Harvesting Hope in Community Gardens

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Often on urban lots, behind chain link fences, adorned with hand-painted signs, plots burgeoning with fruits, vegetables, and flowers, flanked by compost piles — the humble community garden feels like a salve for so much that ails us.

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On this Community Voices episode, we're going from Los Angeles to Brazil to hear how community gardens have brought people much more than fresh fruits and vegetables. With food prices on the rise and so many of us losing touch with the abundance of our communities, we thought it’d be nice to hear how community gardens have helped you — our community.

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Here are some of the people you'll hear from in this episode:

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• Listener contributions: Dr. Sheridan Ross, Alexa Rivera, Clara, Nick Blocha, Camille
• Editing and engineer: Evan Goodchild‍
• Host and producer: Katelan Cunningham

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Full Transcript

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Katelan (00:00):

Hey, welcome to Second Nature, a podcast from Commons. Commons is the app that over 100,000 people are using to cut through their greenwashing and earn rewards for sustainable living. And this is the show where we talk to people about how they're living sustainably in an unsustainable world. And before we kick off this week's episode, I wanted to share some really exciting news. Our show has been nominated for a webby.

Katelan (00:33):

If you haven't heard of them, the Webby Awards are kind of a big deal for people who make content on the internet. We're already in the top five sustainability podcasts, but we need your vote to get the win. We've added the link to vote in our show notes, or you can go right to vote dot webby awards.com and go to the podcast category and you'll find second nature under the sustainability and environment shows. After you vote, you're gonna receive an email to verify, and that's, it takes less than a minute. It would really mean a lot. So thanks in advance. Okay onto the show when you realize all they can do, it is hard not to romanticize community gardens often on urban, lots behind Chain link fences adorned with hand painted signs, plots burgeoning with fruits and vegetables and flowers, flanked by compost piles. The humble community garden feels like a sal. For so much that ails us, we have to get so much of our fresh food from big grocery stores. So it's no surprise that many of us have lost touch with the land that feeds us, the soil, the pollinators, the plants, and even the pests. They're all part of ecosystems that you can find in any community garden,

Katelan (02:00):

But not so much on industrial farms. The ones shipping most of our fresh food to grocery stores there, monocultures and pesticide use, have stripped the soil of its nutrients and killed off lots of pollinators. We haven't only lost touch with the source of our food because of industrial farming, though 18 million people in the US alone in 2023 were food insecure, many of them living in food deserts. You may have heard this term, food desert, which indicates an area where fresh, affordable food isn't readily available. But activist and farmer, Karen Washington prefers the term food apartheid. She coined this term because the thought of a desert conjuress up images of arid land where it's near impossible to grow food. But these quote unquote food deserts, they're not defined by a lack of possibility. They're defined by systemic neglect and people of color are most affected. Community gardens here in the US actually came about as a solution to the lack of accessible and affordable fresh food during the economic recession of the 1890s with food prices high today, and so many of us losing touch with the abundance and possibilities of our communities, we thought it'd be nice to hear how community gardens have helped you, our community.

Katelan (03:23):

I'm your host, Katelan Cunningham, and on this Community Voices episode of Second Nature, we're going from Los Angeles to Brazil to hear how you've connected with your neighbors, your food, and your local ecosystems through community gardens. And what better place to start than with a revisit to Compton Community Garden with Dr. Ross.

Dr. Sheridan Ross (03:49):

My background in, in agriculture actually started way back in 1974. Um, I worked with the University of California Cooperative Extension, and my job was to create community gardens in all throughout LA County. And I was given an area from Slauson to the Orange County line. And so garden here, Compton Community Garden is actually number 60 that I've created. This is one of the communities that desperately needed this garden because this area here is what's called a food desert. Uh, we started the garden on June of, um, 2012. Um, this was a, a vacant lot that had set vacant for 19 years. And when we got it, um, we had weeds that were so high that you couldn't even see from the street to the alley in the back. The first weekend we got like 600 volunteers here and we told 'em what we're gonna be doing.

