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.


Thursday, February 17, 2011

New Garden Video

Here is the first in an upcoming series of tutorials, look-ins, and general videos that we're posting about the garden. Enjoy, and stay tuned for more.

Up on the Roof: Urban Gardening w/ LA CAN from Nicholas Dahmann on Vimeo.

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Thursday, February 3, 2011

First Winter Harvest!

Today we had our first harvest of the winter!It was perfect timing, too, because tomorrow we have a community meeting in which we will be preparing food for all attendees. Now we can build the menu according to our harvest.

We have leaf lettuce from one of our donated earth boxes, fava beans, kale, greens, and to our surprise...beets. For nearly a month, we thought that the red leafy plant that had been booming was swiss chard. However, when Anne, our amazing master gardener snooped around the leafs, she discovered two large beets nestled under the soil. What a fantastic surprise, and great addition to our meal.

In addition to harvesting, we added two new earth boxes (self-irrigating pots) to the garden, containing broccoli.

We did, however, discover that our booming fava beans have grown weak and a bit sickly. They are now displaying some kind of powdery mold. We think that we may have planted too many in a single SIP (self-irrigating pot), so the plants have eaten all of the nutrients from the soil in a rapid manner. We are going to fertilize to try to keep the plant alive.


Check the photo gallery page for some additional updated photos.

And, stay tuned for a video that we shot on our last group visit up to the garden.

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