Club Sows the Seeds of Protest : Dispute: Gardeners face eviction from city-owned plots if it won’t agree to pay for irrigation. But members say they will fight the city’s ultimatum.

The dozen garden plots brimming with tomatoes, corn and lettuce are more than a hobby for 85-year-old Jenny Moreno Contreras.

For the 10-year member of the Arleta Community Garden Club, the fruit and vegetables she harvests from land beneath power lines means food that she otherwise could not afford.

“This is where we eat,” said Contreras, who shares her home with three relatives. “My pension is too small for me. I do this so I won’t be on welfare.”

Like Contreras, most of the 72 garden club members are senior citizens on fixed incomes. For 17 years they have tilled the soil on unwanted odd lots along Canterbury Avenue to produce fruit, vegetables and flowers.

Now, after months of haggling over the price of water to irrigate the land, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s mammoth bureaucracy has issued an ultimatum and a July 6 deadline: Pay up or get out.

The DWP owns the 5.5 acres the garden club has sown, but these seniors, who say the harvest is a vital supplement to their diets and incomes, don’t plan to bow out quietly.

“If we’re ousted, some of our members will be close to welfare,” said Craig Wickham, 37, the club’s vice president. “I don’t want to see that.”

Wickham and other members fighting eviction plan a protest at DWP offices in Sun Valley today.

“It’s not fair,” said Henry Fowzer, the club’s 83-year-old treasurer, who says he feeds his grandchildren with the cucumbers and tomatoes he raises on 12 garden plots. “The crops are ready to produce. We’re going to take one heck of a shellacking.”

The DWP has been negotiating with residents for more than a year without reaching an agreement, said Dan Duffy, superintendent of transmission rights of way.

“We can’t continue this way,” Duffy said. “We have to insist that the garden club sign the agreement to continue occupancy or we will have to ask them to leave.”

Duffy dismissed club members’ contentions that the department is trying to chase off the senior citizens and lease the property to a commercial nursery instead.

“The department’s position is we really do recognize the value of the garden clubs,” Duffy said. “The department itself would like to see the garden club continue.”

For Wickham, the club simply lacks the money and manpower to meet DWP demands, such as paying for water used in the garden’s northern section after 17 years of receiving it for free. Members say it could double the club’s annual $4,500 water bill, which is paid by charging members an annual $8 per plot.

“Our garden plot fees are going to double,” Wickham said. “We’ll lose some gardeners who can’t afford it.”

Members also bristle at requirements that the club take over maintenance of parkways and keep areas beneath transmission towers clear of weeds.

“They’re asking citizens to provide free maintenance to the DWP,” said member Larry Clark, 51, as a handful of gardeners cooled off in the shade of a tree yesterday.

“We say that’s slave labor,” Fowzer said.