and her garden wisdom in their lives.

Suzanne Goin

Suzanne Goin is the chef and co-owner at Lucques, A.O.C., and Tavern in Los Angeles, and has earned multiple James Beard Foundation awards, including Outstanding Chef.

Farmers markets are a great way to connect with your community, and the farmers who grow our food are an invaluable source of information and inspiration for our own home gardens.

Sunflowers are said to be a bees favorite flower and bring these vital pollinators to the garden.

I am nearly breathless as I reach the ninety-second step up the steep hillside. I am following Suzanne and David and their three young children to a piece of land on their property in the Santa Monica Mountains that is flat and holds the sun. The children run ahead of us, laughing, excited to explore this territory relatively far from the house and the kitchen. They ask questions. Could there be a garden here? A place to grow food for family, friends, and possibly their restaurants? A place of secluded beauty?

Suzanne Goin and David Lentz are two of my favorite chefs. I have eaten delicious food for many years in their celebrated restaurants Lucques, A.O.C., Tavern, and the Hungry Cat. I take a good look around. Were high up in the canyon, with no yards around, and Suzanne says she really wants the garden in the ground, not in raised beds, so it can have the feel and dignity and beauty of a farm. I check to see what kinds of trees are growing nearby and whether they might cause trouble for the garden. Eucalyptus and pine trees, for example, shed leaves and needles that can make the soil chemistry unfriendly to vegetables.

I take a seat on the ground.

The soil here is parched. Its hard to tell what it could be, given some water, good compost, and other organic amendments such as alfalfa meal and phosphate rock. I dig up some soil with my spade and put it in a bag to take with me. I sit in this spot for a while longer, tracking the arc of the sun and the westerly breeze and feel what is gorgeous about this place. I notice that there are no bees. We need bees. Without bees, a lot of the vegetables we plant will simply not produce well, and some wont produce at all. I also see some gopher holes and know that the moment we plant food, we will have many more. But I like this piece of land, so close to the California sky.

I take the bag of soil to some trusted friends: to the family-owned nursery I frequent daily and to a couple of local organic farmers whose produce is legendary. We examine the soil together. We add some water; we hold it in our hands. We decide its good. I throw some random seeds in the ground as a test, a few kale and fava beans, water them, and come back in ten days: They have sprouted, which tells me this garden wants to grow. Then the work begins.

A garden begins and ends with a seed.

Runner beans add gorgeous color to the garden and a delicious snap to dinner.

Compost, alfalfa meal, and more are hauled up the ninety-two steps. Citrus trees from a cherished farmer arrive; we plant those to one side. We amend, a double dig, turning earth over and folding in rich compost. Turning it back in again. African basil is the soul of my gardens, and I plant some on both sides of the plot to attract bees; its aroma is an enchantment. I let the soil rest a few days and then its all hands in. Suzanne, David, and their kids join me in planting fava beans, lemon verbena, shiso, peas, broccoli, cauliflower, Swiss chard, purslane, and so much more. We find room for blackberries, boysenberries, golden raspberries. We water, we tend, and we grow. In time, tender pea tendrils make their way up the trellises, sunchokes reach for the sky, and arugula and other salad greens are ripe for picking. This garden surprises me with its sumptuous logic; it feels wild but there is order in this wildnessit has found its own rhythm. The outrageous colors and soul-gripping scents are as beautiful as that of any flower garden; there are wildflowers in the broccoli patch and poppies in the middle of pea shootsno perfect rows of perfect plants here. There is food and magic bursting out onto the garden footpaths. Its like an outburst of the canyon itself.