Vegetables are just a snip away
VENICE A group of Westsiders are hoping to end hunger in the Los Angeles area, one garden at a time.
Aiming to foster food security in Los Angeles through urban agriculture, childhood friends Megan Bomba, Sara Carnochan and Kathleen Redmond launched the Venice-based Heart Beet Gardening in January, a business in which the three recent college graduates travel to homes and schools to design, build and maintain organic vegetable gardens.
The business model has proven to be successful, particularly on the Westside, where land is sparse and residents hold organic produce at a premium. The team is responsible for the creation of 26 urban gardens, planted in private residences, preschools and charter schools across Southern California, the majority of which are in Santa Monica and West Los Angeles.
“We think of it as our own urban farm split into different parcels,” said Redmond, a Hollywood resident who graduated from Oberlin College with a degree in environmental studies in 2006.
The goal of the business is to decrease food insecurity by allowing households, schools and communities to grow their own vegetable gardens, giving them easy access to healthy food.
The process starts with a consultation, whereby the Heart Beet Gardening team determines the size of the garden and where it would be able to best maximize natural sunlight. The team then builds the garden, planting certain vegetables depending on the time of season. In most cases, the team will return to the house periodically to maintain the garden, checking on the health of the vegetables and planting new seeds.
The team’s services start at $500 and can run more than $1,500, depending on the size of the garden. The gardens can take anywhere from a few weeks to several months to develop, depending on whether it’s an herb garden or a miniature farm of sorts, containing watermelon, corn and cucumbers.
One of the factors buoying the success of the girls’ business is vegetable gardens tend to thrive year-round because of the climate. The trick with growing healthy vegetables in the winter is sunlight, Redmond said.
Bomba and Redmond were both environmental studies students at Oberlin College when they first talked of starting an urban agriculture company if they ever decided to move from the Ohio college back to Southern California. When the two former roommates did eventually move back home, they decided to make their dreams a reality, enlisting their childhood friend Carnochan, a teacher at New Roads Elementary School.
Their first project was a garden at Carnochan’s parents home in Venice, where the women planted cabbage, peas and other vegetables that blossomed in cold weather. That garden was followed by several other projects at relatives’ homes. Once the team saw feasibility in their business proposal, they decided to take Heart Beet Gardening off the ground in January.
Though the three friends run the business on a part-time basis — Redmond works in an afterschool program in the San Fernando Valley and Bomba is a substitute teacher at Crossroads Elementary School — there are hopes of turning Heart Beet Gardening into a full-time, non-profit operation, branching out more to work with the local schools. The team is currently working with students to build a garden — what Bomba calls an “outdoor classroom” — at the Larchmont Charter School in Hancock Park.
Teaching students how to garden is an effective way to encourage children to eat their vegetables, said Bomba, who lives in Culver City.
“It’s amazing what kids eat when they grow it themselves,” she said.
Students gain a sense of ownership when they are taught to grow and maintain their own garden, Redmond added.
“It’s good to have that connection to the natural world,” Redmond said.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 22, 2007. Read the original PDF.