Skid Row Gardening: July 2010

Welcome to Skid Row Gardening!

Gardening, Civil Rights, and Community Organizing

Skid Row is a fifty square-block area nestled on the eastern flank of downtown Los Angeles, and is home to over 11,000 homeless and extremely low-income people. The population includes single individuals and families with children, chronically homeless people, people with a mental illness and/or a substance abuse problem, veterans, people with other disabilities and chronic health conditions.

Recently, Skid Row has come under increasing attack by politicians, city planners, and criminal justice officials who refuse to acknowledge Skid Row as a “real” community. Much of this has to do with a recent wave of redevelopment and gentrification that makes Skid Row’s land highly valued. This has led to widespread violations of community residents’ civil and human rights on a massive scale. The Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN) is an outspoken opponent of these city efforts (for more detailed information on LACAN campaigns, visit www.cangress.org). Like many of the prominent civil rights organizations coming before them, LACAN sees civil rights as inseparable from food justice and equality.

In the summer of 2010 LACAN launched its own community garden located on a rooftop on Main Street. Stay tuned to this blog and watch the garden grow. We aim for democratic control where residents can work together to produce the healthy food that this neighborhood deserves.

Friday, July 23, 2010

Our first harvest.

We harvested our first vegetable today. We picked the biggest Serrano today.

When we first set out to establish the garden, our stated goal was to bring quality, local, organic food into the Skid Row community. We're taking one step closer to that goal tonight. On the first and third Friday of every month, we hold a Resident Organizing Committee (ROC) Meeting at our office at 530 S. Main St. The meeting, open to the public, brings residents together to discuss the issues that impact our community the most, where we democratically design solutions. We always end each meeting with a family0style meal. We have decided to integrate our health and nutrition component to the ROC meal, and have begun serving healthy meals freshly prepared by residents themselves. Before the meal, we describe the ingredients, our decisions to include those items, and detail any healthy substitutions we've made (natural sea salt instead of more processed sodium substitutes, for example).

Our vision is to begin integrating produce from our garden into these meals, and tonight we are making salsa with our Serrano Chile as the prized ingredient. It will accompany turkey chili and brown rice.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Shade tree added!

Our plants have been taking a beating from the downtown sun, so we have begun experimenting with different methods to keep them cool. The natural shadows from the different ledges on the roof help to cool some of the plants in the morning while shading others when the sun heads west getting closer to sunset.

Today we added a Dwarf Lemon Tree (Eureka Lemon) to help in this effort.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

New plants!

We planted additional plants today, thanks to a donation from a friend of the organization.

We now are home to two more tomato plants and strawberries. Strawberries are already growing!

Saturday, July 3, 2010

We've got veggies.

Our first vegetables have begun to grow this week! One of our Serrano plants is sprouting peppers on a daily basis. The one here is almost ready to pick. It will be our first vegetable among many to come.

Our Lilac Pepper has also begun to mature, along with a handful of tomato plants and beans. We hope to harvest some of these soon.

Who would have thought that in only a matter of weeks, the Skid Row garden would come to life? Stay tuned.