December 9, 2004
The Garden of Ed

Ed was amazed at how many subscribers were able to correctly identify the location of the picture in yesterday’s contest. After all, it was just a picture of a shack. And, if you think about it, there must be a whole bunch of shacks around here. Some of them are selling for a million dollars!  This particular shack happens to be in the Pilgrim Terrace Community Gardens on Modoc Street. The picture was taken from the back looking toward the Middle School across the street.

In the early 70’s, the hippie crowd, as part of the ecology-now, back-to-basics, big-business-is-bad-VW-busses-are-good movement, embraced Community Gardens like grapes on a vine. Residents of low and moderate-income neighborhoods worked together to transform vacant, trash-filled lots into communal places to grow food and get back to nature.  Far out!

The original Community Garden in Santa Barbara was built where the Alice Keck Park Park is today.  That garden is gone, but three others have taken its place. Besides Pilgrim Terrace, there is Rancheria garden located on the Lower Westside near SBCC, and Yanonali garden located on the Eastside by the Franklin Center.   The gardens are owned and operated by the City.  For $52/year you can get a small plot of land, free water, and a place to keep your tools. You decide what to grow. And, whatever you grow you get to take home and eat.

The dedicated staff of edhat.com got to tour the back forty of Yanonali Garden with Ricardo Venegas from the Franklin Center.  Ricardo was great - he knew every plant and every gardener like they were family, and he was happy to share. He told us about the people who had been planting there for over 20 years, how they were passing on their love of agriculture to their grandchildren, how the gardeners competed for the best crops, and how they would sit and watch the garden grow after the day’s work was done.

These aren’t hippies and VW-huggers he was talking about. They are lower/middle income families who live in the nearby houses. The lack of affordable housing in Santa Barbara forces many families to share tight quarters. The Franklin Center offers health care and other services to these families.  The Yanonali Garden provides a little piece of freedom that comes from working the land.

Being so close to winter, many of the plots were filled with weeds, or were just empty.  The crops we did see on our tour were broccoli, lettuce, and cabbage.  Don Luis, a gardener who has been at it for 25 years, had his entire plot filled with green onions.  There are still some plots available. If you’ve got $52, some seeds, and a green thumb, you too can have a garden of your own.   Contact the City Parks and Recreation Division. They will steer your hoe in the right direction.

Chryss, Dee, Enji99, GCHeadley, Hattie, Kat, MDH, Mud, Music Man, Plobenberg, Sir Ahh, Spizzy5, SpoilSport, and T-Baby each had the correct answer. So, we alphabetized them and assigned them each a letter from the alphabet. Then we placed the Edhat laptop on the floor and called over to the dog, “Time to trample the keyboard, Molly!” Molly would have nothing to do with it. She danced around the laptop, but never did her paw hit the keyboard.  Finally, frustration set in, and we picked up the laptop and pushed it gently into one the dedicated staffers’ faces. “B” was the first letter to appear and thus the winner of the Circa Candle and Edhat t-shirt is “Dee”, the second on our list.

Speaking of shacks, gardening, and Ed, check out The Soap Box to see a picture sent in by a subscriber

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