Harvest of Hope : Rebuilding: A handful of inner-city gardens have sprung up, begun with U.S. riot-recovery aid. Residents say the vegetables and fruit provide much-needed food--and pride.

When residents of a grimy industrial neighborhood south of Downtown Los Angeles were offered free seeds, fertilizer and plots to establish a community garden outside the Los Angeles Regional Foodbank last fall, the initial response was lackluster.

“They felt they’d be scammed,” said Doris Bloch, director of the surplus food distributing charity. “They said, ‘We have to give half the food we grow to the bank, right?’ And I said, ‘No, this is your food.’ ”

Now, lush rows of Mexican corn grow 12 feet high with the city’s skyscrapers as a backdrop. And inner-city farmers pick plump tomatoes and vividly colored chilies and pumpkins as Metro Blue Line trolleys whiz past the chain-link fence protecting the city-owned lot. It’s almost as if history was repeating itself, with vacant land in the heart of the gritty urban cityscape--a mere 40 blocks from City Hall--restored to its agricultural roots.

The 7.5-acre community garden at Long Beach Avenue and 41st Street, tilled and harvested by more than 100 families, was established with the help of that rarest of funding sources--federal seed money set aside for post-riot relief.

Unfortunately, only a handful of programs have actually taken root more than a year after top U.S. Agriculture Department officials and then-Rebuild L.A. Chairman Peter V. Ueberroth announced plans to establish 10 such community gardens across riot-scarred neighborhoods of Los Angeles--a sort-of “weed and seed” program without the controversy of the anti-crime measure of that name.

“What’s difficult, basically, is getting the land,” said Fernando Silva of L.A. Harvest, a private, nonprofit organization overseeing the garden projects. “And when you’ve finally got the land, you have to prepare the soil. It’s a major operation, especially when the lot is a big lot.”

This month, SIPA, a Filipino-American community organization, held a groundbreaking ceremony for a garden on a Beverly Boulevard lot nearly as dusty as an Oklahoma farm field at the height of the Great Depression. Other gardens funded but not yet started are planned for Hollywood, the Westlake area and South-Central Los Angeles.

Garden programs serving about a dozen families each have been launched this year at the St. Joseph’s Center Preschool in Venice and in the Jordan Downs and Pueblo del Rio housing projects in South-Central Los Angeles.

Another 30-family community garden in the Nickerson Gardens housing project, one of about nine currently operating gardens established with federal support before the riots, was rejuvenated with the post-riot federal seed money. Protected by a tall metal fence, it is probably the most neatly maintained of these gardens in Los Angeles.

“We have about 30 plots out there and we’re growing corn, beets, eggplant, bell peppers, cabbage, carrots, greens, green onions, jalapeno peppers and three types of squash,” Nickerson resident Juanita Randle said. “Now, we don’t have to run to the store for vegetables. And with no spraying, everything is natural.”

Brenda Funches, managing adviser of the federal Common Ground garden program, says that even an initiative as down-to-earth as a community garden takes time to flourish.

“Everyone wants things happening in a year because it’s a benchmark--one year after the riots,” Funches said. “But it took longer than a year for people to end up in the state they were in. And it will take more than a year to get out of it.

“This is a long-term thing and we’re literally planting seeds of hope.”

Besides, proponents say, most would agree that the goals are worthwhile.

“This is about feeding people,” Silva said. “Most of what is the so-called neglected community doesn’t have access to fresh produce. What they can get in the small stores around those communities is not just very bad in quality but very expensive as well.”

Moreover, community gardens promote family togetherness and can serve as a source of pride and industry, backers say.

“So many people--particularly recent immigrants from Central America--tell me, ‘Look, I don’t know how to read or write or speak in English,’ ” Silva said. “There is so little I can teach to my children and I have no opportunity to show my children I have some kind of knowledge living in this strange land that is Los Angeles.

“Now for the first time, I have an opportunity to teach my kids and show them their father is a person with a lot of knowledge on very important matters--basic survival and transforming land into a productive living thing.”

