Prototype Issue
Watts Wonder: The Powerful Green Thumb of Anne Marie Carter
By Erin Powers
(page 1 of 2)“The Seed Lady of Watts.” A simple, memorable name for a complex woman. Anna Marie Carter’s 5-year-old Watts Garden Club is nestled among some of LA’s most notorious gang and drug-ridden housing projects.
More than 300 children from the surrounding communities come here after school to make constructive use of their energy. For these children, the club provides a safe, nurturing atmosphere that keeps them out of trouble and off the streets. The Watts Garden Club’s mission? “I tell the kids that just like with plants, you have to water yourself with organic foods, nice thoughts and positive actions. You have to weed through the bad stuff, and the Garden Club is a good start.”
A certified master gardener, Carter rediscovered her passion for organic gardening in 1997, after she suffered a near-fatal electric shock while at work—a production job in the entertainment industry. The doctors sent her home to die; miraculously, she survived.
“I thought that there must be a reason and purpose God let me live through that,” says Carter, who set about organizing organic gardens for more than 2,000 AIDS patients in LA. After witnessing an increase in their vitality, she decided to do the same thing with the neglected youth in her community.
With donations and offers of help, the Garden Club thrived way beyond Carter’s expectations. The children she works with grow their own organic produce, make their own pastas and breads and produce their own line of handmade organic soaps. They hold open-air markets on weekends, where they sell their products. Carter also teaches her group how to manage and invest money, instructing them “not to run away from their community but stay and build it up. This is yours. Make it something. Make something out of nothing.”
Carter received a Local Hero award from the Dalai Lama at UCLA’s 2005 World Festival of Sacred Music.
RTLA: How did you become known as the Seed Lady? SL: In my religion, they teach me that faith without work is dead. If you’re not actively working at it, then your whole effort is a waste of time. I’m basically what you would call an urban guerrilla gardener.
You might see the essence of the Seed Lady on the side of a freeway. Anywhere I feel there might be somebody living and they’re hungry, I go out there, plant some seeds, and food will sprout. You’ll walk by and say, “Did you see that lettuce? Is that lettuce? What’s that lettuce doing there?” Then you find some tomatoes and some onions. Maybe there’s some cucumbers up under there. Hey, you got a salad! Has the seed lady been here? Perhaps.
I’ve had people tell me that they found some of my garden, ate it and it sustained them through a very difficult time.
How did your passion for organic foods and gardens start? I was born in an agricultural part of the Bay area. My grandmother, who raised me, was a Muslim in the Nation of Islam under the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. So at that time in the ‘50s, she helped write a book called How to Eat to Live [by Elijah Muhammad], so our whole world was surrounded in nutrition, because she was a cook. But she only cooked and ate halal food, which is basically kosher [for Muslims]. Back in the ‘50s it was very much unheard of. We didn’t eat food out of the grocery store. We grew our own food, and all the meat that we ate was raised and slaughtered in Modesto. In the spring, we’d fill up our trunks and we’d eat off that for a year.
How did the Watts Garden Club get started? Well, I just noticed that a lot of the people around me looked very bad, were obese and sick. I loved to eat and I know good food. The food that they have here in LA is not that good. I mean, for the common, ordinary day-to-day type working person, people that are considered the masses, the food here is horrible. It comes from other countries. It doesn’t taste right. It’s been genetically manipulated, hybridized, irradiated. It has pesticides on it. I can taste them. I can smell them as soon as I walk in the store. Coming from such a beautiful place like the Bay area, down into this basin, I just saw the differences.
I started a little store in Crenshaw, back in the early ‘90s. I was going to school for this entrepreneurial training program, and the Rodney King riots happened. I tried to leave my house to get some food, and there was a gentleman from the National Guard on the corner with an assault rifle. He pointed it at me and told me to go back in the house.
I told him I was hungry and needed to go get some food, and he said, “Go back in the house.” I went inside and said to myself, “I’ve got to get out of here. I’m in prison.” So I went down the back stairs into the alley, opened up my garage door, started my car and went up the alley through Inglewood—the National Guard weren’t there—driving all the way around to the farmers’ market in Hollywood.
