In a quiet neighborhood in Panorama City, a nonprofit urban farm is thriving

Not far from busy Roscoe Avenue in Panorama City, a plot of land about one-eighth of an acre, is producing rows of squash, lettuce, broccoli, onions and radishes. It’s the home of the  Black Thumb Farm, a nonprofit that trains high school students how to tend the soil and create compost, and how to grow and harvest the vegetables. In the spring, students work as farm hands, and “they get to take the food that they grow,” says Ethereal Quintero, a board member of Black Thumb Farm.

Black Thumb Farm has built relationships with local high schools, and in the summer the farm pays students to tend the produce that the farm sells at its public farm stand. “We’re reaping a lot of produce,” Quintero said. “It’s a really potent project.”

As the farm gets ready for its 5-year-anniversary fundraiser in late November, its employees are working to move the farm to Mission Hills, where the nonprofit will have a much larger piece of land — 2.3 acres — and a permanent home.

Alexys Romo, executive director at Black Thumb Farm, says, “Nothing gets wasted in the garden, cuttings are harvested for propagations, teas, eating, and anything left is composted and returned to the soil through compost. … In our move we’re going to leave a lot behind which we will miss, but the new farm is a blank space and an opportunity to design and grow in a way that works for our ‘org’ and growing community. I can’t wait to get some huge native trees established.”

This year Black Thumb Farm donated more 1,000 pounds of produce to those in need.

Esmeralda Gonzalez, a California Climate Action Corps fellow who is working at the farm, said, “Moving forward and into the future, we are shaping the world we want to see. Black Thumb Farm is doing that by creating a green agricultural space for our youth and communities.”

Quintero says that in 2016 when he was a boy, he built “a school garden at Sharp Avenue Elementary in Arleta. And now I’m helping support the permanent establishment of Black Thumb Farm just a few miles away, also on Sharp Avenue. Seeing these efforts grow in the same community that raised me feels like planting seeds for the next generation that I never had access to.”