Buy at the Market to Grow at Home

Each Sunday visitors to the buy fruit, vegetables and herbs, but with the presence of two nurseries on site, you can also buy the plants to grow these delicious edibles yourself thanks Atkins Nursery and Roberto Ramos who are at the market every week. 

Located in North San Diego County, Atkins Nursery has a terrific assortment of culinary herbs, seasonal vegetable plants and fruit trees for your home garden. On any given day you’ll find mint, oregano, basil and chives in 4” pots that will easily fit into your shopping bag. 

Looking for something more exotic?  Grow epazote, a Mexican spice, the leaves of which are used for cooking beans or making tea. Atkins also has chaya, another Mexican plant whose leaves are mainly used to make a drink known for its medicinal properties for treating diabetes and high blood pressure. 

Of course you can find more traditional plants like cilantro, rosemary, thyme, and sage. You can also pick out a few different types of chili peppers. Atkins also carries a number of Thai peppers that can spice up your meals.    

At the center of the Farmers’ Market is Roberto Ramos and his nursery, Plants and Fruit Trees by Ramos. Ramos hails from Whittier, where he and his family grow seedlings on one acre.  

Ramos has been at the market for 3 ½ years and offers weekly selections of edibles and non-edibles, including lavender, variegated sage and tomatoes. I also found several amazingly tall “tree peppers.”  These plants are 4 or 5 feet tall and have tiny, yet potently spicy Pequin peppers dangling from their branches. Pequins rank hotter than jalapeños on the Scoville chart – between 100,000-140,000 units. Ramos also sells Black Africa tree peppers with tiny black peppers.  Either of these would be an amazing long-lasting addition to any front porch or back yard. After all, these are no ordinary pepper plants - they live for eight to 10 years.

Ramos’ nursery also carries avocado trees, roses, cannas, agapanthus, shrimp plant and ferns. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, just ask. Ramos will bring it the following week.

It's not too late to plant

Fall is a great time to plant herbs, but there’s still time to enjoy warm weather crops like tomatoes and peppers until October. You can grow them in containers or directly in the ground. Just make sure to give them plenty of sunlight – at least six hours per day.

Enjoy the fruits of your labor

Picture a meal made from your herb garden.  Brown butter and sage sauce over pasta, or a spicy Thai stir fry with bok choy are great ways to incorporate home grown herbs into dishes.  Once again, the Mar Vista Farmers’ Market has everything you need to make a meal with really fresh ingredients.

Christy Wilhelmi is well known to many local Mar Vistans as The Gardenerd. Her website and blog at  www.gardenerd.com offers  information on classes, consulting and food-garden design.