The Plots Thicken : Gardens: Arleta club’s land is flourishing with fruits, vegetables and companionship that links people of many heritages.

Beneath a towering row of power lines, a meeting of nations is taking place at the Arleta Community Garden Club.

Anna Simone, 70, of Sun Valley is hacking away some devil’s grass from neatly tended plots where she is growing fava beans, escarole, dandelions and that most Italian of vegetables--tomatoes.

“I show you a tomato!” says the vigorous Simone, pointing to the product of a handful of seeds she brought back from Italy last year. “I like this work.”

Nearby, Harut Chakmakchian is kneeling beside his purple basil, to be used in Greek foods for family and friends.

“Salad,” says Chakmakchian, who knows almost no English, pointing to the tiny plants.

The bitter melons of Filipino Rene Daliva lie next to Chinese-American Donald Chu’s garden, along with the crops of Mexican, Japanese and Central American immigrants--95 members in all, growing fruits and vegetables they couldn’t find in most San Fernando Valley supermarkets, as well as garden staples like corn and tomatoes.

Started in 1976, Arleta’s garden club is now bigger than ever--with 20 new members and two new parcels of land to till--after resolving a dispute with the Department of Water and Power last year.

The DWP, which lets the club farm below its electrical towers along Canterbury Avenue, discovered that it had unknowingly paid the bill for a large portion of the garden’s water over the years--about $35,000. The DWP asked the club to pay more for water, not farm within 50 feet of any tower and create a 16-foot access road through the middle of the garden, or leave the property.

“We were blamed for the way the DWP was neglecting their property,” said garden-master David Winseman, who spends about three hours a day on the site.

The garden club--mostly made up of senior citizens and low-income families who rely on the garden for sustenance or entertainment--grudgingly agreed, expecting to have to raise their members’ yearly water rates from $8 to $20 per plot to meet the demand. The increase was significant, since many of the gardeners work up to a dozen of the 15-foot plots.

Under a compromise, the rates were only raised to $10.

DWP officials have since revised regulations on watering gardens citywide, making it cheaper for urban garden clubs to water their crops. The DWP maintained throughout the controversy last year that it never considered expelling the garden club, and simply asked the club to support itself.

Since then, relations with the DWP and a handful of neighbors opposed to the garden have blossomed, and the club now is allowed to farm on about 7 1/2 acres of DWP land, up from about six acres, according to Winseman.

Some residents are still less than supportive of the garden, however.

“We have a 12-foot window and it overlooks this stupid garden,” said Sheila Badger, 69, one of the few residents opposed to the club who hasn’t moved out. “Our main concern is the beer drinking and urinating that goes on over there. And they’ve been growing some kind of sugar cane to make alcohol. We’re the only English-speaking people around here. Those old men sit around there all day long. What can they do with 40 tomato bushes?”

Instead of losing members as a result of the water rate increase, the club has significantly grown instead, and there is a waiting list for garden plots, Winseman said.

Don Holdstock, 65, of Panorama City has been working in the garden for 15 years. Now that he is retired, the garden is a way to stay active and get out of the house.

“At the time I started, I was working, so it was just fun,” he said. “Now, I’m retired, so it helps me get the cobwebs out. I don’t bowl or anything like that.”

Many of the members feel a kinship with others who enjoy working the land. The club is planning a picnic for the end of June, when members can enjoy the fruits of each other’s labor as well as their own.

“It’s fun,” said club president Mel Vargas, 64, a former employee of the Los Angeles County Arboretum. “One of the reasons I fought the DWP for a year is that these are mainly poor people who don’t have much money, or things to do, so they need this.”