Harvesting Hope From a Living Lab

It wasn’t the Mormon Tabernacle Choir framed in red poinsettias on a TV screen. It wasn’t a Crystal Cathedral production with live camels in the aisles.

It was the Crenshaw High School Elite Choir belting out Handel’s Messiah amid rows of broccoli and collard greens on the northeast corner of the school’s campus last Wednesday afternoon.

The a cappella carols amid the cabbages served as background music to the main event of the afternoon--the harvest of vegetables from a rejuvenated campus garden that is the centerpiece of a new program that students named “Food from the ‘Hood.”

Until May, the weed-choked patch that once served as the school’s horticultural teaching lab had lain fallow for years, the victim of declining school funds.

“I had been trying to get grants for five or six years to reopen the garden,” said Crenshaw science teacher Tammy Bird, who oversees the new program. “Then, after the riots, all these people just appeared and started networking.”

Lending help were nonprofit groups such as Gardens For Kids and LA Works, businesses such as Burpee Seeds and San Joaquin Composting Co., civic groups such as the Los Angeles Conservation Corps, along with volunteers such as Rachel and Bill Mabie, and marketing consultants Craig Rexroad and Melinda McMullen.

Since help came after the riots, about 30 students have worked with the volunteers--often on Saturdays--to weed out the brambles and create a large and lush garden that grows many vegetables. Through the program, the students learn about agriculture, science, marketing and business.

Last week, the fresh greens were added to boxes of food given to 42 families served by a neighborhood program called Helpers for the Homeless and Hungry.

As they picked their harvest Wednesday, high school sophomores--some of whom had never seen collard greens grow nor heard of Italian parsley--tossed lettuce into food boxes with glee appropriate for the season.

Six months ago, some of those students thought broccoli grew like little bumpy trees in the ground, and the only cabbage patches others had seen grew dolls.

At the beginning of the program, one volunteer noted wistfully, some students were afraid to invest so much time in a project they didn’t think could last. One student said she assumed that people would jump the schoolyard fence and take the vegetables.

Perhaps the most skeptical was Niombi Harris, 17.

“I thought it was stupid--you know, everybody digging in the dirt,” the lanky senior said. “But my whole outlook changed. I found out it could last.”

What made the difference?

“You spell it L-O-V-E,” said Harris, a speech and debate star who has been designated student spokesman for the program.

“We feel we need to give back to the community, to prove to the people that our community is a beautiful place,” he said, “Food From the ‘Hood, I mean, it’s cool, everybody likes it. . . . if another school sees what we’re doing, they can do the same, and grow food for another 42 families, and another school can grow it for another 42 families . . . “