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Francis Avenue Community Garden: a chile-lover's delight

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Community Gardens Dispatch No. 17: Francis Avenue, Los Angeles

Although the Francis Avenue Community Garden is small  -- only 18 10-foot-by-10-foot plots—it's a Meso-America foodies' delight.

"This one is hot," said Marta Servin, the caretaker, pointing out a tiny green-brown ball-shaped chile pepper. "Chile bola. This round one is from Salvador, also very hot, muy picoso. They call it chiltepe, and they also have it in Oaxaca."

Located in the most densely populated neighborhood in Los Angeles, Francis Avenue Garden -- also known as the Moothart Collingnon Community Garden, after the land owners who made the space available -- is small, tidy and always busy. During the day, housewives come to sit on the mismatched park benches under the pergola just outside the fenced-in gardening area, trading gossip and watching one another's children. It's a true community meeting place, used for wedding parties, talks on domestic violence, arts and crafts classes for the kids. (In the photo below, that's Marta Servin on the left, showing varieties of peppers from states all over Mexico, Destiny Borrales at center eating and playing in the sugar cane, and Fernando Larios chatting with other community gardeners.)

Francis-Collage

Nearly all the plots are in raised beds, and everything has a use, either as food or as medicine. Most of the beds are surrounded with plastic mesh to keep out the chickens that shared the space until last year. Except for one Korean American gardener, everyone is from Mexico, Guatemala or El Salvador. In the summer, corn, tomatoes, epazote, chiles and squash dominate, but now, in winter, the beans are just starting to come up, planted neatly in rows, and the bananas that tower in the corners are mostly done, their stalks bare of fruit. That doesn't mean they're useless, however. The leaves are used to wrap tamales. The avocado leaves are similarly harvested, either for enclosing meat for roasting or to be ground into powder for flavoring the masa dough for tamales.

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A true Hollywood story at Fountain Community Gardens

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Community Gardens Dispatch No. 16: Fountain Community Gardens, Los Angeles

Only a few years ago, the tale of the 20,000-square-foot lot at the corner of Fountain Avenue and St. Andrews Place -- a stone's throw from the 101 Freeway in Hollywood -- was just plain sad.

Since the 1970s, it had been used as a city-owned parking lot for trailers offering temporary housing for the homeless and families in transition, mainly poor single mothers. That program ended in the '80s, but the trailers were left behind, and local gangs and meth cooks moved in, gardeners here say. After a fire that began on the lot burned down a neighboring house, the community demanded that the city take action. A higher fence was built, and the site was slated for a community center.

The recession shelved that project but in 2009 led to another solution: the Fountain Community Gardens, Hollywood's newest and largest collection of community plots.

Fountain-Alex-V Artist Alex Alferov, pictured at right, the site's first garden master, grew up in the neighborhood and was an altar boy at the landmark Russian Orthodox church down the street. He has seen the area's population shift from Eastern European and Italian to largely Central American, Mexican, Thai and Armenian, and the community garden, he says, has helped to bring back an invigorating, multicultural energy.

The vibe starts at the distinctive front gate, metal cut in in the Mexican folk-art style of papel picado. The work was done by east L.A. artist Michael Amescua, whose art also adorns Solano Canyon Community Garden.

Fountain Community Gardens has 67 immaculately tended plots, most 5-by-15-foot raised beds. (That's Michael Mapel cleaning up his parsley in the photo at top.) The land is nearly ringed by 25 native species and a few young citrus. Mature pines are scattered around the lot, and though the needles are left as mulch, the cones are gathered up neatly and arranged decoratively here and there.

The plots reflect the mix of gardeners: Chinese greens rise next to Italian basil; sugar cane and chayote grow next to artichoke and asparagus. At $10 a month, a plot here isn't not cheap compared with some other community gardens. Being Hollywood, the location attracts some gardeners who work in entertainment, some are homeless, and still others are in halfway houses.

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When a community garden isn't so rosy

Franklin Hills
Community Gardens dispatch No. 15: Norman Harriton / Franklin Hills

Location is not everything. Just look at the Norman Harriton / Franklin Hills Community Garden, perched at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, west of the landmark Shakespeare Bridge in one of Los Angeles' lovely neighborhoods. The garden sits on land owned by the Lycee International de Los Angeles school, near the classrooms and soccer field of Lycee's Los Feliz campus. It has an eye-popping view of the city, spanning  the foothills of Silver Lake west to the hump of the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

The view within the garden, however, is less evocative. Bougainvillea and grapevines do their best to camouflage a chain-link fence. Although the rules call for year-round maintenance, it's obvious that some plots haven't been visited since summer, possibly earlier.

