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

UC 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 trained new gardeners for jobs in Los Angeles’ $171 million green industry.

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

“It was truly a community effort,” says 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.

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 foods 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.

However, there are other benefits, according to UC Cooperative Extension Master Gardener Manuel Cisneros, the coordinator of a community garden at the Carmelitos Low-Income Housing Development in Long Beach. Before the garden was established, he said, “there weren’t a lot of reasons for people to come out of the buildings.”

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 farmer’s market at the development every other week, generating funds to help pay garden expenses.

The Carmelitos community garden is a tropical paradise in what once was a trash-strewn vacant lot alongside the railroad right-of-way near 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 a professional-scale nursery and training program called The Garden Experience. Today, the Carmelitos Housing Development has low crime, is graffiti-free, well tended and completely full.

Cisneros points out a Columbian 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.

An immigrant from El Salvador, Cisneros was displaced from his automotive repair shop by the Los Angeles riots in the early 1990s and landed at the low-income housing development. There he learned English and invaluable gardening skills. Cisneros demonstrated his knack for management at The Garden Experience, eventually earning his appointment to coordinate the community garden.

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

“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.”

(March 2004)

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