Dr. Sheridan Ross (04:46):

We gave them their vision and everything. And um, a lot of people from Compton, a lot of people from hospitals around in the area, just a lot of interesting people that came to us. And all of the fire departments here in the city of Compton had all their trucks lined up in the middle of the street and they came out to help us. And it took us about all about three weekends to build this entire garden. And one of the ladies brought her kid here to the garden and she says, my kid won't eat vegetables at all. I said, okay, um, let me walk around with him for a while. And so we had peas grown up on the fence. And so I walked around and I picked one up and I put it in my hand and I picked one up and I gave it to him and I threw it in my mouth.

Dr. Sheridan Ross (05:30):

He looked at me, he says, uh, you didn't even wash that. I says, you know, I says, but I says, you know what? It's nice and fresh and everything. And so eventually he ate it. So I'm talking to another person and he says, okay, I'm ready to go. So I turn around and he has this whole shirt turned up with peace, and about a month later, his mom comes to the garden. She says, what did you do to my kid? I says, what do you mean? She says, just from that one interaction, him and his little friends have gotten together. He's cleaned off an area in my backyard, and she says he's growing vegetables. And she says, I came home the other day. He made me dinner. I just stood there. She says, it's filtered over to his classwork. I talked to his teacher and she says, what did you do to him? Now he's completely changed. He likes to be a helper now in class. He likes to do everything. I didn't do anything. She says, all I did was introduce him to a community garden. If that one introduction can change a person that deeply think what would could happen if we have this same situation at all elementary schools, we get kids to start eating vegetables instead of eating junk foods that can change a whole society.

Nick (06:54):

My name is Nick. I'm 26 years old. I currently live near Milford, Iowa. It's because I'm serving an AmeriCorps position at what's known as the Lakeside Labs up on West Okoboji right now. I started getting involved with community gardens when I was in high school, whether it was volunteering with the NHS or the Boy Scouts, or just my school in general, or even just helping out neighbors and friends that work on these things and they needed help tearing out certain kinds of weeds, et cetera. I've traveled around a lot in each place. I'll try to contribute to community gardens, whether it's enjoying the space or coming through and helping with planting. Uh, in Houston, there is a lot of community gardens that were some of the primary food sources for low income houses in the area. Sometimes those people would be able to contribute and sometimes it was just off of the goodwill of the volunteers and the people that are working in the community gardens that are saying, no, this is important to us too, then give it to those who desperately need this food.

Nick (08:07):

For me, I love digging in the dirt. I've always loved playing in the dirt As a kid, I was a barefoot kid running around in my backyard and through the woods, and there's always going to be that connection to nature for me and for me. There is also always going to be my connection to the involvement in the process of food. Personally, I think it's really important that I have a hand in the process of how food gets from the ground to me. So I'm aware of it and I work for it, and I'm, I'm fully conscious of what it takes and what I'm eating. And oftentimes when we grow things our own and grow them organically, if we can, uh, they're much more nutritious and you need to eat less than we normally do off of very processed foods that we have now.

Camille (09:05):

Hi, my name's Camille Louise. I live in sunny San Diego, California. I'm a park project manager and own my own online landscape design business. With my job as a park project manager, oftentimes I'm working with communities who are looking to have that kind of space, you know, have a space in a park or if it's a small enough acreage, sometimes the entire acreage ends up being a community garden. So I will work with community members and stakeholders to get that kind of programming into our parks. Um, it's become more and more popular over the years, I'd say, and some of the really successful ones I've seen out in Southern San Diego County. I've seen lots of vegetables, fruit trees are pretty easy, like citrus trees are really happy here in southern California. So I'll see a lot of those grown successfully in these larger community gardens. Um, I also work with private clients on my online landscape design business, and oftentimes private homeowners are looking for little garden boxes or a little space in the corner to grow their vegetables and their herbs for cooking. So while I'm not directly involved in a community garden nearby, um, you know, I am working with community members and private homeowners.