For a city where gardeners may wait two years for a plot to open, the waiting list here is surprisingly short, though given the condition of the place, perhaps the bigger surprise is that there's any waiting list at all. Membership to the tiny garden -- 7,000 square feet divided into 26 plots, six reserved for Lycee gardening classes -- costs $50 a year. Plots with active gardeners are easy to spot: You actually can see the soil. Everywhere else you'll see a carpeting of pine needles or an equally thick layer of invasive Johnson grass.

Franklin Hills 3 The garden is named after its founder, the late Norman Harriton, a local resident who worked with the Franklin Hills Residents Assn. and the Lycee to tear up asphalt, cut down mature palms and put in watering stands. Some of the earliest supporters were local real estate agents who recognized that community gardens are great for property values. The result was a secret garden that few newcomers know exists. But Harriton passed away in 2004 and things have not been the same since.

Nowadays when garden coordinator Michele Flynn stops in to tend her plot, the one thing she notices is neglect. 

"There should be one main rule: Once you get a plot, you have to use it," she says, admitting that she's frustrated by the lax enforcement. "If you don't use it, you're out. You're supposed to garden all year, but most people don't."

There are no restrictions on watering timers — verboten at many community gardens — and during the downpours last month, timers in the garden were still operating as usual, irrigating plots in the rain, Flynn says.

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We're digging in at community gardens

Community-Rockdale

In case you've missed Jeff Spurrier's weekly dispatches from community gardens -- the people and the plantings, the experiments and the solutions -- let us help you catch up:

Dispatches No. 1 and 2: Our kickoff feature on dynamo Milli Macen-Moore and the follow-up on the Milagro Allegro garden's uplifting history

Dispatch No. 3: For those waiting for a plot, garden sharing proves to be a good alternative

Dispatch No. 4: The Main Street garden in Santa Monica, a pioneer in the movement

Dispatch No. 5: A smart design for wheelchairs at Park Drive in Santa Monica

Dispatch No. 6: At Solano Canyon, gardening in the shadow of Dodger Stadium

Dispatch No. 7: On Skid Row, ingeniously gardening by the bucket

Dispatches No. 8 and 9: Ocean View Farms, true to its name and composting like crazy

Dispatch No. 10: How raised beds have made the Rockdale garden in Eagle Rock

Dispatch No. 11: In Silver Lake, community garden as pocket park

Dispatch No. 12: Veteran seed savers at the Altadena Community Garden keep their harvests going, and going, and ...

Dispatches 13 and 14: At the Learning Garden in Venice, Spurrier checks out the Seed Library of Los Angeles and watches a grafting master in action

Stay tuned for new installments every Wednesday. Bookmark L.A. at Home and join us on Facebook, where we have a page dedicated to gardening in the West.

Photo: Eagle Rockdale Community Garden, better known as just Rockdale. Credit: Ann Summa


Garden doctor grafts plants with surgical precision

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Community Gardens dispatch No. 14: The Learning Garden, Venice

Grafting -- the joining of two plants to make a single new one -- is a complicated procedure, a mixture of surgery and carpentry for the gardener attempting the procedure. The nutrition-gathering roots of one plant play host to the scion, usually a year-old stem containing buds that's attached on top. When it's done right, the results can be downright inspirational, as David King learned in the 1980s, when he visited the former Montecito mansion of chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley Jr.

The architect positioned the house around two large oaks, but in the 1940s, one of the trees began to die, said King, who was studying plant propagation at the time. "He planted two young oaks on either side of the dying oak, and after about 10 years, he grafted them onto it," King said. "And more than 30 years later, it was still alive. I get goose bumps to this day -- what skill."

This month, King will start cutting back the trees and vines at the Learning Garden at Venice High School, gathering scions and cuttings for his classes in plant propagation. He has some rootstock already prepped in the greenhouse and more on order from Raintree Nursery in Washington state.

Grafting-nodesPreparations call for the sharpening of knives, the cleaning of pruners and inspection of the Thompson seedless grapevines blanketing a rebar trellis in the Venice garden. Some of those vines soon will be pruned away in King's UCLA Extension class. Older cane will be cut into four-node-long sections, heavily deleafed and planted in cactus mix -- two nodes in the soil, two nodes out. Grapevines are satisfyingly easy to propagate as long as the cuttings are kept moist by regular misting for the first few months, until new leaves appear.

