Episode 05: California Gardening: Past, Present, and Future
“Water conservation depends on how much the garden management is focused on reminding, encouraging, and coaxing people…In school gardens, the district pays for water, but the keys to turn the water on and off are closely guarded because water is expensive. In church gardens, the church has absorbed the cost of water as a part of its overhead and ministry costs, but water is always an issue in community gardens.”
rachel surls & rose hayden-smith
A conversation with University of California Cooperative Extension Sustainable Food Systems advisors for Los Angeles and Ventura Counties, Drs. Rachel Surls and Rose Hayden-Smith about the victory garden movement, urban farming, community gardens, the Master Gardener program, and drought strategies for those interested in growing food.
guests on the show
Dr. Rose Hayden-Smith
Dr. Hayden-Smith is an Emeritus UC ANR Cooperative Extension advisor. She previously was a 4-H and Master Gardener advisor, and also served as the leader of UC ANR's strategic initiative in sustainable food systems. She is the editor of the UC Food Observer, a communications platform in support of UC's Global Food Initiative. Dr. Hayden-Smith is also a practicing U.S. historian and a nationally-recognized expert in the history of youth/school gardening and Victory Gardens. She is the author of “Sowing the Seeds of Victory: American Gardening Programs of World War 1”, published by McFarland. Learn more here and follow her on Twitter @victorygrower.
Dr. Rachel Surls
Dr. Rachel Surls is the Sustainable Food Systems Advisor for University of California Cooperative Extension in Los Angeles County. She coordinates training, technical assistance and resources for urban farmers in California. She directs the UC Master Gardener Volunteer program in Los Angeles, which helps residents learn to grow their own food and garden sustainably. Dr. Surls co-authored a book on the largely forgotten agricultural history of Los Angeles, “From Cows to Concrete: The Rise and Fall of Farming in Los Angeles,” published by Angel City Press in 2016. Learn more here, and follow her on Twitter @RachelSurls.
TRANSCRIPT
Mallika Nocco
Welcome to Water Talk from the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources. I'm Dr. Mallika Nocco, a cooperative extension specialist in soil plant water relations and irrigation management.
Sam Sandoval
Hi, I'm Sam Sandoval. I'm a faculty and extension specialist in water resources.
Faith Kearns
And I'm Faith Kearns, the academic coordinator for the California Institute for Water Resources.
Mallika Nocco
Thank you for joining us on Water Talk today. In this episode, we are going to talk about all things gardening, victory gardens, urban gardening, and agriculture. Our guests are Dr. Rose Hayden Smith and Dr. Rachel Surls. Rose and Rachel are both food systems advisors with UC Cooperative Extension as well as authors. The two of them have a tremendous amount of knowledge to share. So welcome to them and we are going to get right into our questions.
Faith Kearns
I will start by asking Rose about the book you wrote that has seen a huge resurgence in the last few months. It is called Sowing the Seeds of Victory: American Gardening Programs of World War I, which was all about victory gardens. And so we want to start by just talking about what victory gardens are.
Rose Hayden-Smith
Okay, well, thank you for having me and for having me with Rachel, who's truly one of my favorite people in the world. So thank you. So victory gardens originated in the US during World War I as part of homefront mobilization, they were initially called liberty gardens, and they were modeled on successful programs in the UK and Canada. And they also built on very deep US experiences in gardening, including the popularity of school gardens in the United States at the turn of the last century. In World War I, there were several different programs that were organized by groups, in partnership with the government, and different levels of government. They encouraged school, home, community, and workplace gardens.
I'd like to add that because these were progressive era programs, they sought to fix things that they perceived as needed fixing in American society. So they wanted to through victory gardens raise more food to consume on the homefront. They wanted to enable more food to go to troops that were being sent to France, and also to our European allies. But some groups were very interested in teaching kids about agriculture and gardening, Americanizing immigrants, improving nutrition, beautifying cities, and building common purpose and morale. Because the sort of red state/blue state stuff we have now was very prevalent 100 years ago as well. And in World War I particularly, there was a very pluralistic view of how these gardens should work, and that everyone should be involved and that would strengthen democracy.
