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