How One TV Writer Made Her Own Thriving Garden Oasis

When Los Angeles-based TV writer Emily Heller saw that her dog had zero interest in playing in the backyard of the Atwater Village house she bought with her husband in 2018, she decided to turn it into a garden at the encouragement of her brother, who is a prolific gardener. "I was also getting tired of buying kale and then throwing most of it away on a weekly basis so I was like, ‘Maybe if I grow some food, I can just pick the leaves when I want it and I won’t be wasting so much food,’" Heller says. As for how her humble-sized piece of land became abundant with so much produce, she says, "I think a lot of gardeners will tell you it starts with one grow bag and then it turns into another, and then you’re buying a raised bed and then all of a sudden you’re converting everything."

Heller grew up in San Francisco and lived in New York City before settling in southern California, so learning how to set up a garden for the former city-dweller first required education about the land she was living on. The first thing she did was optimize her property for agriculture. "I looked into the Southern California turf replacement rebate, which is where the water department basically pays you to get rid of your lawn. I signed up for that program and took the free class that they offer and it absolutely radicalized me about stormwater capture," she says. "I ended up getting rid of 1,100 square feet of grass and replaced it with more climate-appropriate landscaping. I got rain barrels. I got a rain chain. I started really doing all of it."

After years of growing out her former garden, which she affectionately describes as a hodgepodge of materials and "a bit Winchester Mystery House, where rooms were added as they went," she and her husband decided to build a guest house in the backyard — which meant that for a year, Heller’s gardening had to pause while the entire backyard was rearranged and redesigned. Once the guest house was complete, Heller then worked with professional landscapers to "redesign from the ground up what I actually wanted my garden to look like" which included custom raised beds equipped with irrigation and a pergola outdoor seating area. Heller says she now has "the garden of my dreams."

When thinking back to the city life she once lived, Heller says, "Let me be clear, I did not used to be interested in gardening at all." But soon, like the flourishing plant life in her backyard that took on grand lives of their own, Heller "really spiraled." "You have to be careful when you start gardening or you’ll start talking about stormwater capture at parties with anyone who will listen," she says, jokingly and earnestly. "I think a lot of people are like, ‘Oh, I don’t have a green thumb. I kill plants too much.’ I think the real measure of a gardener is not whether you kill plants but whether you try again after you do."

Assemble DIY raised beds

When Heller began her gardening journey, she bought DIY kits and assembled two corrugated metal raised beds. "I really did well with EarthBox and I will plug this company because I think for a lot of people who are starting a garden for the first time, it’s a really great, idiot-proof product," Heller says. This kit was instrumental for Heller in learning how to bottom-feed her raised planters. "There’s a little tube where you pour water until it comes out the overflow hole, and then you know you’ve fed your plants enough water. It’s really, really easy to grow in those," she says.

As for what to grow in the raised beds, Heller suggests only edible food because they "need to be watered very different amounts than the stuff in the ground," she says. (And food grown directly in the ground can possibly be contaminated by insecticides, as she learned after a bout with home-grown artichokes and food poisoning.)

Start small—and then expand

One way to get used to gardening is to start with nursery-grown seedlings or replanting something that’s already sustaining. "My brother gave me a kale plant that was alive and already giving me food the second I had it, and it was really hard to kill," says Heller of the cold-season brassica that can effortlessly grow throughout spring and fall. "Starting out with a successful plant made me feel like I could do this."

Once Heller’s confidence was strong, she moved on to the next logical step: growing plants from seed. "For some reason it was really important to me to know that I could do that [even though it’s] a lot easier to buy seedlings from the nursery," she says.

Growing from seeds is always unpredictable. "Even when I have one plant that’s doing really well, I always have another plant that isn’t. The last time I did peppers, I had 12 different plants that were all doing so great and this summer, only one of them survived," she says. "I still troubleshoot my new seed setup, so it’s definitely exciting when a plant that you’ve been taking care of starts giving you fruit. It’s taught me to be patient; you really are waiting so long to get to the point where you can eat something that comes off of it."