So really quickly, I want to say about my book is that it is focused on World War I. But it also covers a lot of other things, too, about how women used work in gardening and agriculture to press for suffrage. It talks a lot about nutrition. I follow the trajectory between World War II and the modern day food system. And I end actually with some suggestions, policy recommendations of what we might do in terms of taking lessons from the past to improve our food system today.
Mallika Nocco
Sounds like a great book, Rose, and I actually am looking for books to read right now. So speaking of books to read right now, Rachel, you've written a book about urban agriculture in the Los Angeles area. And the name of your book is From Cows to Concrete: The Rise and Fall of Farming in Los Angeles. People don't often think about agriculture and LA at the same time today. I was just wondering, can you please tell us a little bit about this history?
Rachel Surls
Yes. I first got interested in this topic, I would say somewhere between 15 and 20 years ago. I ran across some old historic Los Angeles County Agricultural Commissioner reports that indicated at one time Los Angeles County was the top farm county in the nation, not just in California, but in the nation. And as an LA transplant myself, I came here in the late 1980s, this blew my mind. I could not believe that this could be the case. And I sort of tuck this in the back of my head and I thought I'd like to write about that someday. And eventually I did. I ran into somebody else who was also very interested in that topic, Judith Gerber, and we ended up writing this book together.
We are amateur historians, unlike Rose, who is a professional historian. And we thought, let's take LA's history, from pre-colonial times through the present through the lens of agriculture, it'll be no problem (laughs), just several hundred years of history. It took seven years to write this book. It turned out to be incredibly ambitious to do that, even though we didn't know it at the time, but it was so fascinating to see how agriculture has been part of Los Angeles, even before it was called Los Angeles. Food production and bountiful supplies of sustenance were part of this place that we call LA. Some little known facts are that Los Angeles was the first commercial wine growing region of California way before Napa and Sonoma. It was all about growing grapes and making wine in Los Angeles. We were home to the first commercial citrus industry, to hundreds and hundreds of dairies and poultry farms, massive wheat branches, and so much more over the decades.
And indeed, people don't always connect these dots about the history of Los Angeles. For example, several years ago, people were really into this movement to legalize beekeeping in residential backyards in Los Angeles. So the city council was lobbied, there was a big push and it finally happened and everyone was excited that they could now have bees legally in their backyards. And so this urban beekeeping movement seemed to people to be new and exciting, but actually it reflects la history because la had a huge beekeeping movement in the late 1800s. It was this huge mecca for beekeeping. And John Muir even said, Southern California will never amount to much, but at least it will be a great place for beekeeping. So Angelenos are passionate gardeners. Apparently it's in our DNA or something, because it dates back to the founding of the Pueblo and even before that, and it's exciting to see the resurgence of this interest in gardening, such as things like victory gardens and school gardens and community gardens and urban agriculture that are happening today. So it's all exciting and new, yet it harkens back to our roots at the same time.
Faith Kearns
Thank you. That's actually a great lead in for the next question that we wanted to ask, which is really a question for both of you, which is that there really are so many different ways to learn about gardening and interact with food systems work from our own UC Master Gardener network to school gardens to small urban farms. What kinds of suggestions would you make for beginners to get involved with gardening and/or food systems work?
Rose Hayden-Smith
Okay, so the suggestion that I would have is that for so many people right now homes is the classroom, and if you have kids, garden with kids. Research indicates that kids that grow fruits and vegetables will consume more of them. And there are so many reasons to garden at home. I like to plant something that germinates quickly like carrots. One of my favorite activities right now has been to visit the Texas A & M Facebook page for the Junior Master Gardener program, which is the national 4-H curriculum for gardening for kids. They have been recording some Facebook Live activities that are experiential, and they're all STEM and science-based gardening, nutrition, and carrying all that great stuff across the curriculum. It's free. Link to that Facebook page, it's good. So I would like to encourage you to do that.
