Parenting : Cultivating a Love of Gardening : Community plots give families who don’t have room to grow vegetables at home a chance to learn the joys of working the soil.

Jodi Gross grew up in an apartment without a yard and remembers wanting a garden so desperately that her mother finally painted a garden mural over her bed.

Now she, her husband, Dale, and their two children--Mitchell, 4, and Amelia, 10 months--live in a Canoga Park apartment, where they have no place to plant a garden. This hasn’t stopped her, though, from realizing her life’s dream. In January, wanting her own children to grow up gardening, and cherishing visions of a patch full of herbs, onions, garlic, peppers, strawberries and flowers, she rented a plot at the Orcutt Horticultural Center in West Hills. There, for a $20 annual fee, gardeners get a freshly tilled 10-by 20-foot plot and all the water they need.

Such a setup, Gross has found, provides an arena for an ideal family project. Children of all ages enjoy digging in the dirt, watching plants grow and presenting the fruits of their labors at the dinner table. In addition, said Yvonne Freeman, adult education coordinator of the Common Ground Garden Program in Los Angeles, gardening sessions can easily turn into nature lessons as young ones observe the snails and butterflies that greens attract, the variations in leaf forms and the way they incline to catch the sun.

For the Gross family, the process began with research: With children in tow, Jodi Gross scavenged the library for practical books on vegetable gardening and then planned the details on graph paper. She bought about $100 worth of plants, seeds, bulbs, tools and soil amendments.

For the children, even the preliminaries were fun. “We had a ball,” Gross said.

Now that the garden is in, she brings the children to their plot two or three days a week, for an hour or so. Mitchell helps weed and water, and loves looking for new strawberries to harvest. Amelia usually sits in a stroller and watches, sometimes napping in the sun.

If there’s time, Gross sits down with a cold drink and surveys the area. “I like the satisfaction of putting something in the ground and watching it grow, and just being outside with lots of beautiful things all around,” she said.

Karla West of West Hills describes a similar delight in her foray into family food gardening. Twice a week for the last seven years, she has been bringing her husband and two children--Ambur, 12, and Daniel, 9--along with the family dog, to their garden plot at the Orcutt center. While the Wests live in a house with a small yard, Karla likes the community feel of a neighborhood garden, and relishes the chance to swap ideas and trade vegetables with other gardeners.

The Wests plant what they like to eat: broccoli, corn, onions, carrots, sunflowers, beets and lettuce. They also grow turnips--not to cook, but because they grow so fast. “It makes me feel successful,” said West, a teacher at Sutter Middle School in Winnetka.

She’s glad to report that her children don’t mind weeding and watering--unless it’s hot--and they love planting and picking. But she thinks the best thing about the garden is that it has made the kids appreciate the value and taste of fresh vegetables.

Freeman, who has three youngsters who garden, offers a few tips for families interested in trying a vegetable garden. First, she counsels, start small and gradually increase the size of the area so that the details and the work are not initially overwhelming. In terms of crop selection, she finds that baby pumpkins, sunflowers, pole beans and cherry tomatoes are typically big hits with children. But she advises parents to select seeds and plants that the family is most likely to enjoy eating. “There’s no sense planting kohlrabi if you’re not going to eat it,” she says.

In her own garden, she encourages her children to have fun but also to dig, rake and weed as hard as they can. In her words, “My kids realize that if you want the rewards of the harvest, you have to work.”

WHERE TO GO

What: Rentable family gardening plots.

Location: The Orcutt Horticultural Center, 23600 Roscoe Blvd., West Hills.

Price: $20 a year for a 10-by-20-foot plot.

Call: (818) 346-7449.

Information: For hints on growing vegetables or for a computerized directory of community gardens in Los Angeles County, call Common Ground Garden Program, (213) 744-4340.