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"The Seed Lady" gives away gardens to ailing neighbors in South Central Los Angeles
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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? |