"Your food should not kill you, and that's what's happening right now." "What we're dealing with, with the pesticides, the gmos " "It's slow." "It's slow, but it's still killing us." "Most of Los Angeles is actually prime growing land." "It's really former agricultural land, four seasons of growing, lots of sunlight." "It's a secret blessing that -- that the city isn't really known for." "There's this mental divide that has then led to a material divide that cities are concrete, and food comes from some mysterious place far away, in -- produced in mysterious ways of which we have no idea." "Most people have to work during the week, and then on the weekend, that's the time that they get to do what they enjoy." "For me, when I say I'm gonna take a day off," "I'm just gonna -- still gonna do something in the garden." "Like, that's just what I enjoy to do." "So, why would I really do anything else?" "When you're in computer science or programming, it's just a really bad lifestyle." "You sit, and you stare at a screen, and maybe you get up and stretch, but there's nothing to look at, usually." "The labs we have are in a basement." "They were just, like, white walls and computer screens." "Everyone's, like, eating pizza and cookies all the time." "I was looking for something to do outside that was, like, physical activity." "That's kind of how I got into it." "I just wanted to try growing a few things, and I ripped out some of the lawn back here and started the first vegetable garden at this house." "I'm not going in any of those traditional paths that we consider as successful here, especially in this area " "Successful as becoming an engineer, becoming a doctor, becoming a lawyer, becoming a Professor, whatever it is." "No one I've known has ever defined success as growing food or becoming a farmer." "It just sounds ridiculous to them." " Good job." " No, you go ahead." "First hit the ground and brush." "No, you didn't brush." "One more try." "Okay." "Ah." "You hit on the top." "That's okay, but you hit it, at least." "Good shot." "Yeah." "When I heard that rishi passed his computer process software examination, we were very happy that he'll find a good job and everything, you know." "He'll be settled down." "But he gave us a surprise." "He went to India and did some organic farming over there, came back." "We were excited, still, he will go back to job." "But he gave us another surprise because he started digging his own backyard and front yard and started putting all kind of trees and vegetables and this and that." "Frankly, we were not very happy at that time." "Ah." "He was so smart, got the full ride at u.C. San Diego, and then he went off after college and went to India." "And I see these pictures on Facebook of him pushing a plow with no shoes on or nothing, and he's posting that he's making cow patties." "And I'm thinking, "oh, what's wrong with him?"" "I know if it was my kids, and they were doing this, my husband would have a heart attack." "But his mom is different, and she believes different things, and he believed." "I mean, the kids were raised differently." "Ma?" "So, you got everything?" " Yeah." " Okay." "People in the U.S. sometimes are just consumers, like a little pac-man " "You know, pac, pac, pac, pac, pac, pac." "And so they never really stop and enjoy, you know, friends or food or family or relationships, and they don't have, really, time, 'cause they're always running." "Use it to -- For the ceremonies." "We chase the dollar too much, and we don't understand why we are earning the dollar in the first place." "You are earning money to lead a good life, but you're not." "I think that's good." "Do you really need, you know, all the excess things that you need to go and work for?" "Who is it?" "I'm Ron Finley." "I'm a friend of sondra manley." "Yes?" "I'm Debbie." "Okay, well, she asked me to come glean the tree of lemons." "Do you need a -- Oh, you got your own bag." "I come " " I come prepared, you know." "I come correct." "That's how we do it." "Help yourself to the lemons, really." "Thank you, ma'am." "Look at this space." "This would be a great garden." "I mean, look at this." "I got to talk to sondra about this." "Yes, you can see what happened here." "You know, probably none of this fruit was picked." "You know, it's just rotting and drying out on the tree." "Yeah." "Wow." "You got to think of the hundreds and hundreds of trees that this is happening to all over the city, you know, where this stuff can be turned into food." "Especially the price that they're charging for lemons right now is ridiculous, you know." "And to think that this whole place, that's what they did here." "Most of those " "What is that, a gift from the gods?" "That came down with a thud." "What a lot of people don't realize " "If you pick the fruit, a lot of times, more grows, you know?" "It's like you're encouraging a plant to do what it's supposed to do." "It's like the plant wants to feed you, you know?" "Hello." "Hey, Deb." "You have a bag?" "I just want two." "You really only want two lemons?" "Serious." "Come on, come on." "You want two different kinds?" "You know, there's probably three different trees back there." "Are you serious?" "Yeah, there's three different kinds of lemons back there." "There's this, this, and there's another one." "Okay." "I'll take this." " Take three." " Thank you." " Take care." " All right, you, too." "Bye." "So, I