Edible Rainbow Garden. Rosalind Creasy

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      The Hidden Villa Rainbow Garden

      Hidden Villa is a magical place, an oasis of untamed nature in the midst of suburbia. It is the dream of Josephine and Frank Duveneck who envisioned preserving hundreds of wild acres for future generations to enjoy. Thousands of city children visit during the school year. In the summer, Hidden Villa becomes a children’s camp filled with the smell of bay leaves underfoot, and the culinary delights from a very large vegetable garden.

      A number of years ago—completely immersed in colorful veggies and knowing children loved them too—I was looking for a place to plant my fantasy of a huge rainbow vegetable garden. As I live not far from Hidden Villa, it seemed a perfect place for my culinary rainbow.

      Once the Hidden Villa trustees gave approval, I turned to the local junior college horticulture department for help with this ambitious project. The professor recommended Gudi Riter, which led to a fortuitous pairing as Gudi is a talented cook as well as gardener. You will enjoy trying many of the recipes she helped me develop.

      Because Gudi and I were planting so many unusual colors of vegetables, and to some extent flowers, we planned our garden early in the year (January) to have a good selection of colorful varieties. We needed plenty of time to order seeds and get the peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes sown in late February. In late March, we started more flats of flowers and vegetables including chard, scallions, parsley, and basil, and the flowering zinnias, statice, salvia, verbena, safflower, species marigolds, kochia, and ‘Bells of Ireland.’ Before we planted in late April, the folks at Hidden Villa plowed the area, which was about twenty feet deep and a hundred feet long, and divided the plot into five twenty-foot-square sections approximately five rows deep. They also mixed in lots of manure.

      Gudi finished the soil preparation by laying out and digging the beds and paths. With the help of her son and daughter, soon we were able to plant much of the garden. We placed our transplants then seeded the beans, corn, amaranth, beets, carrots, potatoes, and sunflowers in place. The area was so very large; we’d underestimated the number of plants to fill the rows. So we purchased dwarf marigolds, lobelia, and verbena transplants from a nursery.

      The garden got off to a great start with the exception of most of the blue potatoes that rotted. A few gophers gave us problems until they were trapped. By late June the garden was filling in very well.

      By then, the area’s grasses and brush had dried up. In California, we get no rain from May through September. Consequently, the deer moved out of the woods and down the hillside into our rainbow garden. In a flurry of creativity we decided to outline the different beds with a kaleidoscope of yarns. Besides initially foiling the deer, the bright strands gave more of a rainbow feeling to the garden. When the camp children arrived, the garden had yet to bloom but the colorful yarn outlines gave a hint of the fun to follow. Although the yarn seemed to confuse the deer for a few weeks, soon they were back.

      We then tried a scarecrow—a lady built from stockings and straw and dressed in one of my dresses straight from the 1970s, my quasi-hippie stage. This only kept the deer at bay for a few more weeks.

      We finally resorted to black plastic bird netting placed here and there and resigned ourselves to some damage.

      Despite the hungry intruders, by the end of July we started harvesting lots of vegetables and flowers. The camp cooks used some; we fed our families; and we even started bringing neighbors and friends to help. Let me tell you, two thousand square feet of vegetables is a lot of vegetables. We all seemed most to enjoy assembling large harvests of vegetables and flowers and arranging them by colors to really experience the rainbow effect.

      The Hidden Villa rainbow garden came to a close in October and we deemed it a great success. It introduced hundreds of visiting schoolchildren to unusual colors and varieties of vegetables. The garden looked really “cool” and attracted the local TV station to come do a story. Most of all, we shared an exciting summer full of surprises in our special place. I’m sure the Duvenecks are smiling.

      Clockwise from top left: Gudi Riter, her son Andy, and daughter Tina plan out the marigolds for the orange row in the Hidden Villa rainbow garden; Sandra Chang sorts her rainbow treasures in the Hidden Villa garden; Gudi sorts the vegetables from the Hidden Villa garden by color.

      Plant List . . . . . . . . . The Hidden Villa Rainbow Garden

      Red Row

      4- to 6-foot plants for back row

      ‘Burgundy’ amaranth, grain type

      ‘Illumination’ amaranth, leaf type

      ‘Bloody Butcher’ corn

      ‘Red’ okra

      ‘Red Currant’ tomato

      2- to 3-foot plants

      ‘Big Red’ zinnia

      Hibiscus sabdariffa— annual hibiscus

      ‘Early Red’ bell pepper

      ‘Serrano’ chile pepper

      ‘Anaheim’ chile pepper

      ‘Ruby’ chard

      1- to 2-foot plants

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