L.A. Green Grounds

Join us Saturday, May 12 in beautiful Leimert Park for our next LA Green Grounds Dig-In! We’ll begin at 9:30am and go until a new edible garden is in place.

UPDATE: Thank you to friend and community organizer Eddie North-Hager for promoting the Dig-In on Leimert Park Beat — and the videos he’s place on the page are a great look back at LA Green Grounds history: LA Green Grounds to Turn a Leimert Park Backyard into a Garden

More than forty volunteers (a Dig-In record!) came together Saturday at S Harvard Blvd for a wonderful Dig-In during Good Food Day LA. The group logged a full day weeding, digging, planting, and celebrating another lawn turned into an edible garden in South Los Angeles. We hope you’ll enjoy the transformation seen below, and stay tuned to LA Green Grounds for info on the next Dig-In!

Neighbors walk in front of the LA Eco-village

LA Green Grounds members Vanessa Vobis and Craig Dietrich visited the Los Angeles Eco-Village last month while hosting Maine permaculturalists Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito for an ecology-themed week at USC. The group were given a tour by Eco-village founder Lois Arkin, who has helped grow the community from one building in 1980 to the many residences, streets and gardens it is today. The Eco-village is nestled in urban Los Angeles (just West of downtown), and, as the group discovered on their tour, has access to many benefits such as year-round sunlight, public transportation, and local markets. At the same time, village members are active advocates for sustainability, sharing and walkable neighborhoods in an area with quickly changing density and infrastructure.

LA Green Grounders with LA Eco-village founder Lois Arkin

Due to their work in the community the Eco-village is a leader in local and national conversations about about the policies and assumptions that govern urban areas. Having successfully purchased and maintained community land, worked with the city to make streets safer for pedestrians, and presently moving from a single-ownership model under a trust agreement to community ownership, the village serves as a inspiration for both LA Green Grounds, whose members have begun advocating for changes in the laws governing front-yards and parkways, and Maine’s emerging Belfast Cohousing & Ecovillage, the 2011 LEED Project of the Year.

Boston’s Berkeley Community Garden

A couple weeks later LA Green Grounder Craig Dietrich, in Boston for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference, walked to the South End’s Berkeley Community Garden that is tucked between brick buildings, T trains and coffe shops. There, Craig toured the many garden plots that are transitioning from Winter’s snow cover to Spring’s growing season. Even before being touched by gardeners, Craig saw how the Boston soil was bouncing to life with native volunteer plants, grasses, and blooming edibles. This growth was being supplemented with gardeners planting a new crop of vegetables and herbs.

Since 1992 the Berkeley Street garden has been held in a land trust, invoking a bicoastal conversation about Berkeley’s land management by the South End Lower Roxbury Open Space Land Trust and LA Green Grounds ally Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust. Both groups convert private land to public commons that promote community-building, walkable streets and a re-establishment of connections between people and the food they eat.

Join us March 31 for the next LA Green Grounds Dig-In, this time in conjunction with the Mayor’s Day of Service! The lawn we’ll be replacing is in the front of the house and the resulting edible garden is guaranteed to be fantastic. Address: 4167 S. Harvard Blvd, L.A. 90062, 9:30am until 3pm.

November rain led to back-to-back Dig-Ins in December. Now, after one weekend, two new edible gardens exist in South Los Angeles! See the photos below and we hope you’ll join us at our next Dig-In.

E 74th St Dig-In (December 10, 2011)

Keniston Ave Dig-In (December 11, 2011)

After December’s double Dig-Ins Florence visited Yasmine and Alina’s sidewalk-facing garden in Southeast Los Angeles. Yasmine and Alina hosted our October, 2011 Dig-In that featured wonderful volunteer attendance and beautiful weather while planting the edible garden. Below are Florence’s photos from just a couple months later, great results!

Join us as we kick of the year with another edible garden project this month.

In December Florence visited Sandy’s garden on La Salle Ave (Vermont Square neighborhood), host of our April, 2011 Dig-In — fabulous growth of what were then seedlings, and check out those collard greens!

Hope to see you at one or both of two Dig-Ins coming up (catching up on November’s rain delay), Saturday Dec 10th and Sunday Dec 11th!