By Pat Rubin
Sacramento Bee

Marcia Freed loves to garden.
Doesn’t matter where she lives. She thrives on planting flowers and vegetables for fun, for her family, even for the neighbors and perfect strangers.

“I’ve gardened since I was 5 years old,” says Freed, who lives in an apartment building in Carmichael, Calif. “I love it.”
Her two small patios and front entryway are stuffed with potted plants: cannas, sago palms, vines. Doves nest in the back patio, and Freed has watched 58 babies hatch during the five years she’s lived in her apartment.
She and friends also maintain a large vegetable garden.
Still, it wasn’t enough. She needed more space to garden at home.
So she turned the entrance of her apartment building into a colorful and cheerful oasis of flowers. It’s a cacophony of color: Fat clumps of brightly colored dahlias jostle for space with feathery-leafed cosmos, spires of snapdragons, ground-hugging pansies. Clumps of agapanthus, their tall stems topped with balls of blue flowers, consort with orange cannas and yellow sunflowers.
The flowers greet visitors as they pull into the parking lot. First-timers stop and stare. They smile -- and proceed slowly, as if to take in all the flowers.
It’s definitely not your typical apartment-building planting of struggling shrubs and propped-up trees.
“I have flowers from all over the world: India, Thailand, Hawaii, South Africa,” Freed says. She orders seeds via the Internet and buys seeds wherever she travels.
But the best is around the corner.
Once the site of three large trash bins, today it houses a series of three raised beds overflowing with tomatoes, chili peppers, zucchini and more. It’s a jungle of foliage, with green beans growing up among the tomatoes, squash vines insinuating themselves in all the nooks and crannies, and peppers planted wherever there’s an empty spot. Butternut squash foliage has grown over the entire garden, shading it like an umbrella from the sun.
In a narrow strip of soil against the building, Freed planted corn and sunflowers.
She describes the vegetable garden as European-style: raised beds, small spaces, planted intensively. The vegetable garden is just a few months old, and already Freed is harvesting green beans and tomatoes.
One of the best treats, Freed says, is to simply sit in the shade beside the garden and look at it.
Freed shared her gardening tips:
• She uses 10-10-10 fertilizer on the garden every 10 days.
• Her plants attract whiteflies. To discourage the pests from hanging around and laying eggs, she bumps the leaves of all the plants several times each day to stir them up.
• She uses strips of nylons to tie tomato stalks and beans or squash vines to supports. She trained one squash vine up a nearby liquidambar tree.

• E-mail Pat Rubin at prubin@sacbee.com.