A community gardener's view of the Pacific
(Courtesy photo)
Here's Liz's post:
Liz's Recommended Links:
• Gardenerd - A knowledgeable organic gardener writes about her home veggie garden in West L.A., where I am.
• Homegrown Evolution & Ramshackle Solid - These two bloggers write about their homes, veggie gardens, and forays into self-sufficiency in the Silver Lake neighborhood of L.A.
• Urban Homestead - This blog is part of a constellation of sites developed by Pasadena's Dervaes family, at the forefront of the urban homesteading movement. On a 1/6th acre lot, this family produces enough food for themselves and to sell to local restaurants. Best, Anais, who seems to be the one in charge of the blog, is an engaging, informative writer.
A co-worker asked me awhile ago why I grew vegetables. "Is it to save money? Or because you like organics?" I nodded yes, because I had no other short answer for her. Upon reflection, I would now say that I grow vegetables to restore a childlike sense of wonder in and connection to the living world, a sense that had gone missing in my eight on and off years of apartment dwelling in this country's second largest city, Los Angeles.
Before I came by my little beds in a community garden (where I am an associate gardener working on someone else's plot, and as of this writing, after 8 months, number 192 on the waiting list), I didn't know it was a sense of wonder that I was looking for. I just knew that I was burned out on L.A. and wished that I could move back to Minneapolis, where I'm from, where a median earner has a shot at buying a small house with a little patch of yard—not a fashionable little house, but something. In Minnesota, gardening, like home buying, parenthood, marriage, is an activity that signals a certain phase of adulthood. Like me, most of my high school and college friends have at least one parent who grew up on a farm. In that way, our generation of 30- and 40-somethings forms a bridge between our parents' era, when 17% of the nation's population farmed and that of our children, who may never meet the one percent of the population who now grow our food. Gardening becomes a link to family and history, though if you ask my friends or cousins why they mess up their suburban lawns with tomatoes, green beans, and herbs, they'll probably just shrug and say "homegrown tastes better."
What I've learned during stints living abroad is that when you're truly sick of being in a place, when "home", wherever that is, seems like the answer to any question, the thing to do is to dig deeper, learn more about where you're at. I realize now that my mom did this when my parents moved to Atlanta. She became a master gardener and deeply immersed herself into xeriscaping. I'd always assumed this was just to solve the problem of what to do with her half acre yard and its weird orange clay soil, so different from what she'd known for 57 years, but now I see this was her way of growing roots. Learning about heirloom and native plants is, I think, one of the best ways to connect to a place's history, spirit, and ecology.
Just like my mom in Atlanta, I'm trying to grow metaphorical roots in L.A. through planting literal roots, though focusing on food, not flowers. Because I buy produce at farmers markets, I already had a general sense of when different vegetables grow here. But I couldn't have predicted how exciting it was to see my first pole beans twirl up a trellis, or how sad I now am that my short but prolific bean season is over, but then how I'm also eagerly mulling over what I'll grow next. These cycles of enthusiasm and loss replicate the seasons I grew up with, superimposing rhythms on a climate that can have a maddening, confusing sameness to it. (When we see, for example, a billboard advertising a movie that opens in October, Midwestern transplants in L.A. take a full three to five seconds to determine whether October is next week or three months off—I've heard this referred to as "seasonal vertigo.")
Los Angeles was not built with public green space in mind—developers assumed that everyone would have their own private patch of land. My key to the community garden's gate gives me access to 6 acres of plots and paths between them, a great place to garden, take a walk, or sit beneath a pine tree and look at the horizon. When my parents lived in Atlanta, I used to plant a small bed of pansies for my mom when I visited at Christmas —a thrill, coming from the Midwest in December, because handling unfrozen dirt was an exotic treat. Maybe growing vegetables in a community garden in the middle of L.A. has the same appeal: I'm excited to have a connection to the earth precisely because earth, in its non-concrete form, is so rare here. Maybe the next time someone asks me why I'm growing vegetables, I'll just say "because I like to dig in the dirt."
Check out Liz's blog: Growing Roots in L.A.
Liz's Recommended Links:
• Gardenerd - A knowledgeable organic gardener writes about her home veggie garden in West L.A., where I am.
• Homegrown Evolution & Ramshackle Solid - These two bloggers write about their homes, veggie gardens, and forays into self-sufficiency in the Silver Lake neighborhood of L.A.
• Urban Homestead - This blog is part of a constellation of sites developed by Pasadena's Dervaes family, at the forefront of the urban homesteading movement. On a 1/6th acre lot, this family produces enough food for themselves and to sell to local restaurants. Best, Anais, who seems to be the one in charge of the blog, is an engaging, informative writer.
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