BIG, WEIRD-LOOKING - AND STILL GROWING.

Byline: Carol Bidwell Daily News Staff Writer

``Plant a radish, get a radish,'' goes the song from the 1960s Broadway musical ``The Fantasticks.''

But things aren't always so unwavering when you're dealing with a San Fernando Valley back yard, a packet of seeds and Mother Nature.

At least that's what our gardening readers tell us. Since asking gardeners to tell us about their successes and misfit fruits and vegetables, we've heard about lemons shaped like amoebas, tomatoes with human faces and even a ghostly bird growing in the trunk of an old rosebush.

The reason a tomato looks like a face or that two squash grow together as one is the same reason a blue-eyed moppet will pop up in a family of brown-eyed children: It's all in the genes.

Because of variations in fertilization or environment, plants can come up with some pretty strange offspring all on their own, said Allen Saute, an agriculture instructor at Canoga Park High School, a magnet school for students interested in agricultural and environmental science. And growers' attempts to cross strains of plants to produce hardier, larger, earlier-maturing or different-colored produce can contribute to random mutations, he said.

``When you start crossing these plants, you get abnormal shapes - not all the time, but every once in a while. You can get some really funky things,'' he said. ``Or maybe more than one ovary was fertilized, just like in people when you get twins.

``It's luck, it's chance - but it's kinda fun,'' Saute said.

Here's what some Daily News readers have growing in their gardens:

The weirdest

The Rev. Moto Enomoto of North Hills, retired pastor of Church of the Four-Square Gospel, was recently surprised to find in his garden a giant zucchini that resembles Daffy Duck.

``You know how it is with zucchini: The leaves cover them up, and before you know it, they've gotten out of hand,'' Enomoto said. ``I don't know how this one got in the shape it's in. It must have been up against the fence or the ground.''

It wasn't until other landscaping was cleared that the mysterious owl face on a deep-red rosebush in Debbie Moorman's Granada Hills front yard was spotted.

``My son (Eric, 25) discovered it; he said, `We've got an owl in our rosebush,' '' Moorman said. ``It's really neat. It's kinda like our protection, like, `Whooo goes there?' My grandson (Jordan, 17 months) always walks up and points to it and jabbers at it in his own language. He loves it.''

The strange face appears to be a knothole in the trunk of the rosebush, which was already in full flower when the family moved into the house 19 years ago, she said. Three companion rosebushes have no strange faces in their trunks.

Marian Beaudry says her green-thumb husband, Don, can make about anything grow - including two European cucumbers that grew conjoined, side by side. ``We called (it) the twin as it grew together,'' she wrote.

Don also grows Swiss chard; somehow a seed fell on their driveway and took root. Soon, he had a Swiss chard plant growing through the blacktop; if last year's any indication, by the time it goes to seed, it will have grown nearly as high as the garage roof.

For Joe and Christine Weber of Woodland Hills, a typical day's harvest includes a flat of tomatoes, a dozen peaches and a bushel basket of grapefruit, along with assorted onions, peppers and squash. But finding a tomato - probably of the Better Boy variety - with what appears to be a human face was a bit of a surprise to the pair.

``He was an aberration - a tomato anomaly which we thought resembles W.C. Fields in his typical screen portrayal of inebriation,'' Joe Weber said. ``We like it (posed) with the stem on top, but if you turn it over, it looks like he's smoking a cigar.''

Robert J. Bonk wrote to praise the gardening efforts of his wife, Catherine, who sometimes is surprised by what she finds waiting to be picked.

``She is growing Japanese pumpkins, which are small, round and green ... when all of a sudden, a large, round, orange pumpkin the size of a basketball appears,'' he wrote. ``She also grows gobo (a kind of Japanese okra) in discarded trash cans, and they have elephant ear-sized leaves you wouldn't believe.''

Clara Drake of Woodland Hills dropped us a note about a bizarre lemon grown by friend Cathy Verga of Simi Valley and given to her. ``It was too gross to eat and too weird to toss, so I pickled it,'' Drake wrote.

Verga, a psychologist for the Los Angeles Unified School District, said she has no idea how old her lemon tree is (``It came with the house'' when her family moved in 14 years ago), and it's never produced such a surprise before. ``This is really the only mutant one I've ever gotten,'' she said. ``It's very odd.''

It's hard to describe the lemon except to say that it looks the way mercury might if it were yellow and floating freely in liquid. ``It's the strangest thing I've ever grown,'' Verga said.

Pamela Barket of Granada Hills nurtured a prolific plantful of cherry tomatoes and was surprised when one came out with a strange-looking appendage on it. It ``looks like a descendant of Jimmy Durante,'' she wrote.

The biggest

Other people wrote to us about garden giants, with zucchini the undisputed King Kong of Valley vegetables.

Dorothy Kidd of Arleta sent a photo of herself holding three torpedo-sized zukes; Richard Eason said he has one that measures 17 inches wide and 22 inches long - and it's still growing.

Laurie Hoffman of Simi Valley is babying along two zucchini that are each more than 2 feet long. ``They're huge!'' she said. ``I cut the rest of them back so these would get big. I just planted two plants, and this is the first time I ever planted a garden, so I didn't know how big they would get. I haven't even fertilized them, but they just took off. The leaves alone were a foot and a half across.''

Advice from the experts

A faster way to grow plants from seeds

``Instead of the usual method of placing the seed trays or pots on top of the refrigerator (for warmth), try using a heating pad instead,'' Sherman Oaks resident Betty Glaser urges. ``Just set the heat level to `low,' cover the pad with a towel, and you're ready for the seed tray. There is no need to cover the trays, and in less than half the usual time, new seedlings will emerge.''

Growing a pineapple from a pineapple top

It's easy, says Lori Beubis of Granada Hills.

``Just root it in water and then plant it in a good-sized pot,'' she advises. ``Keep it sort of protected in the winter. Then just wait and be very patient.'' It takes about two years to grow a pineapple.

Frugal ways to propagate

To fill up bare spots in a garden without spending a fortune, Kathlee Wipff of Burbank searches for plants at garage sales, plants seeds instead of purchasing seedlings and makes her own cuttings or begs them from friends. Her garden is thriving, the product of ``a little sweat and a little money.''

CAPTION(S):

4 Photos, Box

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?

Very big or very weird, these readers say

Tina Gerson/Daily News

(2) If you visit the Moorman home in Granada Hills, you'll see an owl face on a deep-red rosebush.

Phil McCarten/Daily News

(3) Mike Rosenfeld and Holly Beke, with their large pumpkin at the Independent Living Center of Southern California in Van Nuys.

(4) Don Beaudry of Lake View Terrace can make about anything grow - including two European cucumbers that grew conjoined, side by side.

Bob Halvorsen/Daily News

Box: Advice from the experts (See Text)