Broccoli, beets and more 'Breaking Through Concrete'

City sidewalks with weeds poking through the cracks might be what most people think of when they hear the title of the new book "Breaking Through Concrete." But that’s not what the authors have in mind.

The book chronicles a 2010 road trip to a dozen of the hundreds of urban farms that have sprouted recently, and those that have survived for years around the country -- farms that, the authors say, are the think tanks of a food revolution.

"Breaking Through Concrete," by David Hanson and Edwin Marty with photographs by Michael Hanson, David's brother, presents stories of hope and triumph over homelessness, over difficult municipal regulations, over hunger.

Community gardens: Year-long series comes to a close

 

Community Gardens Dispatch No. 52: The end

It’s transition time in the garden. For me, that means the end of my year in the community garden.

This series began after I graduated from the UC Cooperative Extension's master gardener class in spring 2010. My education continued in community gardens from Ventura to Long Beach, from the foothills to the coast, from the inner city to the ex-urbs.

Microclimates, demographics and histories of the gardens may have differed, but one commonality stood out: No matter the ZIP Code, gardeners were generous with their time, expertise, seedlings and harvest. It sounds like a cliche (or a statement of the obvious) to say that community gardens build community, but after seeing how these gardens can be good neighbors, raising property values and welcoming newcomers with open arms (and full sun), the cliche just sounds like fact.

Los Angeles is blessed with a climate that allows for year-round planting. Just as the car culture produced an asphalt grid now being reclaimed by a generation of urban cyclists, the region's low-rise sprawl creates opportunities for community gardens in light-drenched flat lots. Land-poor would-be gardeners usually are not far away.

Farm to Fork: Gardeners dish ideas for growing community

Community Gardens Dispatch No. 51: Farm to Fork

Among the most interesting topics of discussion at the fifth annual Gathering of the Community Gardens Farm to Fork conference: restaurant-supported agriculture. The phrase refers to a model for food production and community development advocated by Farmworks Los Angeles, a Silver Lake nonprofit organization founded by Charles Lee.

Whereas community gardens divide land into individual plots, each controlled and tended by a different person or group, Lee said, restaurant-supported agriculture calls for an urban farm maintained by a small crew collectively. Farmworks’ goal is to give at-risk youth restaurant training in the form of seasonal gardening internships. The youths water, weed and harvest the land, and over time they see a plant go from ground to kitchen.

The organization has set up with a demonstration farm at Solano Canyon Community Garden, and interns have been recruited from the Homegirl Cafe. The model has worked on myriad levels, producing tasty organic food as well as serving as a form of youth development.

This year, the program’s third, the group is producing more than 6,000 pounds of edibles, mostly vegetables and herbs. Much of it is “farm greens,” says Mark Donofrio of Larchmont Grill, one of the three restaurants supporting the farm. They had such a harvest this past season that he had to change his menu. He’s still getting more greens than he can use.

“The food comes from downtown, near Dodger Stadium, grown on this piece of land near the 110,” he said. “It doesn’t get any more local than that.”

At Glendale community garden, a compulsion for compost

Community Gardens Dispatch No. 50: Monterey Road Eco-Community Garden (West), Glendale

It’s transition time at the Monterey Road Eco-Community Garden (West) in Glendale, and plot partners Lindsey Hansen and Tom Selling are putting in lettuce, peas, potatoes, onions and garlic. But before anything new got planted, they harvested their most important crop of the year: compost from a pair of stackable bins they got free from the Glendale Integrated Waste Management Section.

Hansen and Selling, at right, are part of a team of seven who have made composting a group project at the garden. Four more Integrated Waste Management compost bins are assembled, but they’re empty or filled with non-composting green waste.

In contrast, the bins of the composting team are full to the brim, an inch-thick layer of dried oak leaves on top. Hansen collected 30 bags of raked detritus from her grandmother’s backyard lawn to serve as a ready supply of material to keep the compost bins’ mixture aerobic and balanced, and the attention to detail has clearly paid off.

Community gardens: Plotting our next move

Our yearlong series on community gardens is taking a break this week, but writer Jeff Spurrier and photographer Ann Summa will be back next Wednesday with another report. Until then, some links to dispatches you may have missed the first time around:

From unemployed handyman to sustainable farmer

Fearsome fruit at the Granada Hills Salad Bowl garden

Bad soil, alkaline water and other hurdles in Thousand Oaks

CSA, community-supported agriculture in Long Beach

Growing old? In Oxnard, a place for you

Photo: A break table at the Granada Hills Salad Bowl. Credit: Ann Summa

Growing old at the Oxnard Senior Vegetable Garden

Community Garden Dispatch No. 49: Oxnard Senior Vegetable Garden

“We all chipped in and planted this plot for the old-timer,” John Pardee says. “We let him come in and harvest. He’s about the oldest one here.”

At the Oxnard Senior Vegetable Garden, that’s saying a lot. Ora Cole, the garden president, is 82. Foster, her husband, is 74. (That's the couple, above.) To be eligible for one of the 17 plots, a gardener has to be older than 55.

The garden is next to a fire station on Pleasant Valley Road in Oxnard, its home since moving in 2003. It had been behind another fire station on Hill Street for 30 years, closer to the Wilson Senior Center, the garden’s primary sponsor. A local Eagle Scout found the new site, and he and the gardeners cleared the weed-choked lot and built a small meeting hall. They lowered the dirt by about a foot and used a Rototiller to break up the hardpan.