I loaded my car up with vegetables, food and bread and brought it back to my community through those same alleys. I shared the food with my neighbors, because we were hungry. It brings tears to my eyes because it’s no joke. It’s no joke when you’re on lockdown like that. In the inner city, they can lock this place down in a New York minute. They did it right in front of me. It affected me. It was the thing that made me realize I’d like to provide a way for my people to survive in any event.
How did the community react to your ideas? I started 15 years ago, and I was the only one out there. Everyone said, “She’s crazy. She’s a nut!” But since then we’ve learned about food. Now those same people who called me crazy come to me and say, “I apologize. Now I realize that you’re an asset to the community, and I’m willing to help and support.”
What kinds of things go on in the Garden Club? With the youth, I feel that it’s like a new day for them. They look at their parents on drugs. They look at their alcoholic grandparents. They see their brothers, sisters and cousins in jail. But these kids are smart. They know they don’t want that for themselves.
‘They call me Ms. Anna Marie. I call them Ms. or Mr. whatever. We respect each other here, and that’s what it’s all about. It’s all about love.’
So they come to the Garden Club and they’re filled up with this energy, light and good food. They see plants that are growing, and other healthy children just socializing together. And they always tell me the same thing: “This is a good place.”
If you’re living somewhere that is negative and there’s one little place that’s completely positive, you naturally gravitate toward it. When they come here, we get them in circles and do these think-tank sessions. They’re coming up with all these great ideas. But the greatest one they all have is about love. These kids really want to love one another, and they want someone to love them. They are really hungry for love or anyone that will show them love.
We learn to share with the community here. Getting extra vegetables. Taking them to the homebound elderly. The kids take them vegetables or blankets or seeds or just go by to say hi. The relationships the children are learning to have with the community is making the children better. I’m very proud of my kids. I’ve got 344 of them, and I am so proud of them.
This is a school that’s also teaching them the work ethic that’s missing here in the community. Whether it’s gardening in one of our gardens, sprouting the organic heirloom seeds, or nurturing the plants, we have several workshops. I’ve sent my kids places from Russia to Cleveland to educate them on nonviolent conflict resolution. They can come back home from these workshops and think about ways to actively end this violence that’s so rampant here. We’re not just victims of our society, we also have the power to change things.
You mentioned big changes in the club in the past year. A lot has happened. There was a big freeze that destroyed the crops in our garden in January. Everything got frost burn—about 5,000 containers and our trees. FEMA was going to help out and we were waiting for the emergency-relief bill to pass in Congress, but Bush attached the military-spending plan on it. The Democrats included a timeline to get the soldiers out and Bush vetoed it. I wonder how many other small organizations were affected.
Then Bank of America promised a decent loan but ended up throwing us a small obligatory amount. So we are in the eleventh hour of fundraising. I recently raised about $2,000, but it’s a drop in the bucket. We need more like $15,000. We still have possession of our building and we still have our markets and classes for our kids. But the financial needs have become bigger than we can handle.
What’s happening with your food project? Well, like a garden, the ending of something is just an opportunity for renewal. Solving problems is part of our self-sufficiency project, and another problem was thrown onto the pile. Last year, the farmers on 41st and Alameda lost their 14-acre farm. There was a piece of land in Watts being prepared for use by the Stanford Avalon Farms, a community farming project. The city decided to give some of it to the farmers from 41st.
They came and asked me for a list of names of black farmers—only black farmers—to invite them to participate in a photo op. I refused to participate in any activity that included discrimination, racism or sexism. Shortly after that they decided to distribute 90% of the land to the 41st St. Farmers, leaving only 10% to the Watts residents. It almost caused another riot. It was like a slap in the face. What was particularly galling was that those farmers raise the crops to sell to market. We raise our crops to feed ourselves.
And your solution? A portable organic-gardening process called organopónicos, a technology of how to grow food in containers. It’s a solution for growing food on concrete I learned when I went to Cuba in 2004. I took that technology and refined it and put it in a raised bed and made it portable. We’ve been using them in the garden, and it’s the only thing that survived when the frost came.
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