guess I'll take you on a trip down Western, let you see some of the sights and sounds of South central." "Here we go." "Pollo loco, subway, taco bell." "Pizza hut, McDonald's." "That's the big McDonald's." "But not one healthy food source." "Why would I want to grow my own food when I can walk into McDonald's and, you know, have an all-beef Patty, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onion, on a sesame-seed bun," "you know, when I can go to burger king and have it my way?" "I don't need to grow my food." "I got other stuff to do." "You know, we bought that bill of goods." "Now you see the legacy." "Now you see the obesity." "And if you don't believe me, drive down Western and see all the used wheelchairs for sale." "When I see these wheelchairs, I don't think," ""oh, wheelchair for sale,"" "I think, oh, somebody died, so now there's another space for somebody else to die." "All styles, all models." "We trying to plant some shit." " Good to see you, sir." " How you feel?" "I'm well." "I'm well, thank God." " Good, good, good." " I like that shirt, though." "Get some "plant some shit" t-shirts." "That's hot." "I just put my gloves on, and about to get in." "See?" "See?" "That's what the hummingbird -- That's what she told me." "That hummingbird was talking to me, telling me something." "I tell you, I came to the right place." "What I do, if you're gonna cut these, you know, cut them " "Don't leave them here 'cause they're not gonna do nothing." "It's just taking the energy away from the stuff that's gonna cut." "Just take them all the way down." "People thought dirt was dirt." "They didn't think it was soil." "They thought it was nasty, and that's what low-class people do." "They dig in the dirt, and they do gardens and do that." "It has a negative stereotype." "To me, growing your own food, that's one of the most sexiest thing in the world." "You're taking control." "You're not waiting for someone to grow your food." "You're not standing in line, not knowing what your food is sprayed with." "You don't know where the hell your food came from." "I want a short footprint." "I want my food as fresh and as nutritious and with no pesticides, and it's easy to do." "So my thing is, everybody should be growing their own food." "This amaranth right here, well, I used to steal it out of Ron's front yard." "So, it kind of grew." "I have a couple of strings." "I think I have some from Trinidad." "I have, like, a trinidadian one, and then some of the ones in the back probably came out of his yard." "Yeah." "That's what's supposed to happen." "That's what it's there for." "Each one, reach one." "Mm." "Do I need to re" "You know, put more compost down before I plant?" "You can." "It helps." "Just get a bunch of seedlings and whatnot." "Actually, give me a holler." "I got some stuff that you probably can have at the house." "We out, j." "See, they have the lot right next to the church that we could be growing food on." "That way, the people who are standing in line for free food, they can actually work their garden." "See how big these front lawns are?" "Yep, be great for some food production." "We're having green beans for dinner." "And lunch." "My dad always had a small garden, growing up, in the backyard, and I just remember as a kid walking in the backyard and picking tomatoes and eating them with a salt shaker." "And they were so good." "Ten years ago, it was, like, you just couldn't get a good tomato anywhere." "They looked beautiful, but they didn't taste like tomatoes." "Thought, well, I'll just try growing them." "And I was in an apartment at the time, and asked my landlord if I could just " "There was, like, a long strip of area between the two buildings, and it got a lot of sun." "He said, "knock yourself out."" "So I started growing tomatoes in containers, and they were so good, and they reminded me of what a tomato tasted like as a kid." "So I just grew in containers until I moved into here, and then started doing tomatoes in the ground when this was a dirt lot." "And then Adam started getting into it and started building me all of these boxes for the tomatoes." "And then we thought, well, let's try some beets and some carrots and zucchini, and it just sort of grew from there." "Yeah, she got me hooked on gardening, yeah." "Now he's hooked on it, too." "These are actually lemon cucumbers." "They don't look like a normal cucumber, but they taste just like a regular cucumber." "They're just round and yellow." "Yeah." "This one looks good, right?" "Sweetie?" "Yeah." "Ooh." "This one." "The brighter yellow, the better." "The skins are less thick then." "We should try some pickles with these." "Let's see." "The thing that I find the most interesting is how disconnected people are from their food." "Like, we had people over the other night." "We went out and just picked beans to bring in to eat." "And they're, like, "you're just gonna " "You're just gonna eat those?"" "Like, it just seemed weird." "Like, you have to go to the grocery store or something." "It just didn't seem right instead of picking them and eating them." "It's like, you just got this from the dirt?" "You're gonna eat that?" "Like, yeah, we're gonna eat it." "You're just gonna eat that?" "And we're like, yeah, it's good." "It's called food." "Yeah." "Lawns have just become sort of our default option of what our landscapes look like." "Everyone just has a lawn