It is a Friday evening in the thriving East Hollywood Community Garden. Anay Arias and her younger brother Eddie Cortez remember all the hours the community spent busting up this once barren land.  “In the beginning it couldn’t absorb a drop of water,” Anay remembers. Today Eddie is the garden’s Outreach Coordinator. Soon after the garden opened, he secured their family plot so that their grandfather would have a chance to teach them what he learned over his life as a farmworker in Mexico. Four generations of their family have lived in this neighborhood. “We have never had a chance to work with our hands in the dirt until now,” smiles Anay. Teaming up with the past Outreach Coordinator Heleo Leyva, Anay’s husband Toribio had offered the family truck to deliver loads of compost from the LA Sanitation Department’s Griffith Park Composting Facility.  Back then, garden members would lovingly tear out massive rocks and car parts and till in the first organic matter the land had seen in decades.

Barry Lank lives across the street from the half-acre Madison Ave Park with the community garden tucked behind it.  “I got here at the beginning of 2014, and this was a big old empty lot full of weeds and rats,” he says.  “Full disclosure, I’m a reporter, and I’m lucky I get to cover this part of town for a living.  I have seen lots of change over the years.  When things get better like this, it gets more expensive. That’s just the way it is.  My apartment got closed down for renovations, but I’m lucky I got to sink all my life savings into a place my friend sold me two doors down.”  He pauses.  “Several years back, I was covering an East Hollywood Neighborhood Council Meeting.  The Trust for Public Land, the City Parks Department, and the LA Community Garden Council were gathering public comments on a new park and community garden, and I was like, hey, that is almost my address.  My old address, that is.  I don’t think of myself as a gardener, I mean, everything I try to grow dies.  But I found myself wandering in one day, just to see other people’s stuff.”  When asked why he stepped up to take over as garden Treasurer, he smiles and says, “Not everything I plant dies anymore.”

Sean Gustafson is completing his master gardener certification at the University of California Cooperative Extension of Los Angeles County. He works for a national nonprofit that builds playgrounds with the Trust for Public Land and read about this garden in their newsletters when he and his partner were looking to move to the area.  “Being able to walk here became one of my criteria for looking for our apartment.”  He talked to Louise Leonard, Chair of the Leadership Team, and got on the waitlist.  One year after the garden opened, he got a plot.  “They had already done a lot of planting of squashes and sunflowers to really help build up nutrients in the soil.  This is my third community garden through my life that I’ve been a part of. First in Philadelphia and then in Newark.  I’ve done a lot with composting in the past.  It was really smelly when I first got here,” he laughs. “And the neighbors were complaining, and I said to Louise, I’ll help you with compost.”

“Louise and I used to hang out a lot like this,” Barry says while Louise is cutting up garden trimmings at the compost system that Sean oversees.  “I’m a professional chef,” says Louise, “It’s a job that sometimes takes up to 60 hours. I probably create 30 gallons of food scraps a week that I bring over to the compost. If enough neighbors bring in their food scraps, one day, we might not even need those giant compost deliveries.”  She grew up in Wisconsin and was exposed to gardening when she was young.  “I’m happiest in city parks.  This is why I still find time in my schedule for this place.” She gestures around the garden and out to the playground.  There is a big tractor and equipment designed with a farming theme to remind the community of the area’s rich agricultural history.