You Are Browsing ‘Los Angeles’ Category

Finding the Avenue 33 Farm is a serious challenge. Plug the address into GPS and you end up on a steep residential street packed with older, neatly landscaped homes. To the west, downtown L.A. fills the horizon and, to the south, your destination looks like a modest home with a slightly scruffy front yard and a long, sloping driveway that ends with a carport. How...

Urban soils are particularly prone to contamination. 50 years ago, your yard could have belonged to a farmer, who, perhaps not knowing any better, disposed of old bottles of anti-freeze or contaminated diesel in a hole out behind the tractor garage. Or perhaps the remains of a fallen down outbuilding, long ago coated in lead-based paint, was buried on your property...

With “everything from Alice Waters to Cesar Chavez,” to learn about local agricultural history, a new Oakland exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California that explores the rich topic of local farming is “only going to be a tasting menu,” says Sarah Seiter, the museum’s associate curator of natural sciences. That means Take Root: Oakland Grows Food ,...

“Walk north past the Mar Vista Post Office along Grand View Boulevard and enter a tree-lined, residential street. Less than a block in, on the street’s west side, you’ll find a red ranch house surrounded by wooden furniture, an elliptical driveway, and a wooden stand with a blackboard menu that reads, “Take as many as you want, leave what you think they’re...

“Los Angeles-based ‘gangsta gardener’ and community leader Ron Finley is determined to redefine ‘gangsta’ as being about building thriving communities, not machismo.” “Gardening is gangsta: Mother Nature is gangsta. Being educated, creative and self-sustaining is gangsta. That whole concept was about turning a negative into a positive. If you...

“Jesse DuBois is an urban agriculturalist. He moved to Los Angeles to become a screenwriter, but instead got caught up in reshaping the food system. He is the CoFounder and currently serves as the Chief Eclectic Officer for two start-ups: Farmscape, an urban farming maintenance company, and Agrisaurus, a web-based polyculture gardening assistant. Horticulturally,...

“In this episode, you will get a tour of the front yard and back yard of this residential tract home lot. You will discover what is growing and John will share his tips and tricks along the way. You will learn how you can improve how you are growing in raised beds to grow more food in less space. You will also discover the secret to composting in a 3 bin pallet...

“The garden was beautiful,” Finley said teary eyed, “and then someone complained.”  The city threatened him to remove the garden and put out a warrant for his arrest. The LA Times picked up the story, which prompted a petition, which prompted the city to change its zoning laws. The garden grew and thrived. In 2011, the owner of the property on which the...

With the sound of busy free-ways near by, this community gathers at the Boyle Heights Urban Garden to find peace and relaxation.  At the Mott Street Urban Farm, there is a school garden, and room for community members to garden in their own plots. People of all ages, and all income levels come together to do one thing. Take back control of their food source. “The...

This post/content/images are from berkeleyside.com A sign outside the garden tells when there’s produce being given away. Photo: Alix Wall by Alix Wall/Bay Area Bites Whenever UC Berkeley student Sara Cate Jones has felt the blues coming on, she’s relied on the same remedy: she goes to the student garden on the corner of Walnut and Virginia streets and picks herself...