Don’t forget native plants, too. "I wanted to plant California native milkweed for the monarch butterflies, which had been declared endangered, so I started a bunch of those from seed," she says. Heller didn’t expect anything to happen while they were little seedlings, but "a bunch of butterflies showed up and laid eggs on them." Nature, as it often does, finds a way. This summer, Heller’s milkweed is now a big bush that’s planted in the ground.

Increase soil permeability

Climate change, poor air quality, and heat waves are factors Heller considered in setting up her garden."There were days when it was so hot that my cactus plants were melting like a Salvador Dali painting, which was terrifying," she says. Shade cloths are useful in protecting your plants, but the first and most crucial step is to get your land set up with climate-appropriate landscaping.

"The entire idea is to make the land as permeable as possible, which means that when it rains and floods, my little piece of land is able to absorb as much rain as possible so that it doesn’t run off and flood the streets," she says. "The water department wants you to plant climate-appropriate plants whose roots will grow deep enough and aerate the soil and bring enough healthy organic activity to the soil," says Heller.

 Heller says there are a few ways to make your own land more permeable, which is called "the watershed approach." First, get rid of as much concrete as possible and replace it with gravel or other permeable hardscape. Next, plant native plants that will send roots down deep and make the soil healthy (you may have to research what plant life is right for the climate you live in). Third, install rain chains and build rain swales around your property using vegetative or native rocks, which are essentially "little earth buckets or ditches that hold water to give it time to sink into the earth instead of running off," Heller says. Rain barrels can also hold a lot of water that can be used to replenish your garden.

Combine bagged and organic soils

"Because raised beds can be so big and so expensive to fill, I tend to go for the cheap bulk bags from Home Depot and supplement it with free compost that you can collect yourself from Griffith Park," says Heller. "It’s made with yard trimmings combined with processed dung from the [animals at] LA Zoo—it’s a really good soil amendment." Heller also does her own composting on the side of her house that she incorporates into her beds. "I put a bunch of the compost that I had made in the bottom of the beds and I guess there were some composted scraps of potato in there because now I have some volunteer potato plants growing, which I’m not mad at," she says.

Don’t fear rearranging your garden

When Heller was getting ready to prep her backyard for massive construction, she stopped planting new things, emptied out the seasonal edible food, and saved a bunch of landscaping plants by putting them in pots. "But a lot of my edible plants I just had to say goodbye to," she says. But, a whole year later, her garden has quickly bounced back, mostly in part because her land was already set up for success.

Heller says it’s easy to get carried away with gardening but leaving some room for improvement is important. "I left some blank spaces to start figuring out what I want to do in the future because you always want to have something new to do," she says. Don’t underestimate the size of raised beds, which Heller says "have plenty of room for me to grow everything that I want to grow; they're really ample." There’s no need to take over every square footage in your backyard—you can start with one raised bed and add as you go.

Know when to hire a pro

In LA, there are requirements around making sure there’s a correct amount of planting space and that there’s a shade tree, so calling in the pros was necessary after the guest house was built. Plus, after DIYing every backyard project during the pandemic—building a footpath, installing raised beds, and planting her own trees (and finding out she wasn’t very good at those projects)—Heller was ready to invest after doing things "the cheap way and paying to fix it later."

The most major upgrade was the irrigation system: "I wanted my raised beds to be irrigated because I used to spend a ton of time every morning filling up my watering can and walking around with it. It was a tedious part of gardening sometimes, and I'm not an early riser, and it gets really hot early here," she says. Having irrigated raised beds that automatically water has been helpful, "especially when I go out of town and to know that my plants won't die while I’m away."

Share your knowledge!

When Heller’s backyard was under construction, she started volunteering weekly at her community garden run by members of Ground Game, a grassroots political organizing group, that places excess food grown in the garden into community fridges around LA. Volunteering at a community garden is also a free way to learn some of the ins and outs of gardening with raised beds, and to experience what gardening is actually like, before you start impulsively shopping for materials you may not necessarily need "Being able to direct this hobby that I feel like in many ways is pretty self-indulgent [and contributing to] direct action around feeding people here outside of legacy institutions has been really inspiring," she says. "Look into your local community gardens and see if they would like your help."

All images courtesy of Emily Heller

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