By Dave Good, San Diego Reader
Cats are a problem. We gotta enclose the areas where we’re growing.” Diane Moss breaks it down for a visitor. “You gotta be careful with your compost. It’s composting,” she explains, “and that brings the rats. And the rats bring the cats.”
The Mt. Hope Community Garden in Southeast is a fecund reservation in the midst of tumbledown backyards overgrown with vetch and weeds yellow as dried flax. There’s a short breeze coming off the bay today, but it does little to cool the hot sun beating down on the garden. A security fence cloaked in bright green and lavender passion flower vine dims the heavy commute on Market Street, but the 805 freeway overpass broadcasts a constant blare of car noise.
Moss, her coif kept in check with a headband, wears all black in spite of the heat, but she won’t be here long. “I’m not a farmer. I’m a community organizer. And right now, I’m organizing space for neighborhood parks and community gardens. I’m doing the same thing up in Compton [her mother still lives there] as I do here.”
Moss is 57. She says she was born in South Central in Los Angeles. “We moved to Compton when I was four. So I been there,” she says in a way that implies she’s experienced the worst of the worst of West Coast ghetto living. She remembers that her father kept a small backyard garden. “No, I didn’t help out, except for watering. He always told us to water.” Moss has lived here in Southeast for decades.
On this weekday morning, the Mt. Hope Community Garden gate, padlocked as a rule, stands open. Inside, a thin woman in straw gardening hat and blue denim shovels mulch into a wheelbarrow, which she will roll down one of the many paths that direct foot traffic around the raised garden beds to one of her own. Even this late into the growing season there is plenty: snap peas, peppers, and squash. Collard greens on stalks as tall as a person. The kale has gone brown in the heat.
Time doesn’t exactly stand still here in the garden, but it doesn’t have the same bearing to someone who waits for things to sprout and eventually bear fruit. “We’re going to have produce for sale in here one day,” Moss allows. “We’re just not ready yet. People have been asking us, but we’re not ready.”
But somehow, the Mt. Hope Community Garden has become a destination, at least to some. “People stop here, and they take selfies with the garden. I’m not sure what that’s about.”
Moss’s right-hand man here is a lithe, retired school teacher who says his name is Kadumu. “We’re growing our dirt here.” He smiles, and he puts down his shovel.
“Growing dirt” is a concept I will come to hear about several times today.
Kadumu wears leather gloves, a clean white T-shirt, sleeveless work shirt, sweats, and dusty yard boots. A tan ball cap covers his head. “This garden is two years old. When we started, it looked like that.” He points across Market Street to a hardscrabble vacant lot. “It’s all clay, weeds, and stones,” he explains. “That’s what we started with. But now look.” He walks over to a raised bed, roots around, and offers up a handful of soil. It’s the dark-brown color of ground coffee, it smells loamy, and it’s interspersed with those tiny little white spongy flakes.
“I did go to Home Depot,” he admits.
Outside, on the other side of the fence, a passerby on the sidewalk in sport shirt and slacks gives Kadumu a shout-out: “Lookin’ good!”
“How you doin’, man?” The gardener and the man bump fists through the chain link.
“Lookin’ real good.”
Kadumu smiles.
Moss stands in the shade under a garden canopy and explains how the business works here. “The third Saturday of the month, everybody comes out and helps everybody else out.”
“I come here every Tuesday and volunteer,” Kadumu chimes in.
“We share our knowledge,” Moss says.
A young man in a faded but otherwise spotless T-shirt bearing the Crawford High School logo approaches. “We’d like to see about getting three spaces.” I tell him that I graduated from Crawford; he seems nonplussed. His companions, three women, are all older than he. They speak among each other in a rapid, almost musical Asian tongue. A jetliner on approach to Lindbergh Field makes them talk louder. Moss quotes garden-plot rental prices to them.
The rent on Kadumu’s plot ($5 per month) is paid by the Black Storytellers of San Diego, of which he is both a member and a storyteller. He clears fibrous dead zucchini vines out of the small plot. The smell of the torn vegetation, rising in the heat, is almost minty. Kadumu explains that the Storytellers got the plot with some grant funding.
“It was in several pieces,” the money. “Some of it had to do with music, some had to do with food. So we got a garden bed, and we grew some food.” Which they timed to ripen in conjunction with a reading by poet Nikki Grimes. “We hooked up with the Monarch School — they have a little garden, too — and we took our food there, and a chef cooked it.”
Kadumu sits in the shade; a white cabbage moth flits around his zucchini leaves. “You must first tell your own story — your own truth,” he offers. “It gives people a sense of who you are. Then, you can tell them fiction. You’ve heard the one about the scorpion and the frog?” He grins. “I’ve morphed that one all the way out to where it’s now a squirrel and a UPS truck.”
Moss introduces another Mt. Hope gardener. His name is Francisco. She says he is gearing up to help her produce food for a community event in October. Francisco wears aviator shades, jeans, a T-shirt, and a racing cap. He says he only uses organic fertilizers such as blood meal, fish meal, and coffee grounds to “grow” his dirt.
https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2015/dec/02/urban-agriculture-what-we-call-it/#