A Green Jewel : Tilling the Soil at Community Garden Produces Food, Friendships

They come early, before the sun gets too high, stepping down the street in work boots and wide-brimmed hats, eager to hit the dirt.

At 8 a.m. on a Saturday, the air is cool as the gardeners arrive in ones and twos, unlocking the chain-link gates, shouting out “Good morning!” and heading to their plots in one of the oldest community gardens in the city.

This strip of soil, which stretches from 118th to 120th streets between Avalon Boulevard and Stanford Avenue, is an unlikely pocket of rural tranquillity. A tangle of power lines hums overhead. Even its name--the Century Freeway Garden--calls gridlock, not greenery, to mind.

But those who have worked this earth during the past 18 years treasure it like a green jewel mounted in a concrete setting. Not only is the place peaceful, they say, but it helps keep the cupboards full. Food, not flowers, is the primary crop--the 56 gardeners grow everything from avocados to broccoli, from sweet potatoes to sugar cane.

“We grow every vegetable you can name. My food bill is almost zero,” said Julia Lee, 69, a retired teacher’s assistant who has coordinated the garden since she helped found it in 1974. “When one family doesn’t have, we share with the others. That’s the way we do.”

Next month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Presidential Task Force on L.A. Recovery plans to begin distributing $2.75 million in grants to help create new gardens and other urban greening projects across the city. As the new gardens get under way, the Century Freeway Garden will serve as an enduring example of how a patch of fertile ground, and a lot of sweat, can bind a community.

Built on city-owned land under a federally funded program, the Century Freeway Garden receives no government money for operations, though the city leases the land free of charge. Garden members--some who waited years for a plot--buy their own seeds and tools. But the return on their investment is shared by the entire neighborhood.

Lee, the garden coordinator, and her husband, Andrew, often bring vegetables that they have canned to the people--many of them elderly--who live around the garden. The couple has invited schoolchildren and Scout troops in, to teach youngsters about how things grow. And Lee is not shy about teaching a few other things as well.

“No one can come in the garden,” she said, grinning, “without registering to vote.”

Not all the gardeners live within walking distance. Some travel from Compton and Baldwin Hills, and the Lees live more than 30 blocks away, on 89th Street. But inside the garden gates, everyone is a neighbor.

“It’s like a family thing--everybody knows everybody. Most of us been knowing each other for years,” said Cliff Johnwell, 55, a truck driver, known around the garden as Peanut Man--for one of his favorite crops. People keep an eye on each other, he said.

“If I don’t come out, people get to wondering,” he said. And Johnwell returns the favor.

Johnwell has been known to arrive at 5:30 a.m. to work the plow for older gardeners who cannot manage the equipment alone. If someone is sick, Johnwell and others tend their plot. If someone fails to show up altogether, not a day passes before their telephone rings.

Ask Julia Lee for a tour of the garden and, amid the okra and butter beans, she will tell the stories of her friends. She nods toward a man hoeing a vine-covered patch; his mother has just passed away.

“I keep going to see about him,” she said. Another man just lost his wife. “We look after him.”

At the corner of one plot, she points to a small house. A year ago, she says, it was a haven for drug dealers.

“We got rid of it,” she said.

To get rid of other pests--insects and snails--the gardeners swap home remedies, not chemicals. Lee uses self-rising flour to keep the bugs away. And to deal with depression, anxiety or even anger, she and her fellow farmers say a trip to the garden is the best antidote.

When the city erupted after the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case, the neighborhood post office went up in flames just half a block away. The gardeners saw the smoke in the sky and kept gardening.

“We just came out here and talked about it,” Johnwell said.

“You come to the garden,” said Lee, “you get all your stress out.”

William Tate, 75, a retired postal clerk who lives on 109th Street, said that is the main reason he keeps tending his turnips, garlic and mustard greens. Years ago, after his wife told him she was tired of trying to cook his huge crop, he stopped bringing it home. But he kept planting. He believes it helps keep his high blood pressure under control.

“I get a kick out of it,” he said. “I just like to see it grow.”

True to his name, Al Gardner says, he too is hooked. For the past nine years, the 75-year-old retired postal service supervisor and truck driver has spent part of each day tending his 10-by-20-foot patch of okra, tomatoes and cabbage.

Saturday was no exception. As the sun rose, Gardner, who suffers from bursitis, sat on a milk crate, his eyes shaded by a big straw hat. He was planting red onions, using a string tied between two stakes to keep his row straight.

“I can’t be one of those front-porch sitters. You deteriorate--I swear you do,” he said. Sometimes, he said, his wife has worried about his daily visits to the garden.

“She knows this garden is my heart,” he said, pressing the earth firm around a tiny onion bulb. “But she says: ‘You shouldn’t stay too long. You’re going to drop dead.’ I say: ‘It wouldn’t bother me at all to drop dead in the garden. It’s right where I want to be.’ ”