For 52 years, hundreds of gardeners faithfully worked the earth at theAltadena Community Garden to grow tomatoes, lettuce and basil. Now they tend its soil to regrow their community.
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When the Eaton Fire swept through Altadena in January, it took more than 6,000 homes and at least 19 lives. It also destroyed many of the places where Altadenans came together to build friendships and share fellowship, like the Altadena Community Garden.
The fire consumed a shed, damaged tools and whipped through the garden's 84 plots. Areas of the garden that managed to avoid fire were contaminated by toxic ash raining down from the homes and businesses that burned nearby. Pollutants penetrated the once-fertile earth.
Of the garden's 120 members, 62 lost their homes in the fire. But gardening is part of who they are, and they're not giving up. They'll rebuild what they lost, and they intend to come back stronger.
“These people are my community,” said Mary McGilvray, vice president of the nonprofit that runs the Altadena Community Garden, as volunteers rolled wheelbarrows across the bare expanse during a recent Saturday community event at the site.
The event drew a visit from Toni Bailey-Raines, daughter of Al Bailey, one of the Altadena residents who founded the garden in the 1970s. Bailey-Raines, co-host of the Altadena Talks podcast, shared stories of the garden told to her by her father, a chemical and mechanical engineer with a green thumb. The garden represents the diversity and spirit of Altadena, she said, and watching volunteers restore it gives her hope.
“This is therapeutic for me,” she said.
Community volunteers have regularly joined forces with gardeners on the weekends. Their goal: to bring back healthy, toxin-free soil so they can nurture healthy crops from it. That healing process is well on its way thanks to a groundswell of support from neighbors, small businesses and philanthropy – including a generous grant from the California Community Foundation.
The gardeners are also getting help from some surprisingly powerful allies in sustainable gardening: mushrooms.
Mushrooms are a sort of clean-up crew for polluted environments. That's the philosophy behind mycoremediation, the use of fungi to remove or neutralize environmental contaminants. Certain types of mushrooms and their root-like networks, known as mycelium, can break down or absorb harmful substances in soil, transforming toxic sites into healthier ecosystems. Mushrooms are the “fruit” of fungi that appear above the soil surface, while mycelium is the underground “body” of the mushroom organism. It's a biochemical factory producing powerful enzymes and acids that break down complex molecules – like the chemicals in ash from the Eaton Fire.
The Altadena Community Garden's leaders chose to use oyster mushrooms to “digest” contaminants in their soil and break them down into inert, harmless chemicals, much like mushrooms would decompose rotting wood.
“This is the largest mushroom remediation project I've ever been involved in,” said Joe Nagy, president of the Altadena Community Garden's nonprofit. To transform the bare land, Nagy immersed himself in remediation techniques, reaching out to L.A. organizations like SoilWise and Metabolic Studio for their expertise in composting and ecological restoration.
The gardeners began remediation as soon as they could safely return to the site in April. But they couldn't simply drop mushrooms into the area and let them do their work. The EPA and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers first cleared debris and removed about 4 inches of contaminated topsoil to rid the land of the most pollutants. The gardeners then had the remaining soil tested for toxic chemicals.
Volunteers laid down new earth and 525 cubic yards of compost over the land – enough dirt to fill about 165 Volkswagen Beetles. Finally, they mixed in mycelium donated by a mushroom grower in Long Beach and covered the earth with straw to preserve moisture. Two months later, they would test the soil for toxins once again.
Even neighboring organizations that suffered in the Eaton Fire are helping. After the Altadena campus of the Pasadena Waldorf School was destroyed in the Eaton Fire, the school gave its felled tree trunks to the garden. A neighbor brought a mobile mill to cut the wood into chunks. The gardeners placed the wooden logs on the soil to encourage mushroom growth along the northern edge of the 2.5-acre property, where chemicals from nearby charred homes have seeped into the garden.
McGilvray walked along that stretch of the garden and pointed out sunflowers and squash and potato seedlings that sprouted from the soil near a chain-link fence. The gardeners planted them, she said, because they're potent tools in a technique called phytoremediation.
Phytoremediation is the use of plants to remove, neutralize or stabilize contaminants, making it a perfect plant-based partner to mycoremediation. It works because plants naturally interact with the environment through their roots, stems and leaves, absorbing nutrients. And just as they absorb nutrients, they can absorb contaminants. Sunflowers are especially powerful: They can absorb heavy metals like arsenic. After the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, sunflowers were planted to help remove radioactive cesium and strontium from contaminated soils and ponds.
At the Altadena Community Garden, the sunflowers also stand as a reminder of the lush plants that once grew from the land, a welcome sign of hope and progress. As mushrooms spurt across the property and squash seedlings shoot their thick leaves skyward, the gardeners prepare to lay down a new irrigation system. After that will come new planter boxes.
Just as Altadena slowly prepares to rebuild, with the hope of retaining the character that makes it unique, so do the farmers of the Altadena Community Garden.
“Our goal is to get our gardeners back to gardening in January,” McGilvray said. “We need it. We need this place back.”
CONTACT: Gilien Silsby, Director of Media Relations, California Community Foundation, 213-500-8673
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SOURCE California Community Foundation
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