because they can't necessarily think of what else to do with it, or maybe they don't have the time and the energy to make that change." "It's kind of a carryover from Western European manicured estates, where it was a symbol of your status, like, how rich you were, because you didn't have to grow food in your " "You know, in your compound, in your domicile." "Bringing that mentality to the west is ridiculous." "We live in L.A., where there's always water shortages all the time, and here we are growing grass." "It makes no sense." "What purpose to it?" "We're not cows." "We can't eat that shit, so what purpose is growing grass serving us?" "Los Angeles is in a desert." "We mismanage the water that we have." "I mean, we've spent billions of dollars on getting water out of the landscape." "There's a lot of areas where we could direct water into local communities, you know, that will soak into the ground, and, you know, we won't have to irrigate those areas." "You know, and then just keep systematically using water wisely instead of just paying for water to come in and paying for water to go out." "There's a lot of good ways to manage water, and almost every one of them very, very low-tech and low-cost." "I spent most of my time working on these, you know, projects in the backyard recently, like this over here." "What we did is, we raised this whole backyard area up there, and then we used the walkways to direct water into this area here, which is gonna become ponds and wetlands." "So that's another part of the whole thing about saving water and introducing new types of habitat, which will help our garden grow better." "Over here, we had just this kind of steep slope, and we terraced it using concrete blocks that we cut out from our backyard patio." "So we actually cut that whole backyard patio up into these blocks and just terraced it." "What that does is, as the water flows down the slope, the terraces catch that water, so we can use it in the slope, and we've also created these new garden beds where we can grow more vegetables." "So, this is our outdoor gray-water shower." "And so when you shower in here, the water that gets used all just goes to the plants that are around us." "And the water just filters through the rocks and goes out to the beds on either side." "We grow all of our own plants from seeds." "That way, we just know that they've been grown organically, 'cause we're doing it ourselves." "I think it was important for me to help my family with their garden." "That way, at least they could see some value in what I'm doing." "I told him about me putting the garden in, and it never coming out right." "And rishi suggested that I should try it the way he was doing it." "So I told him, "okay, I've got a space." ""Come on over, and I'll let you have free rein of whatever you want to do over there."" "Okay, so we have..." "Chard, cilantro, celery, green onion, broccoli." "My aunt, she was a little bit skeptical at first because she hasn't been an organic gardener." "Even the day that we came and installed the garden, she was putting a chemical fertilizer on the roses over there." "And so it's taken some convincing." "How big are these gonna get?" "I think the broccoli will get pretty big." "Even the celery is pretty large." "We don't really need a trowel." "No, it's pretty -- The ground is pretty soft." "We don't even need anything, though I think I'm gonna have to get a manicure afterwards." "You mean like the pomegranate is?" "Yeah." "After rishi did my garden, I had an amazing crop " "Buckets and buckets full of tomatoes, tons of eggplant." "I gave away -- I would go visit anybody," "I would take boxes of fruits and vegetables for them." "I wouldn't have had that doing it myself." "I would have gotten frustrated and stopped again." "And the way he did it, where it was very little work and showed me how to do it, you look forward to going out there and actually picking the fruit 'cause you were so amazed by it." "My grandpa Bruce is on kombucha now, and even my aunt, she's been eating healthier." "Everyone's kind of learning a little bit of something, at least, living a healthier lifestyle a little bit." "So, that is, you know, part of what I see as my accomplishment," "and I think I'm done here." "I picked up composting from him, and I have three beans in my house, and they're like children to me, like kids to me." "And the same compost, I use it in my urban farming that I've started in the back." "It's helping." "So pick all the red ones." "I think we need to start growing them for the soups and stuff." "You think these are gonna sell?" "I think so." "You know, if I didn't have the help of my family right now," "I'm not making enough to support myself or to support anyone else, you know, if I want to start a family." "No one has really figured out how to do this and make an income at it yet, and so that's the risky thing, but that's also the interesting thing." "We've been trying a lot of different things for the last year and a half." "We've been doing this farmer's market for the last, I guess, almost five, six months now." "Oh, yeah, yeah, exactly." "That'd be great." "Hello." "Would you like to try a jujube?" "It's a good fruit." "Hello." "Hi." "Would you like to try a jujube?" "No, thanks." "Is that what those things are?" "Have you ever had one?" "Mm, I don't really like to try things from a market, thanks." "More for