Alexa (10:29):

Hi, my name is Alexa Rivera. I'm 19 years old and I live in Los Angeles, California. I am currently a student and I just finished my freshman year of college at uc Santa Cruz. I became involved in my community garden because it's something that I've always seen growing up in my own backyard. My family has maintained their own version of a community garden. So my grandma and my aunts will all pitch in and help. They'll all come over. They all have their own fruits and vegetables that they like to cultivate. Um, we even have animals, we have chickens and we have ducks. And so that was kind of the environment that I had always grown up in. My mom, helping get the eggs in the morning for our breakfast, getting the apples off the tree. And so when I went to Santa Cruz, I was really happy to see that there were community gardens throughout the campus.

Alexa (11:25):

Um, and so it kind of felt like I had a little piece of home while I was at school. At home we like to grow a bunch of fruits. So we have a bunch of citrus, we have oranges, um, we have limes. We like apples. At one point we even had a banana tree, so definitely fruit fans. And of course we collected eggs from the chickens. But at Santa Cruz there were smaller plants, so there were herbs like mint and rosemary. In one quarter there were even carrots growing. Since starting to garden, I've definitely learned the amount of care and attention that plants really require. I grew up Christian and I grew up learning about Bible verses and there's this one verse in the Bible where God tells Adam to cultivate and tend to the earth. And that verse really resonates with me. And I think whether you're religious or non-religious and you're trying to live a sustainable life, that it should really resonate with you. Kind of carrying that responsibility of cultivating and investing in our planet, and not only in our planet, but in our communities. What keeps me coming back definitely just has to be the feeling of contentment and joy when cultivating these plants. I guess when you nurture and spend so much time invested in growing something, you kind of develop a shepherd and sheep relationship. So just caring for something that's so dependent on you and finally seeing the payoff and what plant or vegetable it's grown into, um, it's definitely fun.

Clara (13:10):

Well, I got involved with Community Garden when I moved to Fipa. The neighborhood that I was living in had this place where we could go and take our organic trash and then they would do the compost, and they had a garden there and it was a beautiful garden. But actually the gardening part was the end of the journey. The journey kind of started nine years ago when I started working with Impact, and I found out what Agroforestry was, and I realized that you cannot make an impact by yourself. You gotta do it in community. The thing about Agri Forest is that you can plant it all by yourself, but it will take such a long time and to manage it, it's such an effort. We see that when people get together to do it together, we have many hands working towards a common goal and then a task that would take, sometimes a month can be done in a day.

Clara (14:16):

It's also a way of healing, I guess, that makes people more aware that actually being in the presence and in the present can actually create a reality that we would actually wanna live in. I've learned nature's wisdom with the law of the minimum effort. It doesn't mean that it doesn't make an effort. It means that it makes only the necessary effort for it to grow and to evolve. That's something very important to learn, especially in a society that we live today, where more is always good and to learn how to not act is a very big wisdom. Actually, what keeps me coming back to regenerative practices, I guess not only gardening or planting, but it just makes you feel good, not in a feel good way, that it's only satisfying your desires, uh, on the instantaneous level, but actually bringing you lasting fulfillment and joy because you're actually doing something that it's aligned with your body, your soul, and whatever is around

Katelan (15:47):

You ready to start planting.

Katelan (15:52):

Whether you sign up for a plot at your local community garden, start your own community garden or start sharing your own garden with neighbors. I hope this episode brought you some inspiration and comradery. If you liked this episode, you should definitely scroll through the archive because we have a great episode on urban gardening where we talk to Nelson Pic and of course learn from our community. And then we also have a sort of composting 1 0 1 episode where I talk to Dr. Ross from Compton Community Garden, as well as a bunch of people from our community who have learned so much about composting through trial and error. Also, if you're not already, be sure to follow us on Instagram at Second Nature Earth. Thanks to our listeners for sharing their harvests with us today. You heard from

Camille (16:40):

Camille Louise. I live in sunny, San Diego, California.

Nick (16:45):

Nick , Milford, Iowa,

Alexa (16:47):

Alexa Rivera, Los Angeles, California.

Katelan (16:50):

This episode was edited and engineered by Evan Goodchild. It was written and produced by me, Katelan Cunningham. I'm gonna go check on my seed lings, but I'll see you back here next week. Bye.