The Cupertino Courier

Cover Story

Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer

Master gardener Magie Klugherz digs out a test plant of O Henry sweet potatoes. This season, the master gardeners are growing 21 sweet potato varieties to determine which grows best in this area.

Grow Your Own

Cupertino's community garden gives those with green thumbs a place to work the soil

By JOANNE GRIFFITH-DOMINGUE

Charlie Liggett loves tomatoes, and that's a good thing. He estimates he still has 500 pounds to harvest from the 6-foot-high tomato plants growing in his plot at the Cupertino Community Gardens at McClellan Ranch Park.

"I planted mine before anyone else, back in March," said Liggett, 69, a longtime Cupertino resident who has had his garden plot for 15 years.

From the plot next to Liggett's, a head popped up and joined the conversation. "Charlie was the earliest to plant," said Cupertino resident Ann Cleaver, also 69, who has had her plot for seven years, "and we were the latest to plant."

But that doesn't seem to have hurt Cleaver's tomato crop. She chatted while she harvested tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchini. "I'm picking organic vegetables for a friend with breast cancer. She's recovering from a double mastectomy," she said.

Liggett and Cleaver are two of the 70 Cupertino residents who have a plot at the city's community gardens in the 23.5-acre McClellan Ranch Park. In 1972, with funding help from the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the city purchased the McClellan Ranch from W. T. McClellan and George McCauley, who had raised dairy cattle.

At the time the city bought the ranch, it was a working horse farm. In 1974 the community gardens were moved from Memorial Park in Cupertino to their current location, a 2-acre area behind the original barns at McClellan Ranch. In 1976, the city adopted an ordinance protecting the property as a nature and rural preserve.

From the beginning, the gardens have been a popular, successful part of activities at the park. Gardeners may raise vegetables, fruits and flowers. All gardening must be organic. Gardeners pay an annual fee for water, which, depending on the size of their garden plot, may cost from $25 to $70.

Cupertino community garden plots are much larger than those in most other cities. Ralph Riddle loves his 30- by-30-foot plot, which he has had since 1989.

"We are fortunate to have the size of plots we have," he said. In the new Sunnyvale community gardens on Charles Street, the plots are all 4 by 16 feet, 64 square feet. In Cupertino, "there's an agreement to split some plots as they turn over," Riddle said. Many have been split, but they don't turn over often. Right now there is a waiting list, said Barbara Banfield, a full-time naturalist with the city who manages the gardens. Some plots are full of weeds and don't seem to be gardened at the moment.

Banfield explained she's not moving new people into the vacant plots right now because a segment of the Stevens Creek trail, from McClellan Road to Stevens Creek, is going to be built around one edge of the gardens. They will lose nine garden plots as a result. Banfield's goal is to be able to move the nine displaced gardeners to the vacant plots.

Except there are not nine vacant plots.

"For now I'm trying to figure out how to accommodate those nine. Add new plots? Look elsewhere in the city? There's a lot of land out there," she said, pointing to the fields outside the fenced garden area, "but this is a nature preserve--one person's fallow field is another person's bird habitat," Banfield said. "How to meet everybody's objective: that's a challenge. It would be great if people didn't have to drive so far."

Anne Ng seconds that motion. Ng, a longtime Cupertino resident, would like to see community gardens in more than one part of town. She speaks up at city council meetings. She has a garden at home so does not have a community garden plot. "But if I was without a yard in 'condo-tino,' I would very much want a community garden, and people driving to a community garden just doesn't seem right," she said.

Ng's primary transportation is her bicycle. She lives on the east side of Cupertino. But she recognizes the dilemma. Her neighborhood park, Creekside Park, is huge, but almost all of it is three much-used and sorely needed soccer fields," she said.

Meanwhile, until the trail construction is complete at McClellan Ranch Park and the nine gardeners who will be displaced are relocated, there's a freeze on placing anyone from the waiting list into a vacant garden space.

21 varieties of sweet potatoes

Who knew there were 21 varieties of sweet potatoes? "I didn't know," said master gardener Magie Klugherz. But she learned. Klugherz is the co-leader of the 23-member team of master gardeners who are growing sweet potatoes in the master gardener double plot at McClellan Ranch Park. The gardeners planted 21 varieties: six on May 13 and 15 on June 24.

On Nov. 11 the master gardeners will host a tasting for the public. "We will cook, dice and serve in little cups," Klugherz said. "We'll use lots of cups."

It's not just about crop-tasting, Banfield said. "The gardeners treat the soil differently to see if it affects the vigor of the plants."

In late August the master gardeners did a test dig of a row of sweet potatoes, ones that were planted first. But the gardeners were disappointed. The sweet potatoes are growing more slowly than expected. So the date of the tasting was moved from October to November.

Since 1989 master gardeners have been trying out varieties of vegetables. In 2005 it was root vegetables, such as beets, carrots and turnips. In 2004 it was the year of the eggplant, and in 2003 they grew summer squash.