At the same time, proponents of community gardens concede that the current program only serves a tiny number of needy families. In addition, problems such as theft occasionally crop up.

“You have to think in terms of not just adequate space and access to water but also security,” said Lamont Bristol of the Pacific Asian Consortium in Employment, which supervises the gardens programs in city housing projects. “It’s a big problem, especially now.

“In Pueblo del Rio, I put up razor wire because people were climbing over the fence and picking the produce. No one has done that since I put up the razor wire.”

The garden at Pueblo serves 12 Latino, African-American and Cambodian families. Each grows vegetables used in the favorite dishes of their cultures.

It’s the same at the nearby Foodbank garden, where the manner in which families farm also reflects their cultural heritage.

“This is a microcosm of Western Hemisphere agricultural practices,” Bloch said. “People from different countries have different growing practices. Some plant corn next to tomatoes, some don’t do that because they think it is wrong.”

Even the borders of plots differ dramatically. Some are lined with old cornstalks, others with cactus, aloe or flowers.

The Foodbank garden, conceived shortly after the riots, got a jump-start because of Bloch’s close relationship with City Hall officials and the proximity of the two-block-long, city-owned lot that was once targeted for a large incinerator project and later for affordable housing.

In a neighborhood dominated by auto salvage and recycling businesses, the garden serves as an eye-pleasing and eye-opening respite, providing proof that with adequate soil and water, one can grow a wide variety of fruit and vegetables virtually anywhere in Los Angeles.

Aesthetics, however, are the least of it.

“These are low-income people, not Berkeley in the ‘60s. These people need the food they grow,” Bloch said. “Our goal is to give people who lack resources additional resources to help themselves.”

Besides donations of soil and seeds--and start-up labor provided by the Los Angeles Conservation Corps--the garden cost just over $8,000 to establish, Block said.

At this point, it has taken off like the corn and sunflower plants that dwarf most of the urban farmers, and has a waiting list of 160 families.

“People don’t feel as empowered when a big building is put in their neighborhood as much as when a project helps them lead better lives now,” Bloch said.

Garden co-chairs Alfredo and Ruth De Anda are a case in point.

Ruth, 36, and Alfredo, 44, a onetime migrant farm worker, have had difficulty finding jobs in Los Angeles to support their six children who live at home.

“I’ve looked for work,” Ruth De Anda said. “But if you pay a baby-sitter $60 a week and make $150 a week, it’s not worth it.”

By toiling in the urban field, the De Andas save at least $60 a month on vegetables and fruit and have spent much of the summer teaching their young sons Octavio, 8, and Juaquin, 3, how to farm.

“This is something positive,” she said. “You can come here and forgot the world.”

“A lot of people rely on what they grow here. People trade things for dinner. By the time everyone leaves at night, they have dinner.”

The De Andas have been among the most successful of farmers, growing vegetables in such large quantities that last week they donated 30 pounds of freshly picked tomatoes to the food bank.

Carlos Monroe, a disabled former recycling company manager, has had a tougher time. “I’m a bad farmer,” said Monroe, 51, as he watered his dusty patch of vegetables. “My wife grew up on a farm, but she won’t show me how to do it.”

Monroe said some problems have developed in the garden because several participants hog the handful of hoses and because the gates have been locked at 8 p.m. since a couple of minor theft and vandalism incidents occurred. Now, people who work do not always have time to tend to their crops, he said.

The garden, because of its sheer magnitude and the tall, razor-wire fence, has also led to misunderstandings.

“Some people think we’re in jail,” said Aldo Garcia, 8, as he planted corn and beans with his mother, Marta. “But I tell them this is fun. I’m tired of being at home during the summer.”

Factory worker Miguel Avalos, 51, agreed. Dressed in a white cowboy hat and carrying an overflowing plastic bag of cucumbers and tomatoes, Avalos, who grew up on a farm in Mexico, smiled as he loaded the day’s harvest in the back of his pickup truck.

“This tastes better than from the store,” Avalos said, “because it doesn’t cost anything.”