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Three years ago Bryant Street resident Anneke Dempsey and her doctors were mystified by an illness she had. In the midst of her pain, she began to garden.
Now mostly cured, Dempsey wouldn’t give up gardening for the world.
“There’s something addicting about (gardening),” she said. “Your mind goes away from the pain.”
Without taking a single gardening class, Dempsey scoured the Internet until she understood what was needed to grow food in containers.
Nearly every outdoor inch of her Bryant Street home’s 5,000-square-foot lot has a plant on it, front and backyards. The diminutive “hobbit home” she shares with her husband, Ray, could be the topic of another article, cheerfully decorated with bold colors.
Dempsey was born in the Dutch East Indies on the island of Timor and grew up in the Netherlands, but never gardened there. Until she retired, she worked as a director at Cray Computers. Now, she estimates that she spends about five hours a day in her garden, caring for and hand watering hundreds of containers in which her plants live.
“I like container gardening. It’s flexible,” she said, as she can change out plants or move them to follow the sun. Her bright-green deck stairway is lined with lush tomato plants. “You can do so much in a small spot. That’s why I like container gardens.”
She also loves the mystery of growing everything from seeds or propagating from cuttings. “I have no idea what I’m gonna get. It’s a total mystery,” she said.
Her husband outfitted special light tables in the garage (which they share with a 1953 MG), plus a greenhouse. She is able to take plants through three stages: seeds in the light table, seedlings in a greenhouse and then outside.
Her edible plants include fruit trees like lime and kumquat and espaliered pear and apple. In her front yard are strawberry plants with fat red berries on them, as well as a lemon tree interspersed with flowers.
One of her main gardening secrets: Diestel turkey manure she gets at Lyngso Garden Materials in San Carlos. “Diestel turkeys eat a vegetarian diet. I use it on everything,” she said.
While some gardeners battle birds and rodents, Dempsey doesn’t. Her husband hung clear plastic drink cups upside down on the tomato plants’ stakes initially to protect Dempsey’s eyes from the sharp points, but it turns out the soft tinkling of the cups on the stakes keeps all pests away. “I have no problem with critters,” she said.
She expects thousands of cherry and other kinds of tomatoes this year. In the past, she has given them to friends and neighbors, but this year she is giving them plants and giving many of the tomatoes to her church’s food kitchen.
Unlike Dempsey, Midtown resident Richard Swent had grown vegetables for years, but five years ago, he and his wife tore out their backyard lawn and put in raised vegetable beds.
The 10-foot-by-20-foot garden has carrots, lettuce, bok choy, Napa cabbage, onions, arugula, kale, snow peas and string beans. He covered the walkway between the beds with bamboo, which “allows me to reach everything without stepping into the growing space.”
“I don’t actually remember why I started growing vegetables, but it was probably my wife’s suggestions,” he said. He started with lettuce and spinach. When they moved to their present house, he stuck with leafy greens but tried a few other things.
In 2013, with their children grown up and moved out, they removed the lawn and put in a large garden. “At first I just planted more lettuce and spinach but quickly discovered that there was no way we could eat enough salad to keep up with a dozen lettuce plants and equal number of spinach,” he said.
He reduced the amount of leafy greens and planted other things like serrano peppers after trying other peppers to see what would grow best.
Sometimes experiments worked and sometimes they didn’t. “My wife likes eggplant, and I tried that but got almost nothing edible,” he said.
He dislikes fish, but when his wife found a recipe for salmon on a fennel/snap pea slaw, he said he likes the slaw so much, “I will happily eat through the salmon to get to it.”
Like Swent, Palo Alto resident Carol Pladsen-Bloom has gardened for two decades, allowing her yard to “evolve,” mostly based on the weather and her season of life.
During the drought when she was working, she pretty much ignored her garden, turning off the sprinklers for a while.
She recently but “re-engaged” when the winter was rainy. She planted hardy succulents and cacti alongside zucchini and spaghetti squash in an ornamental design in her front yard. Pole beans climb up twine by her front door. In her backyard, eggplant, tomatoes, basil and potatoes thrive.
“I’ve gone from employed and we had rain to I’m retired and we’ve had droughts,” she said about the evolution of her garden.
Elizabeth Lorenz is the Home and Real Estate Editor for the Palo Alto Weekly. She can be emailed at elorenz@embarcaderopublishing.com.
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