Our garden activities in the news!
(photo by Scott Varley / Daily Breeze Staff Photographer)
On Tuesday March 24, Peter and Harvest Westchester appeared on the front page of the Daily Breeze. And on March 26 the story made the 6pm news on Channel 4.
Harvest Westchester is a very recent expansion of the Community Garden’s efforts. Many people in our area have backyard fruit trees. Often the trees yield far more than the owners can use. Rather than the extra fruit rotting on the ground or attracting pests, Harvest Westchester was conceived to collect that extra fruit and share community bounty.
Harvest Westchester accepts owner-harvested fruit on Thursday afternoons (they cannot store anything). They also offer “fruit harvest parties” where volunteers will go and harvest the trees of community members who are otherwise unable to do so. The volunteers and the property owner share in the harvest, and excess fruit goes to needy local families through distribution organizations such as LAX Food Pantry.
Community fruit harvests help expand our sense of community. We begin to blur the lines of “this is mine” and “that is yours” — an essential comprehension change as we learn how to work together as a community. We discover that, if we share, not everyone has to have their very own Meyer Lemon tree. Instead, if one person plants a Meyer Lemon and another uses his space to plant a Satsuma Mandarin, we can have greater diversity within our neighborhood.
Diversity and sharing and building a self-sufficient community are all elements of resilience — our ability to flex and adapt as circumstances around us change. Resilience is a concept we have been exploring with the Environmental Change-Makers and Transition Los Angeles. Read more about it at their websites.
So, register your trees with Harvest Westchester, and join in the fun!