Old Bill Beaver on a Farm, Happy New Year's Day!

More 2025 Adventures

Around L.A.!
4.0 mi (6.4 km)

2026 Adventures

Wattle’s new, everyone!

After spending so much time focusing on places away from home, I realized I should pay at least a little more attention to my home town of Los Angeles! After all, if I’m going to live up to my #HelptheHelpers motto, I’d better find some helpers to help. that’s when I learned about the Wattles Farm Community Garden, a historic estate turned farm near Runyon Canyon, which was celebrating its 50th anniversary on August 23 and needed volunteers! What a great way to get involved: outdoors, in nature, helping build a green space! I signed up to help coordinate the potluck!

Wattles Farm was one of LA’s pioneering community gardens in 1975, part of an initiative by then-Mayor Tom Bradley to add green space to the City of Angels! It divided up 4.2 of the 49 acres making up the former estate of Gurdon Wattles into 172 garden plots while preserving a grove of Mr. Wattles’ historic avocado trees! And gosh, I was amazed by how creative folks were with their plots! Fences, trellises, even a boat! Plus, there were fruit trees of all kinds for the community to share, even exotic ones like guavas, persimmons, and cherimoyas!

I was so impressed that I asked the folks at registration if I could have a plot myself, and it turns out, I could! But it’s not just something given out; I would have to earn my place on the list by participating in three monthly garden cleanups! From there, it would be a waiting game for when the next plots cleared out. So I took home a native milkweed plant that they’d been giving out to support the monarch butterflies, and I headed home to mark up my calendar.

Cleanup days were pretty intense, especially over the summer! The paths needed to be mulched, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow, plus dead trees that needed to be chopped down (my specialty), and lots and lots of pulling weeds, but not just any weeds, stinging nettles! Along the way, I learned that boiled stinging nettle is actually really good eating, and that there’s always some kind of tasty, fresh fruit waiting in wheelbarrows at the end of each day. So you can imagine how excited I was when I got word that I had reached the front of the line and had a plot of my own!

Here it is, Plot Number 170! It had been loved a long time, but the previous residents couldn’t keep taking care of it after they had a baby. So I was in charge of carrying on their legacy and building a great garden!

Boy did I ever luck out too! The previous gardeners had built three planters and lined the bottoms with wire to keep out the gophers! This must have been one expensive and time-consuming project! With so much space, and so much potential, my brain was just abuzz with possibilities. I imagined one planter being for berries, one for veggies, and one for flowers. First, though, I had some work to do!

While the planters were sturdy, two of them had been completely emptied of dirt! So it took more weeks of back-and-forth schlepping to the hardware store to get enough dirt to fill them back up again. The garden’s compost pile was very helpful in getting the first cubic foot filled up, and the rest was just hauling and dumping, hauling and dumping!

One unique feature in my plot was the bird cage! I’m not sure exactly why it was left here, but I realized immediately why it would be useful! In this wild area of birds and squirrels and gophers, this would be the perfect spot to sprout seedlings! I got to work making a checklist, which included some of the berry seeds I’d collected on my adventures this year and stratified in my fridge the last few months. I was so excited!

I waited to do most of my planting when the first forecasted rain storm was coming up, which in Los Angeles is not very often! With my year’s adventures all up, I checked in with Shellie at Boopies Closet, who told me the flowered hat she’d made for me this year could do amazing things in California rains. I’m not sure how she knew that, but since it was coming up on that time of year, I did as she instructed and buried my hat with my wildflowers.

Wowza! I guess she was right! Once the rains came and went, my garden began to sprout, even the spot where I had planted my hat! Wouldn’t you know it? My shabby flower hat had germinated into something sparkly and amazing, just in time for the New Year! I’ve never had a real top hat before, and this one was studded with gems!

Lots of little miracles were happening around my garden thanks to the rains! My potatoes and beans were sprouting! My thimbleberries and huckleberries were poking their heads out of the soil! I can’t wait until they grow big enough to harvest, and by then I’ll have a real feast on my hands! This will definitely keep me busy between adventures!

Well, what do you think? I’d say I look rather dashing, don’t you? Maybe this hat will get me invited to more fancy events like the mixer with the Native Daughters of the Golden West a few weeks back. I wonder if that would mean I’d have to find a tie to go with the hat too. So much to do in planning a whole new year!

With my hat secured and snug, I’m ready to rock 2026! Stay tuned for more gardening tales as I battle for supremacy among my fellow rodents and prepare for my first adventure in the new year. It’ll also be my last year national park questing… Well, if your life is going to be a novel, you may as well start brainstorming new chapters before the deadline!

Pip pip, cheerio!