Topics in Urban Agriculture and Local Ecology (Sustainability) - Greater Los Angeles, Winter / Spring 2023.

 What an eventful start of a new year (2023), for agriculture, in this urban setting, centered around Downtown Los Angeles.

With so many agricultural-based projects centered around Los Angeles, this year, with much ado, with some long-established projects coming in to maturity. People would probably think, out here, in urban and suburban Southern California, that agriculture is typically as it was - off in some (remote) setting, yet, these days, as is evident, from the new SNAP food stamps vegetables and fruits bonus program (there’s various “programs” in place, for welfare benefits recipients, I’ve learned, over the past couple of months), people are receiving a nudge, from the powers that be, or, from their own self-driven initiative, such as making authentic cuisine, from various culinary disciplines, for example, using fresh fruits and vegetables as ingredients for making dishes from scratch (there’s been a lot of nitrogen, or some sort of refrigerant, being flouted around, as well - I’ll get to that, more, later, in this article). I like Thai, personally 😛. 

For starters,

folks who are local might be wondering where they can go, in town, to build upon their own personal (or business… décor, anyone?) localized agricultural interests, otherwise known as gardening, or interior design, landscaping, etc. I happened to choose a garden rarity - it’s considered an endangered species, in fact, as I’d learned, last night, as I perused the Royal Botanical Gardens’ kew.org voluminous database on vanilla, being that I’d found a longtime (and recent) favorite plant of intrigue, for me, which some of my longtime (and other blog) followers, would know, of me. I figured that I could dig some dirt, on my development projects involving vanilla, from the past, and jump on an opportunity to own my own vanilla bean vine(s) - (I got vines, for that matter, not just one). It’s a richly folklorish plant to research and discover, and it still would boggle the intellect, for modern day readers, as well, being that the plant is a favorite, in tissue culture circles, as well as in biotech. People would recall the drama surrounding my makeshift vanilla bean extraction project, which produced a liquid that smelled richly… of something quite unexpected. Perhaps I’ll divulge more, at some other point. 

In any case, for people who would like to outdo their standard garden variety selection of retailers, whether it be online, or in-store, when it comes to selection of plants - try out San Gabriel Nursery, in San Gabriel, CA. One thing, though - it’s much further than people might expect, as far as travel time goes, as getting to that part of town oftentimes means traveling amongst real workday and workweek commuters. This being the case, please only plan on going out there if you’ve got a sizable budget for making the trip work - this means gas, meals, lodging, even, perhaps, and, of course - plants. There’s nothing quite like local retail, and if I happen to have an outsized pop up audience, for this article, I could be doing the various locales, from here to there, from wherever you might be coming from, to arrive at - what amounts to rubbing the locals the wrong way, perhaps, as well as the nursery shop owners, potentially - it’s a well-stocked nursery, with lots of rare and exotic plants, but it’s definitely a small shop type of feel, so please don’t show up there with some kind of religious group, or religious following, sort of thing, about you - I’ve been going there since I was young, and that would really hurt, if this place was improperly targeted. 

Other than that, there’s no place like it in town. I think that there’s kind of a “no homeless people” kind of rule about the locale, and in towns surrounding the place, I have to warn people. I tried it, and man, it was pretty rough. I got a lot of attention, as a homeless person, out there. 

Which reminds me… about the cracks in the ground. 

On one hand, outgoing people (out in public) probably couldn’t possibly be all that regularly outgoing, and deny, that there are definitely tons of cracks in the ground, that are kind of a new thing, some of them. One person had chimed in, on the subject, going back to agriculture, with the oil industry, being one of the predecessors, or “diversions,” perhaps, from standard and organic agriculture, and, now biotech, with plant-based developments and energy resources being a hot topic, of development, and of sustainability. 

Anyways, the saying was something like, “well, all the cracks in the ground, well, that’s actually a great thing,” on the oil and natural gas industry’s side, but the context was an “out here” sort of thing, which is Downtown LA, and, at the moment, nearly everyone is trying to figure out how to get back to monetization of business and industry - the working folks are, at least. 

Or is this some sort of “Democracy,” or Democratic thing, that I don’t quite understand? That might be me, and maybe that’s the case. 

How are you a patron, here?

- some timely voice chimes in, on the subject - “as.” 

Eh. 

Everybody seems to be accusing others of this or that, but I think that so many people are really over it, and people are becoming concerned about - 

Umm, ugh. Never mind. So much drama. Here’s my Vanilla Planifola, Mexican variety, as a Harajuku Doll (I’d suppose… right?)

Rendered by Vector Q app, on iPadOS.

I didn’t even know that Harajuku dolls were amenable to tropical plants, until I did it.  

