In just over a year, Lyons has changed the way the family eats.
"I cook more happily," says Seros, a screenwriter who admits she'd never pulled a vegetable from the soil before meeting Lyons. And the couple's 16-year-old son, Bruno Seros-Ulloa, has found that he does, in fact, like carrots and peppers, and that he enjoys cooking with homegrown produce. "When it's right outside, you just go out. I cook pasta with 'San Marzanos' [from the garden] and basil and some parsley. I toss things together," says Bruno.
Lyons reaches a bare hand into a tub of his homemade compost and scatters it by the handful -- worms and all -- around and over the herbs and vegetables. "John's compost made my tangerine grow," Seros says of a tree that had never before produced much fruit. "We grew the artichoke that ate Cleveland. We grew 12 of them."
Lyons, who grew up on a farm, has been tending his own garden for a decade on half an acre in Chatsworth where he has Irish draft horses and Marans chickens from France. "You can do so many things in an urban environment if you don't mind people looking at you funny," he says. After he tore out his front lawn to plant an edible garden, however, one of his neighbors didn't just look at him funny -- he reported him to the city Department of Health. "He was sure I was doing something illegal."
He was perfecting his compost, a rich concoction of kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, garden waste, paper, worm castings and horse manure. And a little seaweed. "It has lots of micronutrients," explains Lyons, who has taught classes on the California kitchen garden at Descanso Gardens and who will be teaching a class there Saturday on composting.
Lyons recommends changing out plants "en masse" twice a year; he plants summer vegetables in April or May ("I'll add more tomatoes in July so they'll go right through into winter," he notes) and winter vegetables in October or November. Every six weeks, he puts in interval crops, like pole beans, haricots verts, green onions, beets and carrots.
"When you alternate full growing seasons," he says, "you can rotate crops very easily. You put in your tomatoes in the summer, then you put in something else in the winter, and then you can do tomatoes in the same spot the following summer."
Appreciating all that his adopted home state has to offer, Lyons encourages clients to grow California natives, such as Salvia clevelandii, near their vegetable gardens. "They're drought tolerant, aesthetically pleasing and often highly scented," he says. Best of all, "they attract birds and insects like hummingbirds and bees."
Plus, it's a distinctive touch you won't find in France.
--
home@latimes.com