A lawn is out front and a low chain-link fence is thick with climbing beans, an English variety that a friend of Foster Cole’s sent. The beans do well, but the cool weather this close to the ocean results in mold for some plants.

At Cornucopia Community Garden, even the bug spray is DIY

Community Gardens Dispatch No. 48: Cornucopia, Ventura

Summer is usually a difficult time to cultivate cabbage in Southern California, but gardener Karen Hoh at the Cornucopia Community Garden in Ventura has a system to deal with the fluctuating temperatures here. Borrowing a page from the large-scale growers in nearby Oxnard, she has bent PVC pipes into arcs and anchored these ribs with short rebar stakes into the ground, making an improvised cover that protects her densely planted napa cabbage. Too much sun and the head flattens.

Hoh, above, also has hot peppers and garlic going, the base for the kimchee she will be assembling come harvest time. To combat aphids that might attack her various crops, Hoh even makes her own pepper spray: about 1.5 cups of water are mixed with five finely ground manzana peppers and one teaspoon of dish soap, all filtered through a screen.

DIY solutions are aplenty here at Cornucopia, Ventura County’s largest community garden. Located on Telephone Road under power lines, the 142 plots sit on 3.2 acres of former citrus orchard, next door to a mobile home park where some of the gardeners live.

Ray Raya, a youthful 80, says there’s no gardening space in the mobile home park where he lives, so for the past three years he’s been tilling two plots at Cornucopia. He encounters the occasional thief and relentless gophers, but the worst problem is weeds.

“Some come back like an old song," he says. "The wild garlic is terrible. If it were edible, it wouldn’t grow so well.”

Gardener, 10, aims to grow his own peanut butter and jelly sandwich

Community Gardens Dispatch No. 47: Oak Park

Like many gardeners Daniel Cashdan, 10, has a vision of what he will do with his harvest. He’s trying to grow a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The blackberries have been picked and made into the jelly, and the wheat seedlings have been started at home. The peanuts, however, have become meals for the squirrels that live in the undergrowth around nearby Medea Creek.

Daniel remains philosophical. This is his third year tilling plots at the garden on Kanan Road in Oak Park, north of Agoura Hills. His advice: “Get really cheap plants you think the critters will eat and plant them at the same time. Give them that so they won’t want your other stuff.” (That's Daniel, above, who's also growing melons and squash.)

To deal with rats and squirrels, the gardeners here have cleared a 15-foot-wide space where the garden borders the creek, and many of the 72 plots are fenced and netted. Last month a pair of immature barn owls from the Ojai Raptor Center were installed in an owl box, hung high under an oak canopy, with a clear line of flight. The big plastic owls that some gardeners had propped in their plots are coming out because they’re actually predators of the smaller barn owl.

 

Mobile compost sifter: It's for movers and shakers

Community Gardens Dispatch No. 46: Las Flores, Thousand Oaks, Part 2

At Las Flores community garden, you don’t have to fetch compost. It comes to you.

Darrell Heximer came up with a design for a mobile compost sifter that sits over a wheelbarrow. Eagle Scouts built it, incorporating some improvements from their scout leader. The two prototypes are sturdy and easy to use. A screened tray is suspended on the steel frame using short sections of chain; the tray swings back and forth, allowing gravity to do most of the sifting.

“People tell me I should patent it,” says Heximer, an artist and 23-year-employee at Santa Monica City College. He got the idea while driving home to Westlake along the ocean and seeing a beach vendor hauling a handmade cart with balloon tires over the sand.

He and a friend, engineer Colin Grenridge, have a new design with four wheels, a canvas skirt around the frame with pockets for tools, interchangeable screens and hose attachments.

“It has morphed into a mobile compost sifter, potting bench, vegetable washer," Heximer said. "There are compost sifters but nothing like this. This is the Cadillac version.”

Elsewhere at Las Flores, gardeners have deployed other helpful devices. Unlike some community gardens, Las Flores allows irrigation timers. Mike Caulley, a contractor, has two: one for an overhead mister and one for the drip irrigation line, both positioned on a frame above his seedlings and container plants. He uses filters traditionally used for indoor devices to prevent the water line from clogging. Above it all: a solar-powered light trained on the American flag.

Windmills, soda bottles and other secrets to garden success

Community Gardens Dispatch No. 45: Las Flores, Thousand Oaks

At Las Flores, the community gardeners have learned to deal with the extremes: heat in summer, frost in winter, and alkaline water, clay soil and waves of rapacious pests all year long. Although some of their solutions will sound familiar, others are unusual.

Perhaps the biggest effort: Keeping out the pests. A fine wire mesh “snake fence,” buried a good foot deep, runs around the entire perimeter of the chain link. It didn’t keep the ground squirrels out, said garden founder Fayde Macune, right. “But it slowed them down a bit.”

Gardeners battle more than squirrels. Gophers, rabbits, opossums, raccoons and rats do their share of damage. Coyotes have been known to jump the fence.

To fend off the burrowers, some gardeners have installed windmills that vibrate in the ground when they turn -- a deterrent to supplement traps.

Most plots are also fenced, not only to keep pests out but also to retain heat during winter.