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Low-income Los Angeles residents grow food with UC Cooperative Extension support

LOS ANGELES, Calif. - University of California Cooperative Extension feeds the body and the spirit of low-income Los Angeles County residents by helping them supplement their diets with fresh produce while enhancing the sense of purpose and pride that comes from self-sufficiency.

The UCCE Common Ground Program assists residents in gardening, composting, and safely handling and preserving their garden-grown food. The gardens have also been used to train new gardeners for jobs in Los Angeles' $171 million green industry.

In all, there are 60 community gardens scattered throughout Los Angeles County. They provide fresh, healthful produce to low-income residents who otherwise might be challenged by cost and transportation to add fresh fruits and vegetables to their diets on a regular basis.

"All the pretty stuff aside, we're talking food here. Subsistence," said Yvonne Savio, UC Cooperative Extension Common Ground Program manager.

The program is unique in California.  Only 20 metropolitan areas nationwide receive the federal funding to support low-income gardeners.  In place since the 1970s, UCCE’s Los Angeles County Common Ground assists food bank gardens, gardens at halfway houses and shelters for homeless people and abused women, school gardens and senior citizen gardens.

The outreach is done by UC Master Gardeners, who are gardening enthusiasts trained by UC Cooperative Extension scientists in research-based irrigation methods, pest and disease management, and plant selection.  In return for the education, the Master Gardeners volunteer their time to share their knowledge with Los Angeles County gardeners at nurseries, home shows and at the community gardens.  All Master Gardener projects in Los Angeles County aim to enhance the lives of low-income residents.

“I feel privileged and a sense of pride about what our Master Gardener program is about,” Savio said.  “We are mandated to take care of our low-income residents.  How they are gardening is just miraculous.”

UC Cooperative Extension offers free seeds to any Los Angeles County community or school garden.  Seed packets may be picked up at the UCCE Los Angeles County office, 2 Coral Circle in Monterey Park, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.  Information on starting a community garden, monthly gardening tips, and other articles and resources are available on the UCCE Web site at http://celosangeles.ucdavis.edu (click on “Common Ground Garden Program).

Following are examples of gardens receiving assistance from UC Cooperative Extension:

Los Angeles Regional Food Bank Community Garden

Amidst busy industrial neighbors in the City of Vernon, nearly 400 low-income families tend 20-by-20-foot garden beds lush with fresh fruit and vegetables. 

Families, who for the most part live in public housing developments or apartments, pay $12 per month for their slice of the 16-acre Food Bank Community Garden, at Long Beach and Alameda avenues.  The mostly Latino gardeners are growing a wide variety of crops, including corn, lettuce, cilantro, nopales (edible cactus), cabbage, and even bananas and lemons.

A 30-foot-long and four-foot-wide handicap garden was recently completed.  The bed is raised to a level that allows people in wheelchairs, or those unable to crouch down, a place to grow their own food.

Garden groundskeeper, Ray Calzada, is in the UC Master Gardener training program, where he is learning research-based irrigation, pest, weed and disease management from UC scientists.

Echo Park Community Garden

The Echo Park Community Garden, on Sunset Boulevard about three miles from downtown Los Angeles, is an example of public agencies and grassroots volunteers joining with University of California Cooperative Extension to transform local blight into a neighborhood asset.

"It was truly a community effort," said Bea Gold, a volunteer Master Gardener involved in the garden's inception.

The City of Los Angeles was instrumental in striking a deal with the property owner to rent the land to the project for $1 a year for five years. The city demolished a dilapidated house on the property. The Los Angeles Conservation Corps and the Los Angeles Community Garden Council cleared the plot and designed the architectural landscape. Master Gardener volunteers provided seeds, training and insect and disease management information. The neighborhood residents took to working the land.

However, the gardeners are now facing eviction.  The landowner wants to sell, and escalating real estate prices in the area have made purchasing the property a stretch for the non-profit organization.

