Artist turns weed-filled yard into a low-water jungle of fruit trees
Artist-teacher-gardener Jose Ramirez never considered a lawn for his Boyle Heights home. Instead, he created a smorgasbord landscape of fruit.
This is no ordinary orchard, with trees carefully spaced in neat rows. In a densely built residential neighborhood, he’s crowded more than 250 fruit trees along winding paths; multiple varieties of pluots, apricots, nectarines, apples, citrus and avocados are planted so close that their branches intertwine. Just a few steps out his back door, Ramirez and his family can pick fruit from 10 trees around a small deck – Bearss lime, papaya, cherimoya, mango, apple, guava, Meyer lemon, mandarin, nectarine and … cinnamon?
“You use the bark, and I haven’t taken much from that one yet,” Ramirez said, a little apologetically. “It’s still young and kind of an experiment.”
Which pretty much sums up his entire orchard, a lush experiment with organically grown fruit trees stretching out behind the home he purchased in 2002 and into a narrow adjoining vacant lot he bought in 2012.
Ramirez loves to experiment with unusual varieties, too. He has coffee beans growing on one tree – he snacks on them occasionally for a seedy but sweet pick-me-up. Nearby, long prickly arms of his dragon fruit are draped over the branches of other trees, preparing to flower. He has mature mango trees he grew from seed and at least eight different pomegranate trees, all heavy with fruit, despite the limited water they’ve gotten this year.
When he started, Ramirez had almost no experience with growing trees. Most of his learning was from watching YouTube videos (John Kohler’s Growing Your Greens is a particular favorite) and reading books about permaculture and composting. But being inexperienced was also a little freeing. He learned a lot by trial and error and didn’t let mistakes defeat him.
“Being an artist has helped me be a better teacher and gardener because being an artist means being creative and thinking outside the box,” he said. “I had a huge backyard with a lot of potential, and I started to go online looking at what nurseries had available. I’d see these exotic tropical trees, and I’d think, ‘I’ve got to try this.’ You know some things are going to work and some aren’t going to work, but you’ve got to take chances and try new things.”
And there were plenty of failures, especially in the beginning. He remembered a family friend’s avocado tree when he was growing up – “It was always impressive to see” – and longed to grow his own, but the first avocados he planted all died. It took a few years before any survived, but he persisted, and now he’s got 10 varieties thriving in his yard.
“I’ve learned that avocados are very sensitive at the beginning, when you put them in the ground,” he said. “They don’t want to be overwatered or underwatered, so I had to pamper them in the beginning, with worm castings, compost tea and deep watering, and they finally caught on.”
Most of the trees in his urban orchard are 10 to 15 years old, so they need only infrequent deep watering and thick mulch to help keep the moisture in the soil. He has a drip irrigation system but uses it only on the upper orthe chard where he’s planted young trees and tomatoes.
For his older trees, he uses gray water from his kitchen sink, and a rickety system of PVC pipes propped up on bricks to collect rainwater off his roof. Those pipes are dusty these days because of the drought, but when it rains, instead of running down his nearly vertical driveway into the street, all that free water gushes down the gutters around his roof and into the orchard soil, made spongey and friable by years of compost and mulch.
He doesn’t have to do that much in the orchard these days, but in the beginning, the work was intense. When he bought his fixer-upper house, he was recently divorced with shared custody of two young daughters and his focus was on updating the inside. But around the end of 2003, spurred by a commission to create a tile mural at Adventist Health White Memorial medical center in Boyle Heights, Ramirez began digging out the dirt beneath his hillside house to create a large studio where he could make his art. Load by load, he moved a small mountain of soil by wheelbarrow into his steep backyard, trying to create flatter places for planting.
When he was ready to start planting, the backyard was mostly dirt and weeds, he said. He removed most of the shrubs and nonfruiting trees – including a towering line of old ficus trees that worked as a hedge between his yard and the vacant lot next door. He kept their thick gray trunks, which act as a kind of sculptural retaining wall today, as well as a pomegranate, zapote, fig and olive trees.
Later, he used lasagna mulching to smother persistent ivy with layers of wet cardboard and a mulch of wood chips, sawdust and coffee grounds from a local cafe, as well as rock dust to re-mineralize the soil. And every day after work at Esperanza Elementary School in Pico Union, he’d stop at a hardware store and buy 10 more concrete bricks to build one of his many retaining walls.
“The landscaping part was kind of crazy,” he said. “I was bringing in materials every day and working until the sun went down.”
That he was gardening in an almost vertical space didn’t make the job easier. Buying a load of mulch was impossible, he said, because the trucks couldn’t get to his backyard, and there wasn’t room for a load to sit on his driveway or street, so he instead made frequent visits to a now-closed drop site where arborists could leave their wood chips for community use and bagged up as many chips as his small pickup could carry.
He did all this on top of teaching and making art, but Ramirez had lots of inspiration from his late father, who built and tended a terraced orchard and garden in his hilly backyard in El Sereno.
Jose Ramirez Sr. emigrated from Mexico to Los Angeles when he was about 10 and later served in the U.S. Navy. He started working as a carpet layer, Ramirez said, but ultimately supervised asbestos removal projects for the Los Angeles Unified School District.
When his day job was through, Ramirez’s father built stairs and terraces of planting boxes in his yard and planted vegetables, nopal cactus (which Ramirez’s mother, Maria, canned), grapes and fruit trees spaced far apart.
“He grew passion fruit and pineapple guava and cherimoya, and he was always looking for seeds people brought in from Mexico, especially chiles,” Ramirez said of his father. “His philosophy was, ‘If you’re going to plant something, plant something that will give you some food.’ ”
It took several years for Ramirez to appreciate his father’s passion for plants. As a child, he was fascinated by the garden, “but when I got older, I didn’t want to weed anymore,” he said laughing. “We had a big hill that had to be weeded, and hay fever was my excuse.”
Ramirez did pick up some gardening basics from his dad, but when it was time to start planting his yard, he went his own way, focusing mostly on fruit trees and planting them as close together as he could manage using organic permaculture techniques.
He remarried, and his wife, Sara Aguilar, a documentary filmmaker and dancer, remembers doing a lot of watering in the early days and worrying that the trees were going to die. She never needed a lawn, she said. In fact, her parents were members of the Theodore Payne Foundation and early advocates of Southern California landscapes that relied on native plants and food instead of turf.
“I thought he was crazy for planting so many trees so close together,” she said. “I was like, ‘There’s no way this is going to work.’ But slowly, I began to see his vision. I thought, ‘OK, I can see what’s happening,’ and it’s been really fun seeing the trees grow.”
The orchard was a godsend during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said. It became a refuge for friends and family desperate to find a safe place to gather. They would perch on the deck or around the trees, sharing meals and conversation along with the fruit.
Ramirez used to take boxes of fruit to school to share with his students and their families, but that stopped during the pandemic, when so many students learned from home. He and his family are vegetarians, so they eat a lot of what they grow. He passes out excess fruit to neighbors and family and donates boxes to community food banks.
BEING AN ARTIST HAS HELPED ME BE A BETTER TEACHER AND GARDENER BECAUSE BEING AN ARTIST MEANS BEING CREATIVE AND THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX. Jose Ramirez