Sticky Acres

This morning I attended the monthly Backwards Beekeeping club meeting at Farmlab in downtown Los Angeles. On the way out, one of the farmlab-ers offered me a free varigated flax plant, that’s going right into my front yard (YAY!) and a mulberry start. I have no idea where I’m going to plant the mulberry tree…yet, because those trees are legendarily messy and stainy, but I love mulberry jam. Also, I have no idea if the mulberry I got is a male or female plant, so until I can identify the sex of my new tree when it blooms next spring, I think I’m going to just keep it in a pot as a decorative plant because the leaves are so pretty.

Farmlab and the mulberry tree reminded me that I have to sit down with my local city council member at some point in the near future to talk to him about legalizing beekeeping in Los Angeles. I have a feeling that he will be receptive to this idea as he was a supporter of the local community garden. I really want to legalize beekeeping in Los Angeles for obvious selfish reasons, but also because I think small scale farming is the key to lifting Angelinos out of poverty.

Even though the average house in my neighborhood sells for $400,000, 40% of my neighbors live at or below the poverty level. Also, crime is so prevalent in my neck of the woods, that earlier this month, when neighbors two blocks away had a six hour armed stand-off with the police that involved road blocks and helicopters, that confrontation didn’t make the news on any of the four major networks or warrant a mention in the Los Angeles Times. The only reporting of the incident came from a local gallery owner via twitter. Good to know where I can get the news the next time I hear the cops announce over their P.A., “We have you completely surrounded. Drop your weapons.” at 2 am on a Thursday.

While planting a mulberry tree won’t ensure my beauty sleep in the future, urban agriculture, be it a backyard flower farm, or a bee yard, or a community garden, could dramatically improve the quality of life in my neighborhood in many ways.

First, greenery reduces crime. The Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a research laboratory that studies the connection between greenery and human health. They have done numerous studies on the effects of greenery in low-income neighborhoods. In their 2001 study of one Chicago housing project, the LHHL found that the buildings that were surrounded by trees and greenery reported 48% fewer property crimes and 56% fewer violent crimes than identical apartment buildings in the same complex built on barren land. From the LHHL website:

Researchers at Texas A & M University reported similar findings when they used a GIS satellite system to map green spaces in the city of Austin, Texas. What they discovered surprised them: there was no correlation between the amount of vegetation at crime sites and the income level of the area. Poor and rich neighborhoods with above-average amounts of greenery (based on the average for the entire city) both saw a reduction in crime.

Second, urban agriculture reduces hunger. Community and home gardening give people with low food security access to safe, fresh, culturally appropriate, nutritionally sound food that might otherwise be unavailable to them.

While there are certain groups who consistently try to write off organic, small scale, urban farming as some kind of pinko fantasy where sustainable unicorns till magical soil that feeds everyone, it’s good to remember that during World War II, victory gardens, many of them tended by inner city children, produced 40% of the nation’s fruits and vegetables. More recently, City Farms, a New York City-based program that teaches urban farming, produced 11,000 pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables in 15 of their city gardens. (Nearly half of the produce was donated to local food banks and soup kitchens).

Third, urban agriculture creates green jobs and teaches life skills. For example, as of today, my boyfriend and I have made $240 from the sale of our surplus honey from last week’s honey harvest. We harvested 40 pounds of honey from ONE HIVE. There are folks in our bee club who have harvested 75 and 150 pounds of honey out of just one beehive. Even with just a small apiary, a family could augment its income by several thousand dollars a year by selling their surplus honey.

Also, by becoming backyard beekeepers, we’ve developed a skill set that we can turn into employment opportunities. There are beekeepers in our local bee club who are quickly becoming bee removal experts. In addition to being paid to remove bees from private and public properties, these beekeepers are making additional income by reselling the rescued bees along with the honey and wax salvaged from these removal jobs. In essence these beekeepers have created new jobs for themselves in the green sector, that aren’t subsidized by the government, and cannot be outsourced.

What does this have to do with the June Food Stamp Challenge? Well, vegetable seeds and food producing plants, roots and trees can all be purchased with food stamps! For people who have access to gardening space, growing food from seed can exponentially stretch a food budget. Unfortunately, land in many areas is hard to come by, which is why more community support for more gardening space is critical to eradicating hunger. The 20×30 foot plots in the now famous South Central Farm, one of the largest community gardens in the country, keeps 350 low-income families off of welfare. With a little dirt and education, we could not only augment people’s food stamp allotments, but perhaps we could eradicate the need for food stamps for a huge segment of the population too.

Sunday Menu
Crap, crap, and more crap.
Breakfast: Me: 2 cookies, half an apple fritter (bee meeting snacks), coffee (my own)
Lunch: Me: the most perfect homegrown peach ever (received as the rental fee for my porter bee escape from my friend John Lyons), fizzy homemade lemonade, more coffee Mr. Foxypants Ribs, BBQ chicken, beans, corn, watermelon, soda (at the radio station “State of the Station” meeting)
Dinner: cornbread with butter and honey, tea