me." " Hello." " Hi." "Would you like to try some fruit?" "Sure." "Okay, let me find a good one here." "I just actually tried a jujube down there for the first time." " Oh, yeah?" " Yeah." "How was theirs?" "Um, it was good." "You know, it's not -- it's not the most interesting fruit in the world, but from what I understand, it's got a lot of medicinal properties, right?" "Yeah, it's got a lot of medicinal properties." "How's that?" "Much sweeter, actually, than the first one I tried." "It's good." "Very good." "Would you like to try some fruit?" "We have a type of apple here called a jujube." "Would you like to try one?" "No, thank you." "No?" "All right." "We have also lots of dried herbs there and fresh herbs." "If you have any questions " "These are strawberry guavas." "You want to try one of those?" "No." "No, thanks." "No." "Just come to see what you have." "Sure." "I guess it's become a little bit worrying in the last few months because I've just been working so hard." "And I'm usually pretty successful at whatever I do, and I just haven't been able to kind of crack this open." "And I'm still just kind of getting by and not really " "I'm not at the place that I really would like to be financially." "Over here." "There." "Right -- right here." "Put some right here." "See?" "Yeah." "See that?" "I want these kids to realize that they have another opportunity besides the army, you know, which some kids here, they think that that's their only opportunity, that's their only way out." "I want them to know that you can be happy." "You can make money off of this." "That's what I'm trying to do." "And it's one garden at a time, one person at a time." "We done now, dude." "We done." "This is Johnny come lately." "I need you, and I need some folks like you to want to get down, you know, on the real." "Honestly, I couldn't really " "That's all right." "You know?" "I don't know people that got the same " "We done -- Like I just explained to them, we might have to go through a hundred to get one, you know, but they out there." "It's like " "I'm two people myself." "Why don't you get your two-people ass and get that barrel and carry it in the back, please, sir?" "All right." "Another one that I started off with young, just pulled him off the street " ""hey, man, you want to get down?" "I'll give you $10."" "These kids, they want to work, man." "They understand what this is." "Some of them understand how powerful what we're doing is." "And he's one of them, you know?" "Ron!" " Yo." " Ronald!" "My name ain't Ronald." "What's up?" " What's up, big dog?" " What's up, baby?" "How you feel?" "What took you so long?" "Why you just now getting here?" "Come on, man." "You know me, man." "Got these honeys out here, man." "Let's get to growing, man." "Where the honeys?" "I don't see no honeys." "I see your big ass." "Where the honeys at?" "Bears always got honey, bro." "Well, this compost, a friend of mine, Patrick, you know, he was making this, and he doesn't really have anywhere to do it." "He basically made it, you know, testing " "He put a lot of worms in it." "So, it's -- it's pretty rich, you know?" "I really like the way it feels." "Humic acid, man." "This feels super moist, man." "Yeah, it's real moist." "It's holding a lot of the moisture." "It's claylike at the bottom." "Yeah." "Look at that, man." "Look at the worm percentage of that, man." "It's like a worm farm, man." "It's crazy." "It is." "You can throw some down here on these lettuces." "We got some curly lettuce, and there's some sugarcane." "So let's see what happens with that." "Okay, gotcha." "When I see the youth get into the soil," "I see a metamorphosis happen." "Some of them get addicted to it." "Think I need to get some water on those fruit trees in the front, too." "Maybe put some compost around those, too." "He teaches me a whole bunch about all these different plants, all these different species of them." "Basically learning the foundations of the plant growth and how to basically learn this skill on my own so I can do it and teach others." "It's like an each one, teach one type of situation." "And I'm just glad to have somebody be a teacher, you know." "I feel like I'm really blessed, you know, in the first place, to do it with somebody like Ron, who's so knowledgeable in permaculture." "He's blessed also many people who are looking out for him and bringing new things into his life every day." "* unh, got to clean * chopping them bushes, right, right, right * got to chop it up, damn plants in the trash." "All right, have a nice day, man." "You, too." "You gots to, man." "Be a garden gangster." "Energy never dies." "It's just transformed, and when you get compost, you get that heat, and it turns into steam." "Making compost basically made me look at life a totally different way." "It made me think, does anything really die?" "All this stuff will break down in the compost pile." "Ready to make more fertilizer." "It's easy in Los Angeles to grow food." "In a five-acre area, there's three different kinds of sugarcane." "There's two different kinds of mangoes." "There's papayas." "There's, you know, 16 avocado trees " "You know, more than enough to feed just this neighborhood, you know, and that's without trying." "Every time there's the smallest incentive to a more self-sufficient and neighborly way of life, it re-emerges." "In the 1970s during the oil crisis, suddenly we had huge interest in, you