Long before the locavore movement, urbanites were growing something good in Mar Vista.

Founded in 1977, Ocean View Farms is one of the oldest community gardens in Los Angeles. According to Joan Silver, a gardener and past president of Ocean View's board, the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power had originally acquired the land for a reservoir project during World War II.

That project never took off, and the flat part of the land was given to the North Venice Little League in the 1960s. When community gardeners were looking for a site in the mid-1970s, then-Mayor Tom Bradley and then-Councilman Marvin Braude offered the hillside on the condition that the garden could have no costs to the city.

Today the garden is a community success story, with an all-volunteer work force that has developed a unique compost system, which has won waste management awards and saved substantial money for both the garden and the city of Los Angeles.

“I don’t think you could find a better example of how normal neighborhood people got an idea to do something [and did it],” Silver said. “Every corner is being used. [We have] recycling, neighborhood meetings, we’re educating children.”

Ocean View's main goal is to give community members a chance to garden, something that’s not always available to Los Angeles apartment dwellers. The 6½-acre garden has about 350 gardeners working 500 plots, as well as a fruit and nut orchard, a children’s garden and an amphitheater.

The garden will accept anyone in the community who’s willing to maintain a plot and perform at least 12 hours a year of volunteer garden maintenance work. Right now, so many people want to make that commitment that the garden has a three-year waiting list.

Ocean View Farms is named for its westerly view, stretching above the rooftops of Mar Vista and Venice to the ocean. It’s a view real estate developers might envy, even if it’s occasionally interrupted by planes landing at Santa Monica Airport across the street.

But Ocean View is also known for its compost. In the 1980s, gardener Warren Miyashiro wanted to improve the hillside’s naturally sandy soil, so he began composting weeds and other green waste, then scouting horse stables for usable manure.

Eventually, he developed a large system using green waste from the garden itself and horse manure. The manure comes from private stables on the Westside and is trucked to the garden by the city, which saves on sanitation costs. Until a few years ago, garden master Ed Mosman added, Ocean View also used elephant manure trucked down once a week by a man who trained elephants for the movies.

Volunteer committees meet weekly to process the compost material. Garden members can help themselves to as much as they like, and there’s even enough left over to donate to school gardens.

In addition to improving the soil, the composting system has saved both Ocean View and the city money. Before the system was developed, gardeners would simply throw garden waste away, generating $2,000 a year in waste removal—by far the garden’s biggest cost.

These days, Ocean View is down from five dumpsters to two, and its waste reduction efforts earned it awards from the state of California’s Integrated Waste Management Board every year from 1995 to 2006. 

Members also volunteer to help with almost all garden improvements. For example, Silver said, a member who was the head carpenter for a movie studio built Ocean View's amphitheater and the shady picnic area around the “giving tree,” where members leave usable plants and other items they don’t need.

Gardener Joan Naniche joined Ocean View in 1978; she happened to notice it as she drove by and joined on the spot. She said she dreams of being able to rely only on her garden for fresh produce, but that the eating is almost secondary to the pleasure of growing.

“It’s bringing the whole process to fruition, seeing how seeds [grow],” she said. If gardeners let a plant go to seed and self-sow, three or four months later, you’ve got volunteer plants growing. That’s magic.”