[Community_garden] Community_garden Digest, Vol 317, Issue 1
Yvonne Savio
ydsavio at ucdavis.edu
Mon Dec 10 17:43:28 EST 2007
Re community gardens in any California county:
Contact the Master Gardener program in the University of California
Cooperative Extension office. To find each county's contact info, go to:
www.mastergardeners.org
Ciao for now.
Yvonne Savio
Common Ground Garden Program Manager
University of California Cooperative Extension, Los Angeles County
PO Box 22255
4800 E. Cesar E. Chavez Avenue
Los Angeles CA 90022
Phone: 323-260-3407
Fax: 323-881-0067
Email: ydsavio at ucdavis.edu
Website: http://celosangeles.ucdavis.edu/Common_Ground_Garden_Program/
Master Gardener Email Gardening helpline: mglosangeleshelpline at ucdavis.edu
Master Gardener Phone Gardening helpline: 323-260-3238
2007 Lifetime Achievement Award, Los Angeles Community Garden Council
2007 Certificate of Commendation, Los Angeles Unified School District
2006 Certificate of Appreciation, City of Los Angeles
2004 "Feeding the Hungry" Garden Crusader Award, Gardener's Supply Company
Since 1978, the Common Ground Garden program has helped Los Angeles County
residents to garden, grow their own food, and healthfully prepare it. Our
targeted audience and priority are to serve limited-resource residents and
those traditionally underrepresented. By training community volunteers, we
empower neighborhoods to create their own solutions. Our Master Gardener
volunteers work primarily with community gardens, school gardens, seniors,
and homeless and battered women's shelters.
In 2007, 179 Master Gardeners volunteered 8,037 hours serving 64,262
low-income gardeners in Los Angeles County at 31 community gardens, 48
school gardens, 13 shelter gardens, 2 senior gardens, and 14 fairs and
farmers markets.
-----Original Message-----
From: community_garden-bounces at list.communitygarden.org
[mailto:community_garden-bounces at list.communitygarden.org] On Behalf Of
community_garden-request at list.communitygarden.org
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007 9:02 AM
To: community_garden at list.communitygarden.org
Subject: Community_garden Digest, Vol 317, Issue 1
Send Community_garden mailing list submissions to
community_garden at list.communitygarden.org
To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
http://list.communitygarden.org/mailman/listinfo/community_garden_list.commu
nitygarden.org
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
community_garden-request at list.communitygarden.org
You can reach the person managing the list at
community_garden-owner at list.communitygarden.org
When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of Community_garden digest..."
Today's Topics:
1. Redefining American Beauty, by the Yard (Moonshae)
2. San Diego area Community Gardens (Sharon Gordon)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2007 14:15:22 -0500
From: Moonshae <shaester at gmail.com>
Subject: [Community_garden] Redefining American Beauty, by the Yard
To: community_garden at list.communitygarden.org
Message-ID: <5D0C2E09-4F9F-493C-AE12-A26CA09604FE at gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
Water Saving Backyards
Redefining American Beauty, by the Yard
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
New York Times, Published: July 13, 2006
Straight to the Source
WHEN Cecilia Foti, a seventh grader at the Bancroft Middle School
here, was asked to write a persuasive essay for her English class in
the spring semester, she did not choose a topic deeply in tune with
her peers the pros and cons of school uniforms, say, or the districts
retro policy on chewing gum and cellphones.
Instead, she addressed the neighborhood?s latest controversy: her
family?s front yard. The American lawn needs to be eradicated from
our society and fast! she wrote, explaining that her family had
replaced its own with a fruit and vegetable garden. She argued for
the importance of water conservation, the dangers of pesticides and
the dietary benefits and visual appeal of an edible yard. Was the
Garden of Eden grass? she reasoned. No.
In this quintessential 1950s tract community about 25 miles southeast
of downtown Los Angeles, the transformation of the Foti family?s
front yard from one of grass to one dense with pattypan squash
plants, cornstalks, millionaire eggplants, crimson sweet watermelons,
dwarf curry trees and about 195 other edible varieties has been
startling.