know, community gardens." "A big part of it was the sense of having some common ownership and control over the environment." "Otherwise, a vacant space, a polluted space, you can't do anything about it." "It doesn't belong to you." "It just grows even worse, becomes a dumping ground." "Turn that into a neighborhood space, give people both the responsibility to tend it, but the ability to, you know, keep the produce or enjoy, it turns everything around." "There's a natural effect that happens when you are gardening or farming, is that you are learning all the time, so you are absorbing information all the time." "So it kind of lends itself to sharing information because you need more information to solve whatever has come up new for you." "It creates a community of information exchange." "It creates a community of camaraderie and caring." "You are growing carrots and onions and beets, and Tiffany's growing sweet peas and rhubarb, and mabel has the apples, and so has " "You know you don't have to grow all the food that you need." "I know it's all right for me to go get some onions out of your yard, just like you know it's all right for you to get some tomatoes out of my yard." "So now you've made community, and you've eliminated the dependency of going to the store to buy your vegetables." "Ladies!" "Oh, you're already here." "Good morning." "Good morning." "Good morning." "Look." "Look." "Of our four chickens, robot chicken very quickly established herself as our favorite." "She's very talkative." "She's very social, very, very sweet, the bravest, I think, of all of them, 'cause she'll come right out to us and let us hold her." "And she got sick when she was 3 or 4 months old." "Her legs became paralyzed, and she couldn't walk." "We frantically tried to find a vet in Los Angeles who would see a chicken." "It was not an easy task." "Finally found a vet who would see her, and our $12 chicken ended up costing us a fortune in vet fees." "Basically, the outcome was, if we wanted to bring her in the house and try and nurse her back to health, that was really all we could do, so we did." "We had her in the kitchen, kind of cordoned off in the kitchen, and we kept her fed and clean." "We were giving her baths all the time 'cause she couldn't, you know, keep herself clean." "And in the process of that, after about three weeks, her legs started moving again, and she did start walking again, and we eventually got her outside." "But in that process, I think, of her being in the home and being around the dogs and being around us, she became a house chicken and thinks that her rightful place is in the home." "If we shoo her out, she gets very loud and very adamant and forces her way in." "We've locked her out." "The one time we locked her out completely and left for the day, she managed to find her way in through the doggy door, laid her egg, and then got trapped in the house all day." "But she still insists on coming into the home." "We're valiantly trying to get her into the Coop, and thank God, she's young, and we think we're getting there, but yes, robot chicken's spot is on the couch, on the brown blanket, laying her eggs." "We love to spend time out here and garden, but we can't possibly eat everything that we grow." "And some friends of ours mentioned that there was a restaurant called forage out near them and said, "well, if you have so much surplus, you should go talk to them -- They have home growers."" "But I won't replant till next year." "If you brought in produce, and they liked it, they would -- they would trade, you know." "You could basically get like a little debit card for their restaurant." "It's, like, oh, this is really cool." "And I kind of thought we could use it as a time together." "We could grow stuff together, we could take it, and we could see what somebody does with it in a culinary way." "And then we can go enjoy stuff that we grow, you know, so forage really became an ideal situation." "Ingredients are the most important part of cooking." "If it tastes good, it's something special, something that you'd want to share, you know, with people." "Tastes right." "Even if it's not local, that's what we're all about." "It just happens to be that a lot of the best stuff is local because it's so fresh, it's so nearby." "Hello." "Good morning." "Chef." "Sorry, I -- hey." " Hey, guys." " How are you?" " How have you been?" " Pretty good, how are you?" " Good." " Adam." " Shishitos." " Okay, awesome." "These are my favorite, by the way." "What do you do with them?" "Caramelizing these with onions and then serving it with roasted fingerling potatoes." "It's awesome." "This and potatoes are awesome." "This is just awesome." "These are, like, my favorite pepper." "I tried pickling some." "They're starting to turn red." "Oh, it's totally fine when they turn red." "They're really good." "I don't know if they're getting hotter or not." " These did really well." " Extremely well." "I tried a new seed this year, and they were much more prolific than the ones I tried last year." "And it's nice 'cause they can grow right in front of another plant." "Yeah." "So it doesn't get too big." "And the chickens don't like them." "The chickens don't like them." "That's good." "The chickens aren't eating them, which is nice." "All across Los Angeles, people are growing amazing stuff in their backyard." "What happens to that stuff?" "Where -- where does