Gangster gardening

There’s a movie that I want all of you to see. Yep, all of you. It’s not the latest action thriller or love story. Well, actually it's both.

“Can You Dig This?” follows four “gangster gardeners” in South Central Los Angeles, home of some staggering crime and poverty rates. Riddled with gang violence, vacant lots, and empty buildings, it’s not the location you’d expect a garden to flourish. But the four gardeners highlighted in this movie did the unexpected and asked people to put down their guns and instead pick up shovels.

Watch the trailer at https://vimeo.com/130457181 and be inspired.

In the movie, gangster gardener Ron Finley, who lives in the neighborhood and is described as a “horticultural artist,” says, “When you put beauty in a place that generally doesn’t have it, that’s a game changer.”

That gave me the chills.

South Central LA is a food desert, filled with a multitude of fast-food chains yet lacking grocery stores with fresh food. Finley says his neighborhood is “home of the drive-thrus and drive-bys.” But he says drive-thrus are killing more people than drive-by shootings. When he got tired of driving 45 minutes to find a scrap of organic produce, Finley started this gardening revolution on his own street. The parkway (aka hell strip) in front of his home was nothing but grass and weeds. Although the city owned it, he was responsible for maintaining it. So he planted a vegetable garden giving his neighbors access to fresh, healthy food. The city cited him and told him he was in violation of code, but he didn’t pay the fine. The fine turned into a warrant. An LA Times reporter caught wind of it, and once the story broke, Finley’s city council representative was suddenly supporting the project.

You can hear his story here: https://youtu.be/l6VBV00ZREc. Parts of it had me in tears — the feel-good kind.

His gangster gardens started popping up all over South Central, and more volunteers came to help. Delila Vallot, an actress, dancer, and director from Hollywood, directed the film that tells Finley's story. “Can You Dig This” was shown at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2015 and took the event’s Jury Award. In the film Finley says, “A garden can change people’s lives. It can change the structure of a community.” And his project is living proof.

Another quote from the film that moved me was from a young lady who observes, “If this plant can die and it grows back in a bad environment in a city like this, it just shows I can fall and get back up and do the same thing.”

I know I asked all of you to go see this movie. But there’s more. You can host a screening in your town. Visit http://canyoudigthisfilm.com/#screenings for more information. Or you can see it at Cultivate in Columbus this summer — July 9, 5-7 p.m.; July 10, 6-8 p.m.; and July 11, 4-6 p.m. All showings are at the convention center in room C216.