The UC stuff is amazing. I personally am registering for a workshop on May 30, hosted by UC IPM on how to grow a salsa garden. Another food systems resource that I use is John Hopkins, the Center for a Livable Future. And they've actually got a really good teen food systems curriculum up there right now that's free of charge. So those are the sort of things that I would recommend. And again, UC Master Gardeners, close to my heart.
Faith Kearns
Yeah, those are those are really fantastic, specific suggestions. So thank you. Rachel, do you have anything that you would add?
Rachel Surls
Yeah, let me just tag on to Rose's recommendation for the Master Gardener program because I happen to be very involved with our Master Gardener program in Los Angeles County. And we even give a beginning vegetable gardeners class. It's called the Grow LA Victory Garden class and it's small, hands-on classes led by Master Gardeners. We do it every spring and every fall, and you just learn the basics of how to plant a seed, how to take care of that plant, how to water it correctly, all the little things you need to do to become a successful gardener. Because there's more beginning gardeners than ever before, especially with this pandemic, but even before that people who had not gardened are now gardening, and it's our goal with this project to help them be successful and want to stick with it.
Of course, we have had to cancel our spring classes because of the pandemic. But we're now working on putting it into a virtual format. We also have a weekly online gardening clinic for people via Zoom. And this is just one Master Gardener county. But I share these as examples of the kinds of things you can get from your local Master Gardener program, which exists, you know, throughout the US in association with land grant universities.
I'd also encourage people to think about the nonprofit organizations in your communities that you can help to support that are helping to bolster the food system during this time. For example, gleaning organizations. These are organizations that might get extra produce out of people's backyards, or from farmer's fields that can't be harvested, and they get it to food pantries and food banks. For example, here in Los Angeles, we have an amazing gleaning program called Food Forward where you all these citrus trees and other fruit we have in our backyards gets harvested and aggregated and distributed to people who need it. There's a whole array of food pantries and food banks that desperately need our support right now because they are so overtaxed as our food system struggles to keep up with demand and to adjust to all the shocks to the system right now.
Mallika Nocco
I want to also just kind of share in response to what you just mentioned, Rachel, something personal, which is the Master Gardener program was my entry point into the field. If there are folks out there who are starting to kind of feel passion towards these areas, I just think that doing the Master Gardener training is such a low risk entry point into some of these topics and thinking about both the science but also the community aspects of the food system. And I think it would be wonderful to just see many more types of people get involved in gardening and in the food system. And that kind of brings to the next question here. And this is a question for both of you.
When I look at just a lot of the imagery around the victory garden concept now and the articles that are promoting it, you know, as a woman of color, I don't really see myself in those images. And then you know, when you start to dig into it a little bit, it's actually kind of a tricky history, and a problematic history. And I don't want to erase that history when we just talk about let's do victory gardens now. I just would like us to think through this concept of food security, environmental justice, and who gets left out of this a little bit more.
Rose Hayden-Smith
Okay, well, I you know, America, in every era, has an awful record on race and social justice, and tolerance. And so in the pre-conversation, Sam and I were talking a little bit about the litany of miseries that I laid out in my book about the larger sort of context for victory gardens. So I'm just going to give you a little short list of things going on in the larger context in World War I and World War II.
So first of all, World War I, you have a pandemic, and again, very similar to today, right? You have routine violations of civil rights in in both World War I and World War II. You have race riots, you have returning veterans, particularly in World War I, targeted for lynching, because they're viewed as a threat on the American homefront. You have 100% Americanism. You have the American Red summer of 1919 with crazy labor oppression. You have women agitating for suffrage who are being imprisoned. You have in both wars, particularly in World War II, communities of color, moving to cities for war work where they are facing discrimination in housing and there's not enough housing. They're facing discrimination in the workplace, unsafe working conditions, inequitable treatment all around. You have internment during the wars, and the seizure of assets and militarized rhetoric in fusing all these efforts.