it show up?" "Where can I eat that?" "Are there restaurants that do that?" "When we started forage, the answer was, "I don't know."" "You guys still have eggplants." " Oh, yes." " Yeah." "That's pretty amazing." "We're still getting those." "Okay, but these are -- Are these the Japanese ones?" "They're called ping tung." " Oh, okay." " They're like a Japanese." "And these are, like, white eggplants." "Are you still using eggplants?" "Yeah, we throw them around with some of the stuff." " Good, good, good." " So that's awesome." "This one's really great." "Do you do savory?" "We've got savory coming in." "Oh, we love savory." "Do you have lots of this?" " I do." " Can you bring more?" "Yes, yes." "It's, like, taking off now 'cause it's cold." " We love savory." " And lemon thyme." "One thing that I hear from home growers consistently is how much work and how much joy it is to grow food, so when they bring their food to forage, it's at the tail end of this whole process, this whole engagement with the earth" "via the backyard." "So these are people who've been on a journey, you know, and they're very proud of where they've gone and how they've come back." "And so when they bring this food to us, it's -- it's like a child." "They're, like, offering us their child." "These are such meaty " "Oh, yeah." "We have tons of them." "We have a lot more, too." "The garden really has been an example of our growing relationship, sharing not only the labor, but the fruits of our labor, harvesting, making dinners, inviting friends over." "I want this for the rest of my life." "All right, Adam, so, everything is $21." "Cool." "And here you go." " Okay." " All right, thank you." "* welcome to the jungle" "so, I'm actually thinking about putting a garden in there." "That's what I do, put gardens in places." "Plant some shit." "Some hydroponic guys donated to us." "What they wanted to do was to help the cause in changing the food system in South Los Angeles." "This is where I'm storing the stuff right now." "So we got this kind of stuff." "Weed sprayers." "Watering wands." "So, what I'm able to do now, when we set up a garden," "I'm able to leave the person with a water hose, you know, some pruners that they can take care of their garden with." "I want to get people back in touch with their foods, having people realize that food does not only come from a store, it comes from a garden, you know, not having a question, like," "the tomatoes in your garden are the ones " "Are they as fresh as the ones at ralphs, you know?" "It's like, we've been conditioned to do that, as you saw with the gleaning of the fruit." "You have somebody that has a lemon tree that'll probably go out and buy lemons at the market, and you have three lemon trees." "This is one of the most subversive things you can do is grow your own food." "One of the worst things that the model of progress, model of development, that has been manufactured in a very artificial way is this defining of work with our hands not just as degraded, but as not work." "So, real production doesn't get counted, but speculation on wall street is where wealth gets generated." "Working with our hands doesn't get counted." "Using energy slaves gets counted as productivity." "So every structure, measure, metaphor that has been built is working against the creativity of these beautiful hands." "I don't think these look very good." "Look at it." "They're black." "They're not fully developed." "Toss it?" "Yeah." "Every individual seed was an individual flower." "And then once the flowers got pollinated, they, you know, form these seeds here." "And so that's what we're harvesting right now." "And you can see, they've got little thorns on them." "And that's because the way that carrot seeds travel is when an animal or human brushes by them, it kind of gets stuck to your skin or to your clothes, and then you plant it somewhere else." "So that's how it spreads." "The more that you save seeds from your own garden, the more those seeds become adapted to your garden, so every year, the seeds " "You know, the plants will grow a little bit better because they've lived in your climate, and they've -- they've lived in your soil." "So that's the reason that we do it, and then plus, we get so much more seed this way, so we always have enough for our own garden, or to give away or to trade or to sell." "So now she's a multipurpose cat." "She's gonna go sow carrot seeds." "We got lots of tangerines coming in again this year." "Tangerines?" "Yeah." "Those are very good." "Yeah, they're really good." "They are." "There's a few down here that dropped." "We can share that." "And then this one, which I think I've shown you guys a few times." "This is sorrel, and this has a really sour flavor, but it's like a lettuce." "So we need to be eating this more often, 'cause you have a lot of it here." "You can tell it's a bit sour or not." "You can collect that, and you can use it." " Sour." " Yeah, yeah, but it " "It's like a sour candy." "Can I try some?" "Yeah." "I hope it doesn't " "It's like a sour candy, really." "Try it." "Mm." "It's, like, good, and then it's sour, right?" "Greens are exactly like candy." "This is what we need to learn." "Yes." "Better." "I don't remember in my childhood or any of my friends being that enthusiastic about eating vegetables." "It's great to see that, and it's great to see, like, all of the parents and the kids coming