Learn to plant a ‘hellstrip’ veggie plot

Urban vegetable gardening is not always pretty. If picture-perfect curb appeal is crucial to you, a “hellstrip” veggie plot probably isn’t in your future.

But if you don’t mind some raised eyebrows from the neighbors while you experiment, master gardener Laura Heldreth wants to help you get started with your own small, street-side vegetable farm. Heldreth gives a free talk about her experiments and successes with “Growing Vegetables In Your Hellstrip” at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Washougal Community Library.

Heldreth has been an avid urban vegetable gardener for much of her life. Her earliest memory is holding her grandfather’s hand while exploring his garden in Southeast Portland; he harvested a Walla Walla sweet onion, peeled it with a knife and handed it to his granddaughter, who “ate it like an apple,” she said.

Fourteen years ago, Heldreth and her husband moved to a shady, woodsy parcel in northeast Vancouver’s Burnt Bridge Creek neighborhood; the only spot on their property that enjoys full sun is that little strip between the sidewalk and the street — known to many as the “parking strip” or the “planting strip.”

Heldreth, who has a slightly wicked sense of humor, prefers the damnation of “hellstrip” — even though she’s checked on tailpipe-pollution levels with fellow master gardener and soil scientist Martha Minnich, who reassured her that your typical residential-street planting strip is safe for growing food. But it might be less safe if you live right alongside a freeway, she added.

Heldreth laughed that the three raised beds she installed in her hellstrip started out looking like “Dracula” props — “three long coffins filled with soil,” she said — and neighbors were not amused. More like “mortified,” Heldreth said. But they warmed up to the situation once Heldreth started distributing free cucumbers, zucchini, potatoes, arugula, green beans, artichokes and two dozen varieties of tomatoes — to name just a few of her many crops.

“I talk to anybody and give veggies to anybody who comes by,” she said — and many do, since Heldreth lives down the block from the neighborhood elementary school. “There are lots of little hands going through the garden, picking up what I call ‘hand salad’ as they walk by,” she said.

The standout in Heldreth’s hellstrip is the cardoon, an artichoke relative that grows nine feet tall and “steals the show” when it flowers, she said. She even grows cold-hardy (bitter) oranges that can be used in marmalade, she said.

Heldreth is a strictly organic, “no-spray” gardener, and said she’s been surprised at how successful and easy that’s been. Rather than apply Miracle-Gro and commercial pesticides, she occasionally uses natural fertilizers — and handily defeats aphids by attracting beneficial insects and birds, she said. That leaves her more time than she expected, she said, to sip iced tea and watch her garden grow.

The only ongoing problem she’s got is slugs. She uses wet newspaper to attract and capture them, she said, since her dog will happily lap up any bowls of slug-attracting beer she sets out. Speaking of her wicked humor, Heldreth enjoyed describing how her grandmother used to collect slugs in a rusty coffee can, fill it with gasoline — and dispatch those slugs to what you might also call a hellstrip.

“Vegetable gardening is never perfect. It’s always an adventure,” Heldreth said. “But it does bring a lot of joy.”