An urban farm grows in Los Angeles. You can be a part of it.

“Our goal is to connect people with the food they eat, and a chance to get their hands in the ground.”

By Jeanette Marantoss
LA Times
Oct. 10, 2019

Excerpt:

The answer lies above, an arduous climb up the hill behind the home of farmers Ali Greer and Eric Tomassini, past the covered patio, with the new walk-in refrigerator Tomassini built the week before, past barrels of rainwater and flats of seedlings waiting to be planted, up another set of stairs to an acre-wide sprawl of flowers, tomatoes, peppers and lettuce basking in the sun.

There are fruit trees too, along with new rows of carrots and beets tucked in among the taller plants, a sump pump for gray water and giant piles of compost. A rickety bistro table and chairs perch precariously on a short ledge of mostly flat ground, and chirping birds flit endlessly in and out of oak and black walnut trees that line the perimeter.

“When we call our family on speakerphone, they say it sounds like Snow White’s birds,” Tomassini said, laughing, “because that’s all they can hear.”

Clearly, this is a working farm, but you’d better be sturdy on your feet.

Tomassini, 31, a lanky man who tilled this ground by hand last fall using a broad fork tool to loosen the soil, admits the uneven terrain can be a challenge. The first time he spent a day balancing on the hill, “I woke up the next morning to aching knees,” he said. “But in L.A., if you find a piece of land that’s not insanely expensive, it’s on a hill, with no road access, that’s essentially unbuildable.”

Read the complete article here.