together." "So, did you guys notice all the loquat fruit coming up on this loquat tree?" "Mm-hmm." "Uh-huh." "So in another two months or so, these'll be ready." "And you'll just have a few this year." "But every year when the tree gets bigger, we'll get more and more fruit." "Aren't those orange flowers over there edible?" "Yeah." "Even the leaves of that plant are edible." "Really?" "Mm-hmm." "Nasturtium." " Nasturtium." " Oh." "Nastursnium?" "And Mrs. Davis, did you plant any potatoes?" "No." "No, we did not, unless " "Someone must have thrown a potato here." "So, see that potato right there?" "And you see the plant coming out of here?" "We don't want to take it out yet 'cause it's not ready." "But what we can do is take some of the compost that we have and cover up most of this plant, and we'll get some potatoes later this year." " Yes." " Can we plant those with the leaves coming out, the old potato, and it'll grow more potatoes?" "Yeah, you'll grow more potatoes." " Oh, I didn't know that." " Yes." "Let's do that." "Yeah, we could just plant a potato." "You know, the kids are really enjoying learning about all these different things and bringing home vegetables and trying different recipes with different things that they bring home." "Grab that one." "Yeah, pull that one." "I want to put it in." "These are baby carrots we're planting." "Rishi just contributed a lot in that he brings all that knowledge of different things." "Like, I wouldn't have put a flower in my mouth." "That sour plant that my son was eating, there's no way I would have let him do it had he not been here, watching him do it, knowing that it's safe to eat, you know," "so it's very cool." "The variety is very cool." "All right." "Can you put it between these two beds here?" "All right." " You need help?" " No." "You guys have rakes?" "Yeah, right here." "Put it right here." "All right." "You can just dump it and then rake it out because we're not putting this in the bed." "We're putting this in the pathway." "I found over the last few months that my skill and my passion are really in just teaching, being able to be hands-on with the kids and the adults here and really, like, seeing that information get passed around." "And all, you know, the kids are really curious." "I found that that is probably what I'm going to get into more." "No, let the other kids have a turn." "Like, get on this side to do it." "Oh." " Oh." " What happened?" " Something is hot." " Something is really hot." "It was probably those little red chilies." " It's the baingan." " It's not the baingan." "There's just some little red chilies." "Rishi, my son, is the true doctor." "What he grows is medicine." "If you eat what he grows, you will actually get healthy." "The doctors are just treating symptoms." "Feels good to be eating outside." "Yeah." "I don't know why we don't do this more." "People are beginning to understand that they are getting screwed, that the reason why they do everything they think is right to be healthy, and they're not healthy, is because they're eating garbage." "You could say, "I eat a salad a day."" "Well, what kind of salad?" "Are you eating a pesticide-driven salad?" "That's not gonna make you healthy." "It needs people to wake up." "People need to wake up." "I got in trouble with the city because it's illegal to plant food on a parkway." "You need permits, and there's all kinds of codes, and you definitely can't grow food on a parkway." "Edible fruits and vegetables create some unique challenges if they are to be planted in the public right of way, vegetables particularly, because of their perfusety, fruits or vegetables with a tremendous amount of volume." "Many of these fruits and vegetables, when they fall off the plant, could create a trip-and-fall hazard or a slippery hazard." "They also attract insects and other animals like raccoons, possums, rats in the city." "So for that reason, the city has to really view whatever's gonna be utilized in the public right of way very carefully." "I got a citation from the city to take the garden out, and I wasn't gonna do it this time." "Violation of section 62.104, which is a municipal code " "If you are violating that to the extent that it's creating a public safety hazard, particularly an immediate safety hazard, it is a criminal act." "I'm glad that whoever complained complained." "I'm glad that they called the city to try to get me in trouble, then the city issued me this citation to -- to rectify this so-called problem, because if they weren't," "I wouldn't have been sitting in Vancouver, in the 17th floor suite, doing a Ted talk." "So my thing is, you should embrace your haters because you know not what they do for you." "And -- and the garden, it was beautiful, and then somebody complained." "The city came down on me, and they -- and basically gave me a citation saying that I had to remove my garden, which this citation was turned into a warrant." "And I'm, like, come on, really?" "A warrant for planting food on a piece of land that you could care less about?" "And I was like, "cool, bring it,"" "'cause this time, it wasn't coming up." "There are city regulations that were set up so that it could protect the people." "And I think that some city officials forgot about that part of it." "And it seems like they're enforcing things to protect the city and the city officials." "We live in a time of very constrained public