A city farmer faces the challenges of urban gardening

Because of the toxins in her urban soil, Susan Carpenter had to build raised beds to contain her plantings. (Los Angeles Times photo by Ken Hively.)

In Los Angeles, an urban gardener with dreams of farming in the city found that her soil was too polluted with lead and zinc to grow vegetables in the ground. But she didn’t let that stop her.

By Susan Carpenter
Los Angeles Times Writer
November 18, 2009

LOS ANGELES
There are certain phrases I never expected to utter in my lifetime. Things like, “Excuse me if I don’t shake your hand. Mine’s covered in horse urine.” Or, to my son, “When you’re finished with dinner, clear your plate and feed the scraps to the worms.”

Yet those are exactly the sorts of things I’ve found myself saying in the months I’ve been an urban farmer.

A year ago, I didn’t have a vegetable garden. I had a couple of lemon trees, but I’d given up on potted plants, having killed every rooted thing I’d attempted to nurture on my back deck. I didn’t just have a black thumb. I had a black hand.

But last year I began to think that my little postage stamp of a property could do more than just look pretty. Ideally, it could be put to work. I just needed to learn how.

It’s kind of shocking how little I know about plants and soil, given that my mom grew up on a farm and one of my uncles still works major acreage growing corn. In a single generation, the information chain that had passed through my family for centuries was broken.

Like many others in Los Angeles, I bought my food at the supermarket, and my landscape was professionally designed and maintained. I rarely, if ever, touched dirt.

I needed an expert who specialized in small-scale city farming. That person was Tara Kolla. She has been running Silver Lake Farms from her double lot in one of the city’s hip neighborhoods since 2004.

Ms. Kolla teaches gardening workshops and is available for one-on-one property consultations. I hired her last September to do both, and she dug into my project with gusto.

She pawed into my soil with bare hands, scooping out samples to send to a lab so she could see what we were working with. A couple days later, we found out. It was poison, basically. Like a lot of dirt in this city, mine was a victim of car culture, containing high, unhealthful levels of zinc (from brake dust) and lead (from the days of leaded gasoline).

If was going to farm my property, I had two options: build raised beds or remediate the soil by growing a cover crop that would suck up the metals. I chose option No. 2.

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