"Water loss is the big enemy when a plant has no roots," he says.

Grafting cuts vary: simple splice, saddle graft, cleft and wedge, whip and tongue. The key to successful grafting is making an even cut on both sections of plant, King says. It's possible to do this with just a box cutter, rubber bands and a plastic bag, but special grafting wax and Parafilm (a type of medical tape that stretches, seals to itself and eventually withers away) help to achieve a tight fit. Keep reading for more on King, his garden and upcoming classes open to the public ...

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Venice High's Learning Garden, a locavore's delight

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Community Gardens dispatch No. 13: Learning Garden, Venice

The Learning Garden at Venice High School is not an official community garden but rather an educational lab open to the community. Gardeners from Beethoven Street Elementary School and UCLA Extension mix with the Venice High gardening club and students from Yo San University and Emperor's College of Traditional Oriental Medicine.

Venice-learning-garden-king-and-tree-V On a cold Saturday a few weeks ago, garden master David King hosted the first meeting of the Seed Library of Los Angeles, believed to be L.A.'s first regional seed bank. For the $10 membership fee, gardeners can "borrow" the seeds of specific edibles -- heirloom Waltham 29 broccoli, for example. Part of the resulting crop must then be allowed to flower and go to seed, allowing the borrower to return fresh seed stock to the library.

"As seeds grow out repeatedly in our soil and microclimates, they adapt," says King, whose background is in plant propagation, mainly of fruit trees. (That's him at left, with his dog, Tree.)

Far more quickly than one could achieve at home, a variation of Waltham broccoli specific to Los Angeles or even specific to Venice can be developed, better suited to local conditions.

It's a locavore's dream.

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Saving seeds for a harvest that never ends

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Community Gardens dispatch No. 12: Altadena

Even though it's almost Christmas, Marie Yeseta is still harvesting tomatoes at her plot in Altadena Community Garden. One vibrant Italian heirloom — Costoluto Genovese, an acidic late-bloomer that is good for sauces and canning — has produced about 200 tomatoes thus far, she says.

Altadena-portrait And because Yeseta is an avid seed saver, that's one tomato whose seed she will be keeping, stored someplace dry, cool and dark — no hot garages or dank shelves under sinks. It will go into a dated, annotated envelope, which then goes into a tin labeled by season.

Saving seeds is a natural extension of gardening, Yeseta says, and the best way to educate your taste buds and discover the world beyond Early Girl tomatoes and head lettuce. Best of all, it costs almost nothing to continue a particular flavor in your garden.

"I spent $3.50 for a package of squash seeds, and I'll get maybe 10 squash, and each will have more than 50 seeds," she says. She just needs to rinse them clean of fibers and lay them out in a single layer on a screen or plate to dry thoroughly for about a month. "I'll never have to buy those seeds again."

Yeseta has taught classes in seed saving at the Altadena garden. Letting plants go to flower is one essential step, especially for lettuces. Shake off the flower head into a paper bag and let the seeds dry for about two weeks, then replant if you want.

A few plots away, Margaret Jones is harvesting her Christmas beans, heirloom limas with a splash of red on the pale skin. She saves her seeds too, particularly the ones that show the most color. Before she began growing limas, she never knew she could eat them fresh, when their buttery, chestnut-like flavor is best. Now the only ones she saves are for seed, giving them away to other gardeners before the bugs get to them.

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In Silver Lake, community garden as pocket park

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Community gardens dispatch No. 11: Manzanita Street, Silver Lake

Manzanita Street is the smallest community garden in Los Angeles: 13 irregularly shaped plots terraced into a hill and bisected by stairs linking Sunset Boulevard to a cul-de-sac below. It's near the heart of Sunset Junction yet largely invisible, unless you're looking for it.

The neighborhood can be a hard place to garden. Car traffic on Sunset is heavy, and the odd syringe or crack pipe may litter the stairs. The soil is thick clay, with traces of arsenic in one section, and the terraced layout means a constant battle with rainwater runoff.

Manzanita-Trina-2 Despite all that, Manzanita has its charms and the turnover in plots here is low. It's a true urban pocket garden, like something you'd see in lower Manhattan except Cali-style, with a surprising burst of roses and chamomile, asparagus and artichoke, blossoming along the cracked 1920s concrete stairs.

"We really want to paint these steps," says Trina Calderon, right, the garden's coordinator, adding that a sign would be nice too. She's not holding her breath. It took the city three years to fix a broken streetlight above the garden's twin gates.