For people who would like to delve off-local cartography and travails around town, to unfamiliar places, Facebook Marketplace and Facebook Groups are both good places to network and mingle with people who are fairly time- and science-based invested in the vanilla industry. I just feel that showing up, somewhere, locally, beats a whole lot of ad serve and marketing efforts, even on my part, because it offers the consumer the option to browse a rich array of products that are suitable for local climates, here in Southern California, and there’s a whole lot of Asian and Chinese cuisine and nightlife, along the way, if you’re heading east, out from metropolitan Greater Los Angeles areas, off on Valley Blvd., or, if you’re headed down Mission, from the other side of town, you could perhaps check out the Alhambra public library, for example. 

This all being the case, check back on this blog, for some of my indoor and outdoor gardening and interior design: plant-related contexts, for growing tips, and expert insider decorative insights. For example, I thought that the vanilla plant resembled a rubber plant, perhaps, and I had some grand confabulations of perhaps becoming some sort of commodities mogul, as a next step, beyond Vanilla planifola localization, in to Southern California (outdoor, ideally) agriculture, which got me thinking, since the vines I have are nested on a dead log (of some kind of dead wood), that the plants could, perhaps be placed, strategically-minded, in this case, on some other sort of living plant, to the benefit, and eventual unique development (furtherment) of the species that I have, being that I somewhat envision the plant as a dynamic and adaptive grower, albeit under ostensibly tropical conditions. The significant issue, here, is that most people, in Southern California, hot and sunny, though it is, have nearly scant-to-none - experience, that is, living in a truly tropical, or subtropical environment, which these vanilla plants truly thrive in - the humidity hits the traveler, to a tropic region, from a locality such as ours, immediately, and a person would virtually begin sweating, the moment the person exits the airplane.

Helping build the watershed, aided by more well-established and practiced agricultural nations - 

Here and there, rumors float around of miraculous personal developments happening, typically due to intentional decree, and some sort of flash and ecological disaster-scaled whim of being on the side of virtue, whatever that is, in cases such as this. In this instance, a bunch of generally small guys, I’d somewhat have come to believe, had grouped together, as some sort of group establishment, part urban-development team, and part disruptive hoodlums and drug users, from out of the collective sober living home scene - to build a too-skinny-to-stand high-rise, from out of what used to be a standard-sized parking lot in Downtown Los Angeles - on one hand, sure, perhaps it could have been something better, in any case, but, on the other hand, some of the sidewalks in DTLA are kind of skinny, still, and it’s still a bit intimidating to go out and have to maneuver, deftly, and well-informed (sometimes), of that a bunch of people just want to do the drug-use scene and casual streetside death attempts, on a casual, fanciful, favorite, or targeted victim. We’ll see how far this sort of thing goes. The other night, thy were rumored to have taken a woman, from the company of some guy I used to know, who wound up doing psychotic gestures towards me, in my head, once I became schizophrenic, and, later, simply knowingly harassed, in short. A crack-pack kid, as I knew him, as a young person - I thought that it was kind of impressive, at the time. 

It’s a challenging premise, perhaps, but it’s cheap and slutty to believe the best, out of a situation, in general, when there’s some sort of distaste, inherently assumed, between individuals, whereas cheap and slutty would generally sum up these types of differences in life. Small micro-ecological events, and concentrations, of certain types of behaviors, for example, from a kidnapping, and drugging, of a whore, for example, could, in turn, spur some form of unexpected, and or unprecedented sort of retaliation, such as that we had seen, supposedly - across the nation, and locally, here, in Southern California, and in Los Angeles. I felt like I was disproportionately drawn in to the extreme weather action. 

All things being the case, as such, I’ve been attempting to burgeon the agricultural contexts, within this urban setting, as best I can, while maintaining some personal boundaries, such as keeping to things that interest me, and also by trying to tidy up some of the sloppiness, or, at times, things would be a matter of waiting things out, to discover what the eventual decided purpose and uses would be, per se, for stuff that had popped up, around town, such as a recurrent and persistent urine smell, that had shown up, in Pershing Square. For that matter, due to some of the rains, which featured dropping atmospheric nitrogen, in excessive levels, the subway walls had become hopelessly tainted with calcified urine, and several other stations had  taken on, as well, the characteristic odors of urine, which played out fancifully, in some remote sensing humor development settings, such as “I’ve gotta be of on piss, for a pissed-on!” - a crowd favorite. As it turns out, the sparrows took a fancy to the of on olde (piss), as, they had discovered, the urine was a source of novel pleasure, should the power of it, be released, and they would sometimes hop around, and meddle in the dirt, where the piss was of on olde, and constantly there, embedded in the clay dirt, still, despite the rains.

So, there was some bit of inclusivity, that I could feel, for being the bird-feeding guy, on a regular basis, of some of these other projects, which had been developing, yet I had not much of a clue, about these niche and sub-pop themes, for some of this stuff.

Ugh. (from then, until now):