The empty front lawn requiring mowing, watering and weeding
previously on this location has been removed, reads a placard set
amid veggies in oval planting beds fronting the street.
The sign is a not-so-subtle bit of propaganda proclaiming the second
and most recent installment of Edible Estates, an experimental
project by Fritz Haeg, a 37-year-old Los Angeles architect and ersatz
Frederick Law Olmsted. The project, which he inaugurated on the
Fourth of July weekend in 2005 in a front yard in Salina, Kan., is
part of a nascent delawning movement concerned with replacing lawns
around the country with native plants, from prairie grasses in
suburban Chicago to cactus gardens in Tucson.
It is a kind of high-minded version of Extreme Makeover: Home
Edition. As Mr. Haeg put it, It?s about shifting ideas of what?s
beautiful.
It?s about what happens on that square of land between the public
street and the private house. It?s about social engagement. I wanted
to get away from the idea of home as an obsessive isolating cocoon.
The Fotis volunteered for the project after reading about it in early
2006 at treehugger.com, an environmental Web site. Cecilias father,
Michael Foti, a 36-year-old computer programmer and avid gardener who
raises chickens in the backyard, was eager to put his environmental
politics into practice.
I am looking to think differently about this space, Mr. Foti said of
the family?s once-placid front yard. I want to look outward rather
than inward.
The delawning was accomplished over Memorial Day weekend by a SWAT
team of some 15 recruits who read about the project on Mr. Haeg?s Web
site. Mr. Haeg arrived armed with three rented sod cutters, a roto-
tiller and a dozen rakes and shovels, and within three days the yard
was transformed.
The new garden has caused much rumbling in the neighborhood, a pin-
neat community originally built after World War II for returning
G.I.s where colorful windsocks and plastic yard butterflies prevail.
Some neighbors fret about a potential decline in property values,
while others worry that all those succulent fruits and vegetables
will attract drive-by thieves as well as opossums and other vermin in
pursuit of Maui onions and Brandywine tomatoes.
But the biggest concern seems to be the breaching of an unspoken
perimeter. What happens in the backyard is their business, said a 40-
year-old high-voltage lineman who lives down the street and would
give only his initials, Z.V. But this doesn?t seem to me to be a
front yard kind of a deal.
In spite of its contemporary media-savvy title, Edible Estates is a
throwback to the early 20th century, when yards were widely regarded
as utilitarian spaces, particularly in working-class neighborhoods.
As recently as the 1920s and 1930s, decorative lawns which in this
country date back at least to George Washington?s Mount Vernon and
Thomas Jefferson?s Monticello were still largely the province of the
elite, according to Ted Steinberg, a historian at Case Western
Reserve and the author of the new book American Green: The Obsessive
Quest for the Perfect Lawn (W. W. Norton). The yard was for putting
food on the table, Dr. Steinberg said, in the form of vegetables,
goats, rabbits and small livestock.
It was not until the postwar period that the notion of the lawn as
the national landscape developed as a vehicle for upward mobility,
with zoning setbacks designed to encourage clover- and dandelion-free
perfection the living version of broadloom carpeting, Dr. Steinberg
said.
While backyards remained private, the front yard evolved into a
ceremonial space that appears effortlessly and without labor, said
Margaret Crawford, a professor of urban design and planning theory at
the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In middle-class neighborhoods,
she said, the idea of actually using the front yard is extremely
unusual.
Mr. Haeg, who was raised in suburban Minneapolis, now lives in a
geodesic dome in East Los Angeles with a subterranean sprayed-
concrete cave worthy of Dr. No. Covered in mouse-brown asphalt
shingles, it dates to 1984; he found it on the Internet in 2000. Soon
after he moved in, he began cultivating edible plants like kale and
pineapple guava in his terraced garden, and he surrounded the dome
with trellises for grapevines.
