I’m A Guerrilla Urban Gardener And I Want You To Grow Food With Me
In Los Angeles, I have the privilege of growing food with the unhoused. Here you can grow food on the sidewalk, on a rooftop, in the alley, and on a balcony.
By Indy Srinath
Uproxx
November 10, 2021
Excerpt:
My journey into urban agriculture started in the produce department. As a teenager, I discovered the allure of my local health food store for the first time, smitten with the free samples of vegan jerky and the lavender-scented shampoo aisle. But I quickly realized that my dog-sitting pocket change wasn’t enough to cover the cost of anything in the store except for the organic seed packets in the checkout aisle. So I returned home with a bag of vegetable seeds; each packet a promise, each seed an opportunity.
By 23, my daily routine was simple: picking produce at sunrise from the seven acres that I tended, cleaning the roots, carefully packaging each crop, securing boxes of veg in the backseat of the truck nestled neatly beside my backpack, and dropping off the produce to two local markets before my college classes started. I was the one who tracked red mud into the classroom and never had a pencil handy. I would stare out of the window that overlooked the grassy common lawn during chemistry and create a hypothetical crop plan for the fall. My daydreams were spent pondering the square footage of green space and debating between fescue or clover as a cover crop.