That being said, the World War I organizers would have viewed their work as being very pluralistic. You know, in a book that was published right after World War I, called War Gardens Victorious, there are numerous photos of all sorts of different kinds of groups in all different places that are gardening. And whether or not people saw themselves in the posters -- and by the way, also in World War I, these posters were printed in many different languages to reach immigrants -- but whether people saw themselves or not in the actual programmatic structures, they gardened, right? They gardened and they brought their own culture and their own community experiences to it.
In California, you know, two of the largest victory garden sort of communities were Richmond, California, which is now the national World War II homefront, the Rosie the Riveter homefront. And that was a community that really was interesting because it went from like 20,000-23,000 people to about 100,000 people during the course of World War II and the African American population increased on a magnitude of probably eight or ten times. And you know, Los Angeles, huge, huge gardening culture there, very, very large. Active victory garden programs and evidence that all kinds of people garden. But I think that moving forward, we need to, like you suggested, look at this and go is victory gardens the easy term we slip back into or is there another descriptor? Are there better descriptors? Yesterday I was on a national webinar with the Episcopal Church sponsored by the Society to Increase Ministry. They're doing a national initiative, they will, under that banner, those gardens because of their community mission, and it's a faith community, will likely be termed good news gardens, right? So do we have to have a single name for them? And what names are meaningful to communities?
But for me, the biggest things that we need to address are land and access. As I you know, have finished up my career. I struggled with this at the land grant of all the wonderful things we do, but the origins and where that resource comes from to do that work. World War I has some models, because there was a lot of gardening on easements and a relaxation of private property rights to enable more vacant lot cultivation. Maybe we need to look at that, more people need to see themselves in the effort, and they need to see themselves in the leadership. We need to encourage, honor, and support the vast knowledge as Rachel and I both know from our experience in working in community garden efforts, that there is deep knowledge in communities and that you'll let communities lead these efforts and we support and provide information as partners in it.
And for me up there two other big things. So as an historian right now, I am out of breath. I am just breathless all the time. This is such a huge moment in our country. We could go back to World War I and take that idea of a curriculum that could be an experiential curriculum that looks at gardening and agriculture and environment and health and nutrition and the idea of justice, because even we're seeing with COVID, right, that all of these problems with our system, our food system, our health system, our economic system, end up inordinately impacting certain communities, right, certain communities, and we need to address it. I'd also want us to consider how to enable this moving forward. The hundreds of thousands of college students who will not probably be attending college, and could we provide employment for them and really pack that human capital into programs like a food corp and be in communities in ways that are supportive, but not prescriptive.
Rachel Surls
Yeah, I'd love to tag on to what Rose said about access to land because you know who gets to garden, you have to have land to garden, you have to have a backyard or a plot in a community garden, or at least a balcony or a patio. And not everybody has that. In fact, there's plenty of statistics that show that it's racially stratified, who owns land and who has land.
So really, discussions of race are baked into discussions of land equity in this country and you just can't overlook how critical a factor that is. You can't have a community garden without land. You can't have more than a few little pots of herbs or veggies if you don't have land, and people of color are disproportionately renters as well. And when you are a tenant, your ability to garden is not the same.
Mallika Nocco
I want to shift gears just a little bit and talk about water and community gardens. Thinking back to the megadrought, what types of practices did you see in these community gardens to conserve water during that time?
Rachel Surls
Well, I think we saw a lot more gardeners getting serious about moderating their water use, putting in drip irrigation, putting in soaker hoses, and they had to because sometimes now, they could only water twice a week. So yeah, a lot more attention to mulching, adding compost to your soil to make it more resilient.
Faith Kearns
And do you find that some of those practices have continued? Because that's been sort of a big debate around, you know, how these conservation practices that people sort of picked up during the drought, whether they've continued or not. And it seems to be a bit all over the place, but I'm curious in the community garden context?
