Meet you by the garden

Last night I took the family to a potluck dinner and seed swap at Gardenerd. While sitting on line for an hour and half in the Santa Monica City Hall permits office a few days ago I read the Santa Monica Daily Press and the Santa Monica Mirror cover-to-cover. In among the event listings was a Seed Swap sponsored by Gardenerd. Gardenerd sounded, just from the 20 word listing, like my kind of gardening organization: hip, online, open to new people. It turns out it is also a microbusiness, loose community, and very much new to what it is doing.

The potluck was held in the founder, principal, and sole proprietor's backyard in Mar Vista, on an entirely residential street, next to a house in the middle of a complete renovation. From the front, the only indications that there was a public event on site was a small vinyl banner stretched across the top of the garage and an 8.5"x11" sign taped onto the door pointing around the side of the house. In back was a medium sized backyard (by the standards of LA backyards I've seen so far) intensely managed, from the woodchips under the seating area to the wisteria arbor to the raised beds to the hanging garden pockets growing herbs on the back fence. It was a lovely little space dedicated mostly to vegetable gardening, and very much up my alley.

20 or so people sat around finishing up dinner, bedecked with nametags and many clutching handfuls of key envelopes filled with seeds. What with baby and deciding at the last minute to attend we didn't get there until more than an hour through the two hour event but I wolfed down my food and started asking around and soon fell into conversations with folks from all over the Westside and collecting seeds. I had none to offer, but that didn't seem to be a problem, and showing off Miriam was, as always, quite popular. I'm going to stat with an herb garden, so mostly collected herb seeds, chives and basil and cilantro and parsley, but someone pushed her favorite flowers into my hands and someone else was talking about carrots and I went home with a whole selection and a wonderful sense that interesting, helpful people are hiding behind the fences and down the side streets of this huge city.