Our Story

Welcome to Lath House Gardens! We are a small urban farm and licensed nursery located in the San Carlos/Mission Gorge area of the city of San Diego. Year-around we grow microgreens indoors in climate-controlled rooms; in the spring, we use our lath houses to grow heirloom tomato seedlings; during the spring/summer, we use our lath houses to produce heirloom tomatoes and other summer vegetables. We also build custom lath houses and garden planter boxes. You can find our products at local farmers markets or buy from us directly by contacting us through this website. We grow our plants and vegetables using ecological and sustainable methods.

Although we only started Lath House Gardens in 2012, we have grown vegetables for our own use for many years. Each spring we would plant our tomatoes with great anticipation, and would eagerly watch our plants grow and flower and produce many green tomatoes. And then, as the tomatoes would start to blush and ripen, we would lose them to the native wildlife that lives in our area – birds, rats, raccoons – you name it, they would find our garden! It was a yearly exercise in frustration.

Then, in 2011, we purchased and built a greenhouse from a kit and moved our tomato plants inside. We soon discovered that it was too warm in the greenhouse for our tomatoes. We then found that a type of reinforced screen material called "rib lath," which is used in stucco/plaster construction, was the perfect replacement for the greenhouse polycarbonate panels. We replaced the greenhouse panels with this screening, and our first "lath house" was created.

Since then, we have designed and built a total of six custom lath houses for our own use, and we have built other lath houses and planter boxes for our customers to grow their own vegetables and plants, where they are protected from the local wildlife.