Help Harmony House Plant a Food Forest in South LA

Plant Community LA, a newly formed 501(c)3 non-profit, is thrilled to announce our inaugural project: a food forest and native garden to be designed and grown with the residents of Harmony House, in South Los Angeles. PCLA is partnering with Victory Starts Now, which provides homes and treatment for homeless individuals with severe mental disorders who have been diverted from LA County’s increasingly vast jail system. Their simple model of harm reduction and housing first has been successful in removing thousands of persons with mental illnesses from incarceration.

The Harmony House Food Forest project will provide an empowering, healing, and educational program for the community members of one of VSN’s leased properties, Harmony House in South Los Angeles. Through this program, the residents will be enabled to significantly improve their home, neighborhood, and quality of life. In our initial meetings with the members of Harmony House, we learned about the residence to some 20 men, which sits in a neighborhood lacking shade and green space, and has an empty garden plot with heavily compacted and nutrient deprived soil in which little can grow. They have built some planter boxes and the community members of Harmony House wish to grow some fruit trees, annual vegetables, and culinary herbs, interlaced with a pollinator garden comprised of native plants.

In the midst of a severe global heatwave and record drought in our region, the issues surrounding water-conservation, ecology, and sustainability are the foremost of our concerns. To address these problems, we will develop a garden program that draws from emerging restoration and permaculture strategies, employing various water-conservation and phytoremediation techniques. For example, we will employ the use of drought-adapted native plants to attract pollinators, companion planting, composting, rain-barrels, hugelkulture, soil-sponging, swale-building, etc. Our goal is to create a naturally regenerating garden using minimal irrigation and imported materials, and add to the area's biodiversity, ecological habitat, and cooling effects of green space.

Plant Community LA seeks funding to design and implement an urban food forest and native garden with the residents of Harmony House. Our budget includes the cost to provide instruction and materials, including soil for filling the raised beds, plants, mulch, wire and hardware for trellising, an entry-way arbor for grape vines, maintenance tools for Harmony House, etc. Volunteers from the extended community will provide additional labor. A garden of this nature will require consistent care and maintenance, and we have included in the budget funding requirements to provide continuing outdoors, hands-on, group education for the duration of the fall and winter growing seasons. Future smaller-scale fundraising efforts will allow for a spring and summer session, etc. and for the members of Harmony House’s garden program to continue to receive ongoing guidance once the foundational plants are installed and established. Perennial plants will need to be maintained, and some annuals will initially need to be replanted(though ultimately, our goal is to create a garden system that continually provides natural reseeding of those plants). Any additional funds raised beyond our actual costs for the current period will be rolled into the aforementioned future programming at Harmony House and other VSN Homes.

All donations to this project will be matched dollar for dollar, thanks to support from the Vidal Family Charitable Trust.