A Distressing Crop of Water Worries : Community gardens: Green thumbs using public land fear the drought will bring an end to their small urban refuges.
At a time of year when those who garden in community plots normally would be celebrating the bounty of a winter harvest of broccoli, onions, cabbage and greens, many are instead worrying about being kicked off their tiny plots as a result of the drought.
“If we use too much water they’ll just cut us off and throw us out,” said Robert Holtby, the secretary-treasurer of the gardening association at a four-acre site tucked into a little-noticed corner of Van Nuys Airport.
There are about 50 community gardens, which make small plots available to hobby gardeners, throughout Los Angeles County, mostly on land owned by public agencies.
The airport community garden buys its water from the Department of Water and Power just like any other commercial customer. That means that repeatedly exceeding its rationed allotments could result in a shut-off, Holtby said. Other community gardens operating on Los Angeles Unified School District grounds or land owned by other city agencies receive their water free and must depend on the continued generosity of their hosts as water costs rise.
No public officials are proposing to order that the gardens be left fallow. Still, the gardeners who consider their little plots to be refuges from the city--a place to enjoy the outdoors while trading a secret or two with fellow green thumbs about new seed strains--are trying to use less water so that their hobby won’t come to be considered superfluous and wasteful. Especially if water rationing is made more stringent than the 25% reductions from 1986 usage by May that now are widely expected.
Some of the community gardeners are not planting on portions of their tiny holdings to save water. Many are using established conservation methods such as soaker hoses, drip irrigation systems and mulching. Other gardening groups have bought new leakproof faucets or removed hoses altogether, meaning watering must be done by hand using buckets.
“We need to demonstrate to the public and our policy-makers that we can garden using less water,” said Rachel Mabie, a community outreach coordinator for Common Ground, a University of California Extension Office project that sponsors 15 community gardens at housing projects and other publicly owned property around the county.
“As gardeners, we can do a lot to teach . . . people about water conservation,” she said. “Gardening helps people to understand and be a lot more conscious about the importance of water in our lives and how we can conserve it and use it more responsibly.”
Common Ground is putting together a newsletter with water conservation tips, such as planting early to allow harvesting in June before the hottest part of the year. The organization has also removed water hoses and installed spring-loaded faucets that shut off automatically when not in use.
“We have senior citizens who spend 10 hours a day, seven days a week working in their garden, and if they were not able to . . . I hate to think what effect that would have on their lives,” Mabie said.
Others don’t think the gardens will ever be eliminated, even those that receive their water free, because the grounds would still have to be maintained by the agencies that own them. Herschel Burke Gilbert, a retired composer for movies and television who is planning to grow Tahitian squash, tomatoes and corn this summer at Wattles Farm in the Hollywood Hills, said he is not worried.
He acknowledged that a vegetable such as squash needs a lot of water, but he said he uses as little as possible by digging deep irrigation ditches and filling them with water instead of spraying water on a wider area. Wattles Farm is on property owned by the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, and its water supply is free to the gardeners, who pay only a minimal annual fee, usually $12 to $30, to lease their plots.
But, Gilbert said, “the department knows what we use so we are very careful” with water.
Susan Hardin, a caterer who also heads the Mid-Valley Garden Assn. at Millikan Junior High School in Sherman Oaks, said the group is leaving a quarter of its 40 plots unplanted this year to help meet city rationing goals. But she said the group has no way of knowing how much water it is using because the gardeners merely tap into the school’s water supply.
She said she has asked administrators at the school about any plans to move the group’s 17 gardeners off their plots but has not gotten a firm answer.
“They don’t want to deal with it,” she said. “We got no reply from them on whether or not we’d be able to garden.”
Alan Tomiyama, the head of the school district’s operations branch, said schools must reduce water usage the same as other customers, by 10% in March and 15% beginning May 1 under current rules. He said the district has “to look at all aspects of water usage” but said the community gardens would not be targeted. He said he planned to meet with representatives of the gardens, which also occupy portions of campuses in Granada Hills, Gardena and Woodland Hills, to “see if we can jointly reduce the use of water, if there is a need.”
But, he said, the district has no way of letting administrators at individual schools know how much water is used at their campuses because the school district makes a unified payment to the DWP.
A spokesman for the DWP, Ed Freudenberg, said community gardens where the water supply is metered will be treated the same as any of the agency’s commercial customers. If they repeatedly violate restrictions on wasting water or exceed their allotments, it could result in the installation of flow restrictors or even a shut-off.
The water at the garden center in the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Center is supplied by the recreation and parks department but its use is carefully monitored, said Janet LaFrance, the garden’s supervisor. “We have been given an allotment just like everybody else and we’re . . . reading our water meters every day and really being aware of what we are using,” she said.
Although the department’s water staff does some irrigation, the individual gardeners also apply water. LaFrance said she is encouraging them to use soaker hoses and to water deeply and infrequently.
“The gardeners don’t pay for the water . . . but the feeling of most of the patrons here is that they will do whatever they can to help us keep this place,” she said.
At the Van Nuys Airport community garden, the gardening association’s $70 water bill for January is posted for all to see, and Holtby said his fellow gardeners are conscientious about watching how much they use. The gardeners there used about 600 gallons a day less in January and February than they did during the same months last year and are allotted about 5,000 gallons a day in March, down from the 8,000 gallons a day they used two years ago.
“They keep asking, ‘How are we doing on water? How are we doing on water?’ ” Holtby said.
Holtby said a six-member committee watches for water wasters among the group’s 60 members. If someone uses too much, he said, they will be warned, and if they persist they will be expelled. So far, he said, that has not been a problem.
Walter Watson, who retired from a Sylmar aircraft supply firm, has been growing vegetables in the community garden at the airport since 1976. He has a small shed to store his tools and a couple of battered chairs where neighbors stop by to tap his fount of gardening knowledge.
Light-green heads of cabbage, onions, beets, peas and three kinds of greens are ready for harvest on his eight 10-by-40-foot plots. Watson, 74, estimated that he is using 20% less water now than he has in past years.
But he admitted to fearing that his sacrifice would not be enough. If he could no longer garden because of water cutbacks, he said, much more than a cheap supply of vegetables would be eliminated. “I’d be lost, to tell you the truth . . . I’ve been coming here so long,” Watson said.