Rachel Surls
I would say it depends on how much the management of the community garden is focused on reminding people and encouraging people and coaxing people. There is no unique solution in every case. I would say though, the majority of community gardens have a membership structure where they have municipal water and they pay a monthly or annual fee and they use that in large part to pay their water bill.
Rose Hayden-Smith
In school gardens, the school district has paid for the water, but the keys to turn the water on and off are closely guarded right? Because water is expensive. In the church, community gardens that I've been involved with, the church has absorbed the cost of water as part of its overhead and ministry costs. But water is always an issue in community gardening, so thank you for raising that question.
Mallika Nocco
What would you like those of us who are outside of the fields of gardening and food system to know about what you do and how can all of us support your work?
Rose Hayden-Smith
That is such a great question. And thank you. I'm not an apologist for historical models, but I think we can and should learn from them. What people should know about what I do is that I look to the past for lessons that could inform what we're doing now. And I also love to share the work that people are doing with other people.
And I like to do what I would call network weaving. And so you can support my work by not only following me on social media @victorygrower, and then also UC Food Observer platforms, on Twitter and Facebook, but by sharing your story and your work with me so that I can share information about what you're doing with other people. You can also support my work by gardening and sending me a picture of it that I can share on social media and tag you and just, you know, to stay healthy and well.
Rachel Surls
I'd love it if people could consider how they can get involved in their community via gardening. You know, the Master Gardener program is one opportunity that's been mentioned. We're always looking for volunteers. In LA we have our Grow LA Victory Garden program that is an entry level way to get involved in gardening. Also lots of churches and schools need volunteer gardeners, you don't have to be an expert.
I'd love it if people could learn about the urban farming groups that are in their communities, because many of these groups are nonprofit organizations that are focused on social justice and food justice and equity in our community. And if you can connect with and support those organizations, you can really bolster some of their efforts. And let me just mention a couple in Los Angeles because I think they're wonderful examples of the kinds of things that's going on around the US. We have a group called Community Services Unlimited, which harkens back to the Black Panther movement in the 1960s. It's one of the older nonprofits in Los Angeles. They have a small urban farm. They bundle up what they grow with what other regional sustainable farmers grow, and they distribute that food in a very low cost form of baskets and bundles at community locations in south Los Angeles and they also open a grocery store recently in south LA. Then there's Alma Backyard Farms in Compton. They are finding urban agriculture opportunities for people who were recently incarcerated and are coming back into society and becoming urban farmers in the process. And they're distributing food in their community during this crisis. They're also growing and bundling up food and handing out boxes of free food in the community to people who are in crisis.
Another one out in Ontario is Huerta del Valle, another amazing urban agriculture project, getting food into communities that need it in the Inland Empire. So learn about these local organizations. Get involved in your local food policy council, they're doing amazing work. You can find all kinds of points of connection and places to volunteer there. So just get involved in your local food system, during this time especially, we need you.
Sam Sandoval
Something that as I was listening also to you, part of the vocational or more kind of a hands on experience as children or teenagers know how to connect to WiFi or upload videos in YouTube, one of the things will be interesting to actually let them know how to grow a tomato plant. Genius. I actually got hooked into farming, because of salsa boxes, salsa gardening, that's when I would like oh, yeah, actually can do that though. I can see some benefit on that.
Mallika Nocco
I would just echo that and say to the listeners out there, I hope that today that we have convinced that if you decided this year in this pandemic, staying home to start a garden, that you were doing something powerful. And just remember that the plant actually has an impetus to grow. So, you know, they're going to be some mistakes. And I always tell new gardeners, that if everything worked out beautifully and perfectly the first time, this wouldn't be something that we would do or engage in or would be a hobby, there'd be no fun. So, some failures are to be expected, but I hope everyone enjoys the fruits of their labors this year.
Thanks for listening and join us next time on Water Talk.