http://www.awakenedwoman.com/seed_lady.htm
"The Seed Lady" gives away
gardens to ailing neighbors
in South Central Los Angeles
After the Bioneers Conference, AWe editor met with "Seed Lady"
Anna Marie Carter
in Occidental, CA, where she was attending a weekend class in herbalism
at the
Occidental Arts and Ecology Center as part of her scholarship from the
Bioneers.
Following is her story, as she told it.
In 1992 I took an entrepreneurial training through the city of Los
Angeles that the city
provided to disadvantaged low-income people to teach them to create
businesses within
our community.
I didn't have any idea what I wanted to do. Right at that time, that was
when the Rodney
King riots came. Everything in my community got burnt up so there was no
place to find
food, and if you wanted food, you had to go to the grocery store and
stand in a real real
long line. And I just thought to myself, I might as well open a store
that provides organic
vegetables because that's what I ate but I had to travel far to get it.
So I opened a store at
74th and Crenshaw called The Seed Lady, and that became like a little
oasis within the
community for people to come together and talk about issues in the
community. The
children used to come and I would show them how to grow vegetables in the
yard behind
the store and teach them how to market their vegetables.
We planted three tomato plants and the rains knocked them all down. Then
about two
weeks later, these plants just took off! They grew to about seven feet
tall and went over the
fence so the neighbors had free tomatoes. And the kids would come on the
weekends and
sell the tomatoes. It was l994 and there was a shortage of tomatoes in
Los Angeles; people
were selling them for $2 a pound. Well the kids sold them for about a
dollar and they made
enough money to buy their school supplies. One kid even made enough to
pay his mother's
electricity bill. I don't know if it was because I told the kids to pray
when they planted their
seeds. Or maybe it was because we had an alo vera plant there. I just
learned this weekend
that alo vera is a good companion plant for tomatoes!
I ended up closing my store. I was getting a little too popular, and with
my regular job and
the store, I decided to rethink it. I either had to get bigger
&endash; I didn't want to work
hard, I wanted to work smart! I decided I would get on the Internet but
in the meantime
people kept asking me for help with their gardens. So I decided one day I
would start
giving away free gardens, because to tell you the truth, when I looked
around my
neighborhood, people of my community look bad &endash; they look sick
&endash; and
it's because of what they eat.
So I would go to their homes and install the gardens. It was their
responsibility to prepare
the land, because I'm only one person. I would get the supplies they need
and set it up.
It's the best feeling in the world, when you give someone a garden,
especially when they
appreciate it.
I get to eat for free a lot. It's a win-win situation.
Unfortunately I'm getting so popular, I'm forced to go ahead and
incorporate as a non profit
so I can accept some major corporate contributions.
Right now I have organizations that insist on giving me things. They know
I need 'em so they
give them to me &endash; tools, lumber, the seeds, the soil…
A lot of the people have HIV and Aids. I'm not a doctor but I think that
if a person has that
particular disease, which is a virus that inhibits their ability to
assimilate nutrients like protein,
minerals and enzymes, that if these people could eat organic food from
heirloom seeds and
juice them &endash; because when you juice them, the minerals go
directly into your
bloodstream without having to be digested by your stomach. I think that
will help them live
longer. It's a devastating disease and it's rampant in my community. It's
horrible, and so is
the cancer.
In the city you can get bogged down with city life. I know I've become
immune to things
like drive-by shootings. I just roll over onto the floor and I don't even
wake up! I'm hoping
to buy a farm in Compton which is the closest site zoned for farming and
turn it into an
educational facility for the kids so they know where vegetables actually
come from because
they just don't know. If you ask them where their vegetables come from,
they will tell you
the name of a major supermarket!
I learned at the Bioneers about things like RGBh in the milk. I need to
be a community
leader and talk to my people about what's going on because if you don't
know, you'll
perish.. And I'm speaking of the masses &endash; giving the masses a
choice and a voice.
So that's basically my story and I'm sticking to it!
I believe you have a path in life and you've got to follow your path. As
long as I'm going on
the right path, things will go well with me. But if I do go off a certain
way that's not right, I'll
get knocked down, and I know to get back on my path. It seems like the
things I'm doing,
everything is already waiting for me, I just come to it and it's there.
Hearing about the
Individual Development Account is definitely part of my path. For every
$150 you save, the
government gives you $450, so in a month you've got $600. Then in a year
or so you have
enough to qualify to purchase a piece of property. I saw it on the
nightly business report. I
got the information and I went to the meeting and that's what I'm going
to do. It just came
along like a blessing, because so many people asked me to speak at their
church functions
and they said It would be nice if you had a farm because then I could
come and see these
things.
I hear that black farmers are becoming non-existent. Maybe this is a way
for us to see that
we should start providing for ourselves. Most black people are consumers.
We do not
create anything to sell. If we could do just one thing, we could learn to
feed ourselves. We
would come out a whole lot healthier and we would be a lot more
economically viable. We
would have the income instead of always complaining about what we don't
have.
Why cry about it when you can plant a seed?
Anna Carter, the "Seed Lady" of Watts, is an educator,
researcher, advocate of organic
gardening and heirloom seeds. She builds free organic gardens for
residents of South
Central Los Angeles who include the elderly, handicapped, disabled, AIDS
and HIV victims,
Breast Cancer survivors, and residents of drug, alcohol and mental health
shelters. Currently
interning with the Master Gardening Program at UCLA, she is also teaching
children of the
Jordan Downs Housing Project and surrounding neighborhoods
"gardening, English, math
and manners."
Anna "The Seed Lady" Carter c/o Watts Family Garden Club PO Box
19234 Los Angeles,
CA. 90019 E-mail wattsgardenclub@hotmail.com Ph. (323) 969-4740 Fax (323)
789 ...
www.bioneers.org/features/anna.html
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