Each fall at harvest time there's a tasting event.

Riddle was one of the first master gardeners to begin this program. He, along with fellow master gardener Ralph Eddy, grew 20 varieties of green beans in 1989. The green bean winner became Riddle's favorite, and he grows a large crop every year.

The master gardener program is sponsored by the UC Cooperative Extension Program. The cooperative part, Klugherz said, is between the university and the county. To become a master gardener, one must take a series of classes. Upon completion, the gardener agrees to volunteer a certain number of hours for public education about gardening.

There are 23 master gardeners who work on the double plot in the Cupertino gardens. Not everyone shows up every time to work the garden, "but there is always an adequate or better turnout, Klugherz said. Many are Cupertino residents.

Klugherz, 75, had never heard of the master gardener program until after she retired from her job as a systems engineer in 2001. The next class was not until 2003. She was in it. And today she is co-leader for the sweet potato project.

Fence me in

A perimeter fence encloses the gardens to keep the wildlife out. "Deer are a big thing," Banfield said. A bobcat has been spotted down by the creek. All the smaller animals can crawl through the fence--gophers, raccoons, rats and squirrels.

Liggett is not only harvesting his tomatoes. He has caught 17 gophers so far this year. "Last year was a bad rat year," Banfield said. Some keep a wire mesh trap, baited with a juicy, red tomato, to catch rats. Liggett buries his gopher traps just under ground.

Klugherz said the master gardeners caught 16 gophers last year. So far this year they have caught two. "It's hard to get the traps in the ground this year with the sweet potatoes in the ground," she said.

Fencing is an issue with some of the gardeners. One year some gardens were vandalized. "It is frustrating if a gardener has waited a long time for something to be ripe," Banfield said. So a few years ago, gardeners voted on whether to fence in the whole garden and lock them ain gate.

The gardeners voted "no," Banfield said. They wanted children and families to be able to visit the gardens.

"I enjoy the kids coming by," Riddle said. "I had a kid pull a carrot out of the ground and got to see his eyes bug out: 'Oh, that's where a carrot comes from.'"

Banfield brings school groups through for harvest activities. And groups of two or three moms come with their children.

The main gate to the garden is not locked, but most of the plots inside the garden are fenced, and some are padlocked. Gardeners use the fencing that encloses their plot for supporting their crops, such as green beans or tomatoes. So the narrow paths between plots wind through walls of greenery. Around a bend might be a plot full of flowers. One gardener grows only dahlias in almost every color of the rainbow.

Birds of a feather

Some gardeners also are bird watchers. They plant flowers that attract birds. Hooded orioles nest adjacent to the gardens in the spring and summer, said Bob Power, executive director of the Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society.

The Audubon Society's office is just inside the entrance to McClellan Ranch Park in one of the original farm buildings. Having vegetable and flower gardens in the midst of a nature preserve creates a lovely symbiosis, with habitat and food for the birds.

Outside his office Power has spotted a long list of birds so far this year, from osprey and a belted kingfisher to hairy woodpeckers and yellow warblers. In what he calls the magic redwood tree, he has spotted three varieties of hawks, osprey and on Sept. 22 a merlin, which is an uncommon, small, dark falcon.

And for those with plots along the outside edge of the fenced gardens, deer come up and peek in. "I toss them a vegetable," Riddle said. "They're unafraid."

That worries Riddle when he thinks of the impact of the new trail. With the deer so tame, he's afraid of what the trail might do by bringing more people and bicycles into the park.

Meanwhile Liggett continues harvesting. Along with the quarter-ton of tomatoes he expects to pick, he's harvested 50 quarts of blackberries, 30 quarts of raspberries, and of course, the 17, and still counting, gophers.

Cleaver treasures the quail family that nested under her blackberries. One day she found a mother quail and eight babies. "They're safe in here, where the cats can't get them."

But the best part of having a garden plot for Cleaver is introducing gardening and organic vegetables to her grandson, Paul, 11. "He's eating organic and eating vegetables," she said. "We'd come and pick green beans, and he eats them right off the vine."

Even though the gardens are for the benefit of the gardeners with plots, Banfield said, the benefit extends way beyond the gardeners. Whole families garden. Students from kindergarten to college come for creek tours. Preschoolers come to look at corn and pumpkins. The public enjoys the crop- tasting in the fall.

Banfield said, "Even the birders enjoy the gardens."

For more information, visit the master gardener website, www.mastergardeners.org or call its hotline between 9:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. Monday through Friday: 408.282.3105.

Come and taste

The master gardeners will host a sweet potato tasting from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Nov. 11 at the McClellan Ranch Park. Weather permitting, they will be outside in front of the Junior Museum where it has been held each year for at least 10 years. If it rains, the tasting will be inside n the conference room. The McClellan Ranch Park is at 22221 McClellan Road, Cupertino.