January 25th, 2008

Guerrilla Gardeners – Eat Your Heart Out

Posted by Monica Schenk

hugg itdigg it add to del.icio.ustechnorati

Growing organic food in your back yard is the most environmentally sustainable way to source fresh, affordable and delicious produce. With a little time and ingenuity, almost any urban, suburban or rural patch of land can supply food. Environmental activists have illustrated this point for decades through guerilla gardening, planting unwanted gardens on vacant public and private land.

I recently met three clever young women in Los Angeles who found a way to promote urban agriculture - without offending the law. Sara Carnochan, Kathleen Redmond and Megan Bomba are founders of Heart Beet Gardening, a garden service that promotes food security, urban agriculture and seed preservation. They design, build and maintain organic vegetable gardens for busy, earth-friendly clients in the Los Angeles area.

Back yard gardens liberate Heart Beet customers from commercial food systems and give them easy access to healthy, non-GMO, pesticide-free produce. If that was not enough, these do-good entrepreneurs promote bio-diversity by helping clients exchange seed varieties and they pick-up kitchen scraps once a week for members of their Compost Co-op.

We hope Heart Beet Gardening has big plans, as I have visions of franchises planting organic gardens in every major U.S. city. If you know of a similar service in another metropolitan area, please support urban agriculture and tell us about it!