resources." "There aren't a lot of resources to micromanage communities in ways that don't make sense." "So maybe that's one that we can just let it go and say," ""okay, Los Angeles, you got a parkway." "Grow some food on it." "Go for it." "It's okay."" "It was a couple months into our first year." "The health department paid a visit." "The inspector told us that we shouldn't be accepting food grown in people's backyards." "They said that we had to get all of our stuff from an approved source, so we had to pretty much completely shut down our foraging program." "We found a method that is used by farmers " "People who are growing things in the ground, pulling it out of the ground, and then bringing it to market." "That's a home grower." "We had to have a list ready of everything we were growing." "And then someone from the city came out and sort of went through to make sure that we were growing what we said we were growing and asked whether we were using chemicals and that sort of thing." "We've sort of made this road map for a home grower to go through that type of certification." "And so now today, that's what they do." "It helped us learn to put more power into the urban farmers' hands by certifying them." "Before the certification process, they were only able to come to me." "Now they can go to anybody, and they can go to any farmer's market, which is great." "L.A. can be an expensive place just to go to the movies or to go out to dinners." "It's not cheap." "Did you try the quinoa?" "Oh, yeah." "It's really good." "It's fun -- It's nice that it's something we can do together and we can enjoy together." "Yeah, and I hope we can share it with children." "Yeah, put them to work." "Exactly." "Here." "At my own home, if I spend all my time trying to just grow as many vegetables as I can," "I'm still only gonna feed, like, eight people." "But if I can inspire other people to start their own gardens and help them to make those gardens really healthy and really productive, then how many people can I feed?" "That's endless." "Welcome to the growing home." "This is a farm and educational center." "Basically, 95% of the landscaping that you see here is edible." "I've been working on this as a project for the last two years." "What I'm really trying to do with this project is to demonstrate to people what we can do in our homes." "Everything's been going pretty well with the growing home." "I've been getting a lot more teaching engagements, speaking engagements, you know, being invited to panels, and being invited out to different events." "I've got invited to two other farmer's markets nearby." "Break into it, release the oils, and just smell how amazing that is." "I have an intern now who's gonna sell at one of the farmer's markets for me." "Right?" "I put up a web store, and I've been shipping our organic herbs to, like, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington." "The big news in the last few months was that I've joined up with a friend of mine who I met through the master gardener program." "He started a radio show through one of the local radio stations, kpfk, and so now me and him have partnered." "We're co-hosting the show together, and we've got to interview a lot of really influential people in the food world." "I'd really just like to get a vision from you, vandana, seeing all that is collecting right now, all that is kind of snowballing, the urban-farming moving here in Los Angeles, the growth of organic farming all across the world." "How do you see all of this kind of fomenting in the future?" "Here in Los Angeles," "I think the gardening movement that is growing so fast..." "Is showing that there's a change in thinking " "That from the ruins of concrete and parking lots, gardens can grow, from the ruins of hate and riots and fear and divides, peace can grow." "And if, in Los Angeles, we start to think of ourselves as earth citizens of this place, diverse and equal, like the plants " "That our difference in color, the difference in our skin, the difference in our regions doesn't change our common humanity." "And with that, we start to exercise and say, where is it that I can make a contribution" "to make the city a livable, lovable city, where nature thrives in the heart of the city, and nature beyond thrives because the greed of the city is not a predatory, but an ecological relationship?" " I'm Callie." " Callie, I'm Ron." "Hi, I'm mark." "Nice to meet you." "Thank you very much." "Oh, come on, man." "Stop, stop, stop." "How you doing?" "We wound up here at the watch towers with a group of Ted active people that stayed over from Ted, people that hadn't ever planted before." "They wanted to plant some shit, and they were on me, like, "Ron, we need something to do."" "I was overjoyed and happy that everybody came out and had a chance to experience this." "Watch your back." "Breathe." "Since Ted, I'm getting a lot of people calling me or e-mailing from Norway to South Africa to Oakland to Mississippi, and a lot of them -- "where do I start?" "Where do I start?"" "I'm like, you start at the beginning." "And they're, like, well, what's the beginning?" "Wherever you start, you know?" "It's not rocket science." "You get a plant." "You get some good soil." "You get a plant." "Hopefully it's organic." "You put it in the ground, and you water it, and you repeat that again and again and again." "I love this place so, so much."