Still, she's not complaining. The microclimate is ideal for some plants that typically suffer in the heat of summer. Lettuces, artichoke and flowers all thrive here, and the succulents attract tours from the Southern California Horticultural Society. Calderon planted two artichoke plants a few years ago and wound up with a bumper crop this year. "I got sick of eating them," she says.

Manzanita-terraces-side-view

Her neighbor, Phyllis Hauser, pictured at top, took an organic gardening class to learn how to fix the soil in her 70-square-foot plot. She built a no-dig, lasagna-style bed made of chicken-wire topped with layers of newspaper, fertilizer, compost, straw and planting mix. The results were so good that when the bugs began eating one of her cauliflowers, she could be philosophical and let them feed.

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Rockdale community gardeners look to raised beds for better crops

Rockdale-portrait Community gardens dispatch No. 10: Eagle Rockdale, Eagle Rock

If you discovered tiny pearls covering the roots of last summer's poorly performing tomatoes, you probably had parasitic roundworms called nematodes. And what plagued your garden back then defines the task that you shouldn't avoid right now: It's time to heal the soil.

Rockdale-vertical That's what Cardie Kremer Molina (pictured) realized last winter at the Eagle Rockdale Community Garden, or "Rockdale" to gardeners here in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of northeast Los Angeles. After seeing the deformities of her scrawny tomato roots, Molina spent months trying to bring the soil back to health. Two months of solarizing the soil under plastic was followed by a cover crop of nitrogen-building rapeseed. After the plant matured, it was dug up and spread into the soil to decompose with compost, blood meal, bone meal, iron and chicken manure. By March, Molina was ready to try tomatoes again.

"It was a fabulous crop. I got lots of 2-pound Mortgage Lifters," she said, citing a storied variety developed in the 1930s by a man who used seedling sales to pay off his house.

The gardeners of Rockdale's 50 plots have two other common concerns: poison oak and anemic soil. The latter dictates that everything be planted in containers or in raised or terraced beds filled with soil trucked in by the city. The garden sits on a former spur of the light-rail line, and although the tracks are gone, the decades-old asphalt remains in many places, just a few inches under the topsoil. Below the asphalt is the rock of Eagle Rock.

"It's pick-and-shovel work to even go down 3 inches," said Mike Woodward, the garden's elected manager. "So we're raising the level of the ground instead of trying to dig it out."

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Ocean View Farms turns compost into a science

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Community gardens dispatch No. 9: Ocean View Farms, West L.A.

When Warren Miyashiro started gardening at Ocean View Farms in 1985, he looked around for compost to amend the sandy soil. Finding none, he bought a bag from a garden store -- his first, he says, and his last.

OV-compost-Miyashiro Miyashiro, a master of compost, has spent decades building a system here that is the envy of other community gardens. After years of tweaking it, he's almost satisfied. It supplies all 500 plots and common areas and still produces leftovers for school gardens.

Miyashiro began by chopping up plant material with flat bottom shovels and searching Hollywood horse stables for manure. Now he has a Toro mini-tractor, three shredders, three teams of gardener-volunteers and tons of fresh bedding from stables in Mandeville and Sycamore canyons, delivered a few times a month by the L.A. Bureau of Sanitation, which benefits because there's less waste to bring to a landfill.

A decade ago, Ocean View Farms had five green waste bins that filled up fast. They cost the garden $2,000 a year, its biggest expense. Now green waste has been reduced to one bin, mainly nut grass and false garlic that can't be composted because those plants survive the composting process. Everything else goes through a shredder, even the rotten wood from old plot walls.

The process starts at two giant pits, both lined with recycled telephone poles. Each pit is 8 feet deep, 20 feet long and 15 feet wide, and each is capable of holding 25 tons of stable bedding (50% horse manure and 50% wood chips, straw and hay). As one pit is filled and left to age, the other one gets emptied slowly, mini-tractor loads at a time, for an hour every Tuesday morning, 52 weeks a year.

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As a conveyor belt carries the aged bedding into a shredder/chipper, a crew removes paper, plastic, wire and the odd horseshoe. When the material emerges from the shredder, it's light and fluffy, ideal for layering onto green garden waste that is going through a similar sorting and shredding process down the hill by a dozen smaller compost piles.

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Ocean View Farms: The hottest plots in town?

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Community gardens dispatch No. 8: Ocean View Farms, West L.A.

The first thing you notice at Ocean View Farms is the view: a spectacular sweep of Santa Monica Bay from a bluff overlooking Santa Monica Airport. It's so beautiful it hurts (that it's not yours).

