Garden Facts

Holy Nativity Parish is creating a community garden. Together with neighbors and other community organizations, we have “re-purposed” a portion of our side lawn to create a functional garden.

In the largest portion, we will grow organic fruits and vegetables to benefit the less fortunate members of our Los Angeles community. Fruit trees and vegetable plants will pull dual duty, both decorating our church property and providing sustenance for others. The food we grow will be donated to local food banks and soup kitchens which feed disadvantaged families and homeless people.

In another portion we’ll grow – organically and on-site – the flowers we use weekly for our events and services. Non-organic flowers are grown with a variety of fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, nematocides, and plant-growth regulators. Nearly 70 percent of all flowers sold in the U.S. are imported. Importing requires extensive fossil fuels, invokes the human hardship of foreign wars, and exacerbates global warming.

The flowers we raise will enable us to remove our parish from these destructive cycles.

Holy Nativity’s landscape was originally lawn and 40+ year old junipers. By transforming this space into a functional garden, we will:

  • actively help alleviate at least some small part of the suffering and hardship of poverty (social justice);
  • raise community awareness of social justice issues, environmental issues, and issues of consumption (education and culture change);
  • become a very visible example to the community of taking positive action to make a difference (spiritual outreach);
  • transform part of our city footprint from ornamental into functional use (land use);
  • take the water we once spent on our lawn and put it toward producing food for people (water use);
  • promote biodiversity and provide bird/beneficial insect habitat by growing a wider variety of plants, including heirloom vegetables and beneficial insect attractant flowers (creation care);
  • reduce, in at least some small way, the impacts of conventional agriculture and transportation of food and cut flowers (greenhouse gas impacts, environmental care);
  • create a focal point around which to rally the people of our local community (community building).
We welcome your participation!

Donations are welcome, both financial and in-kind. We have raised funds for signage (to educate passers-by), fencing and irrigation re-work, rental tools for the transformation, and more. We still need a storage shed and rainwater collection/storage systems. We also hope to install wheelchair-accessible planting boxes for those who cannot comfortably reach the low raised-bed areas in the main garden. The timetable for this phase of the project is early 2009.

All volunteers are welcome – parishioners, Westchester residents, and the Los Angeles community at large. Visit our Community Garden Participation page to find out how you, your friends and family, your business or employer can be a part of this project.