Housing Project Holds a Garden Party
Nell Wilkerson shook her head in disbelief a few weeks ago when she saw workers blocking out neat rows of redwood-framed vegetable plots in the middle of the sprawling Nickerson Gardens public housing project.
“What fool is going to be out here trying to grow greens in this park?” said Wilkerson, 44, who has lived eight years in the South Los Angeles subsidized apartment complex notorious for its high crime rate.
But Wilkerson, daughter of a Tennessee sharecropper, found the soft, freshly turned soil hard to resist. She signed up for one of the 20 vegetable patches and on Tuesday was with a small group of neighbors and a larger group of public officials who planted the first seeds.
‘Not Going to Be Easy’
“I know it’s not going to be easy,” said Wilkerson, foreseeing problems with children who may take the gardens for sandboxes or “a few others who may take what they want.”
“We’re going to have our ups and downs,” she said. “But I can see a lot of good in it.” The gardens are one of several such projects across the country sponsored by End World Hunger, an organization whose motto is: “Give a hand, not a handout.”
“Our goal is to have food gardens available in every public project in America,” said the group’s executive director, Diane Silverman, who believes that “it empowers people when they help themselves.”
“Given an opportunity to help themselves, poor people will break the preconceived idea of poor people as a problem,” she said. In organizing the garden project, the group brought together private and public agencies, including the Housing Authority and agricultural advisers from the University of California.
Coffee, doughnuts and seeds were offered at the vegetable gardens’ dedication ceremony, where representatives of city, county, state and federal officials, as well as uniformed representatives of the project’s sponsor, Budget Rent-a-Car, far outnumbered residents.
The gardeners, seated in an open, grassy area surrounded by two-story concrete apartment buildings, learned that they will receive advice on how to tend their crops and that--if nature and their neighbors cooperate--each 4-by-16-foot plot will produce about $300 worth of food a year.
Vagaries of Urban Farming
Maria Antonia Alvarado, 54, and her daughter, Alicia Prado, 25, already know something about the vagaries of urban farming.
Alvarado has had her share of headaches tending her own small yard--”the kids dig out my plants and have fights with my tomatoes.” So many plants have been stolen from her mother’s porch that the women have resorted to keeping most of them indoors.
But she and her daughter signed up for one of the last plots anyway, even though they seldom take part in community activities at the housing project because they speak mostly Spanish.
“I love to work in the earth,” said Alvarado, who grew up surrounded by fields and orchards in her native Mexican hometown. “God willing, they’ll leave the gardens alone.”
Her daughter was less optimistic. “I don’t think they’ll respect it, unless everybody cooperates,” she said.
Nevertheless, she helped her mother fill out the checklist for seeds offered through the program. They added chiles and Chinese parsley--key ingredients in making salsa --on the line at the bottom of the list that said “other.”
The first harvest is expected in early spring. If the pioneer gardeners meet with success and interest grows, more gardens will be blocked out.
Wilma Jean Powns, 46, a longtime resident of the projects, has no doubt that the urban farmers will prevail.
“There may be some destructiveness, but we’ll keep going,” she said. “We’ll keep going ‘til they learn they can’t destroy this because we’re going to work together like a family.”