The second thing you notice are the mailboxes, row upon row, marching in grid formation down the slope. Five hundred 15-by-15-foot plots are on nearly 6 acres, and the mailboxes -- required -- are how the members get communications from the garden's board of directors.

Ocean-View-Farms-root-V Ocean View is the second-largest community garden in L.A. -- only Van Nuys is bigger -- and operates like a small city. A mature orchard of citrus, macadamia and avocado lies on the fringe. A satellite garden sits on the north side of the entrance, and a parking lot is shared with a little league diamond. The plots themselves are as diverse as L.A.: riotous English rose gardens next to mixed seasonal edibles next to plots with nothing but lettuce or soybeans.

Not allowed: trees, sugar cane, shading. No overhead watering of adjacent plots. No perimeter walls of lattice or plywood. No smoking, no alcohol, no nude gardening. Everyone is required to grow year-round and contribute 12 hours a year per plot to communal tasks such as turning or shredding the compost, cleaning the walkways, maintaining the extensive network of plumbing, driving the tractor, helping seniors maintain their plot walls and locking gates at twilight. If a waterline breaks, emergency gardener/plumbers are on call. 

The detailed organization of Ocean View Farms is what makes the garden exceptionally productive and popular. More than 500 people are on the waiting list, even though it can take three years before a plot opens up. Once gardeners get in, they stick around.

"I like Ocean View because it's very diverse," says Korea-born Suky Lee, a Beverly Hills real estate agent in real life, pictured above holding a ginseng-like root. "We have a lot of different ethnic groups and everybody brings their own thing to the garden."

 

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Skid Row Community Garden: bounty by the bucket

Skid-Row-Community-Garden-planting-vert Community gardens dispatch No. 7: Skid row, Los Angeles

The newest community garden in Los Angeles has no soil, bakes in all-day sun and is seen by few outsiders except those who pass above in helicopters.

The Skid Row Community Garden is on the roof of a four-story building on South Main Street, between 5th and 6th streets in downtown L.A. It's part of the Los Angeles Community Action Network, an 11-year-old organization with more than 600 members working with homeless and low-income people in the Skid Row area, a population that by some estimates totals about 13,000.

Pete White, founder and co-director of the group, points to the south noting that just a few blocks away is the produce market, the hub for much of Southern California's fresh fruit and vegetables, but the residents of downtown wouldn't know it. Want a definition of food insecurity? Try to buy a fresh carrot around here.

"If the city can't get fresh produce to skid row, we'll grow our own," he says.

The garden is young, started in late June with tomatoes, peppers and herbs, everything planted in plastic containers. Now, with the help of master gardeners Anne Hars and Maggie Lobl, the first fall crop will be going in: fava beans, radishes, brassicas such as kale and mustard, peas, herbs, micro-greens and catnip, the last two intended for downtown restaurants and pet emporiums, a potential revenue source.

Skid-Row-Community-Garden-drilling Skid-Row-Community-Garden-covered The building had been the home of an Army-Navy department store with an unreliable elevator. Even though the summer was mild, gardeners had to trudge up more than 100 steps to water plants on the roof, sometimes twice a day during a heat wave.

 
For the fall crop, Hars enlisted the help of Erik Knutzen, co-author of "The Urban Homestead." Using a 1917 design, he showed the volunteers how to construct a self-irrigating pot system, or SIP, using two 5-gallon paint buckets, an 18-inch piece of 1-inch plastic pipe and a plastic party cup. (See the YouTube video or read full instructions.) The SIPs work off the wicking method, drawing water up from a bottom reservoir to feed the roots. Though others do use potting soil, the growing medium at the skid row garden is not dirt but a soil-less compound, similar to a seed starter.

It's a nutritional mix that is just the right weight," Hars says. "The water wicks up nicely and doesn't get too soggy at the bottom. If you used regular dirt, there would be no wicking action."

The first two SIPs are a few weeks old and are thriving. The fava beans are bursting out of the protective sheeting on top in a thick bouquet.

"They're doing better than my ones at home are," Hars says.

-- Jeff Spurrier

Photo, top: Anne Hars, left, helps Skid Row Community Garden member Lydia Trejo plant in self-irrigating pots made from 5-gallon buckets.

Photo, above right: Dee Weakly, a member of the Skid Row Community Garden, drills a water-overflow hole in a self-irrigating pot at the Los Angeles Community Action Network downtown.

Photo, above left: Though the plant in the foreground looks stressed, the fava beans in the background are thriving.

Photo credit: Ann Summa

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