Mr. Haeg is perhaps best known in Los Angeles for his Sundown Salons,
which transform his three-level, shag-carpeted home into an
alternative cultural space that attracts artists, other architects,
recent M.F.A. graduates and assorted gadflies. The theme and tenor of
the once-a-month gatherings, which began shortly after he moved in,
have varied; they?ve included traditional literary gatherings as well
as gay and lesbian performance art and all-night knitting and make
your own pasta animal sessions.
Mr. Haeg has taught at several colleges, including the Art Center
College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., where he oversaw his students
design and construction of Gardenlab, a campus community garden,
beginning in 2001. He is now designing a house for a film executive
in the Silver Lake section of Los Angeles and a rooftop garden for an
apartment complex in downtown Los Angeles.
Mr. Haeg selected Salina as his first Edible Estates site for its
heartland symbolism it is close to the geographic center of the
country and found his first subjects, Stan and Priti Cox, through
the Land Institute, a Salina-based organization dedicated to
ecologically sustainable agriculture, where Mr. Cox worked as a plant
geneticist.
I didn?t feel any emotion, Ms. Cox, 38, said of her defunct sod
expanse. It was monotonous. Now my senses are stimulated.
Mr. Haeg is planning seven more Edible Estates sites. (Coming soon:
Baltimore and Minneapolis.) Though he lacks training in landscape
architecture or horticulture, he has been shrewd in his recruitment
of plant-literate people with sunny, treeless front yards.
So far each estate has been planted to reflect its region: the Cox
garden in Kansas is heavy with okra and corn, with a smattering of
bitter gourd, pimento and curry trees in deference to Ms. Coxs Indian
roots. The Foti?s yard in California is resplendent with pomelos,
oranges, mandarins and other citrus fruit.
Mr. Haeg regards the Edible Estates project as something of a
manifesto. He fantasizes about setting off a chain reaction among
gardeners that would challenge Americans to rethink their lawns which
he insists on calling pre-edible landscapes though he knows the
chances are slim. Still, he wants to make a point.
Diversity is healthy, he said. The pioneers were ecologically-minded
out of sheer necessity, because they had to eat what they grew. But
we?ve lost touch with the garden as a food source.
What is theoretical for Mr. Haeg, of course, has become everyday
reality for Michael Foti, who must live with his edible estate and
arrive home from a long day at the office to prune and weed and smite
caterpillars into the wee hours without pesticide, he is quick to note.
Mr. Foti is taking the garden one day at a time, A.A. style, a bit
uneasy at the thought of waning daylight. The biggest pest, he noted,
is inertia.
We sometimes joke that its the garden that ate our marriage, he said,
then added wearily: I do feel a certain pressure not to fail. The
whole neighborhood is watching.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
http://list.communitygarden.org/pipermail/community_garden_list.communitygar
den.org/attachments/20071209/525b43dc/attachment.html
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2007 22:21:56 -0500
From: "Sharon Gordon" <gordonse at one.net>
Subject: [Community_garden] San Diego area Community Gardens
To: "Community GardenNational"
<community_garden at list.communitygarden.org>
Message-ID: <011001c83adb$d1b97420$6501a8c0 at hsd1.md.comcast.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
We have a request from someone in the San Diego area looking for community
gardens near their apartment. Is there a list of community gardens in the
area and/or list of people organizing new ones?
Thank you.
Sharon
gordonse at one.net
------------------------------
_______________________________________________
The American Community Gardening Association listserve is only one of ACGA's
services to community gardeners. To learn more about the ACGA and to find
out how to join, please go to http://www.communitygarden.org
To post an e-mail to the list: community_garden at list.communitygarden.org
To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your subscription:
http://list.communitygarden.org/mailman/listinfo/community_garden_list.commu
nitygarden.org
End of Community_garden Digest, Vol 317, Issue 1
************************************************
More information about the Community_garden
mailing list