Forty-two 14-foot-by-5-foot plots are carved out of the three-quarter acre lot that slopes down a hill between apartments and antique shops.  Around and between the garden beds are a citrus grove, fig trees, peach and plum trees, flowers and herbs.  The garden is 100 percent organic.  Four resident cats control rodents.  Garden waste is shredded, composted and returned to the soil on site.

Echo Park Community Garden is a good neighbor.  Gardeners sell plants and cuttings at reasonable prices, offer a youth program and UC Cooperative Extension presents training there open to local residents.

Carmelitos Community Garden, Long Beach

The Carmelitos Community Garden is a tropical paradise in what once was a trash-strewn vacant lot alongside the railroad right-of-way near what was then an unpopular, crime-ridden housing project.  The Los Angeles Community Development Commission worked with UC Cooperative Extension to transform the six-acre area into the community garden and professional-scale nursery and training program called The Growing Experience.  Today, the Carmelitos Housing Development has low crime, is graffiti-free, well tended and completely full.

UC Master Gardener Manuel Cisneros, a former automotive repair shop owner who learned gardening at the Carmelitos Community Garden, today coordinates the community and market gardens.  Before the gardens were established, he said, “there weren’t a lot of reasons for people to come out of the buildings.”  Now residents meet and work together at The Growing Experience.

One 94-year-old women of Korean descent visits the garden twice a day to tend her four-by-eight-foot plot of medicinal herbs.  She cultivates just one of 60 well-tended family garden beds planted with tomatoes, lettuce, carrots, radishes and a host of other garden vegetables.  The garden’s common areas produce enough food to hold a farmers’ market at the development every other week, generating funds to help pay garden expenses. 

Cisneros points out a Colombian coffee plant chock-full of green coffee beans growing in the shade of two banana trees.  Last year, two pounds of gourmet coffee were harvested.  A cherimoya tree nearby is carefully hand-pollinated to ensure plenty of delicious fruit.

“These are things that wouldn’t be available to people here,” Cisneros said. 

The Growing Experience landscape training and job creation program includes professional greenhouses and employs Carmelitos tenants to maintain the Carmelitos landscape and landscaping at other county sites.   Since its inception in 1995, the Growing Experience has trained 150 individuals who had histories of long-term unemployment and public assistance, found full-time jobs for more than 30 percent of its graduates, and developed an extensive local pool of landscape knowledge.

Ocean View Farms, Santa Monica

UC Master Gardener Julie Strand has developed her own specific community gardening workshops, which she presents at the Ocean View Farms community garden and at other sites regularly. 

Ocean View Farms, on a hill overlooking the ocean, is owned by the City of Los Angeles.  The site was used to point defensive munitions toward the Pacific Ocean during World War II.  About 30 years ago, it was transformed into a garden where locals pay $30 a year to tend a plot.

“I developed a container gardening workshop and one on herbs,” she said.  “I have a workshop for spring and summer gardening and one for fall and winter.”

The workshops on seasons are particularly helpful to gardeners who have immigrated to Los Angeles County from areas near the equator or south of the equator.

“They may be thinking they will plant tomatoes and corn in December.  I educate gardeners about our unique seasons,” Strand said.  “Just because it seems warm, you can’t successfully plant whatever you want whenever you want.”

Manzanita Community Garden, Echo Park

The Manzanita Community Garden is still a dream, but one that is rapidly coming true.  The site is a vacant lot with a staircase that leads pedestrians from the residential Manzanita Street cul-de-sac down to Sunset Boulevard.

“It was originally owned by the city’s transportation authorities in the time of the trolleys,” said garden coordinator Tasha Hordin.

The steep, weedy, trash-scattered lot was an eyesore.  Local residents approached the city and got permission to develop a community garden.  The Conservation Corps is building steel-reinforced terraces to create level garden beds.

“Common Ground will provide seeds and technical support,” said Hordin, who has also been involved with the Echo Park Community Garden.  “That’s the great thing about the UC Master Gardeners.”