Urban grower Charlie Southward wants Los Angeles residents to bring in 2025 with an age-old tradition, collard greens on your plate

Farmer’s collard green giveaway sponsored by Black Farmers Index and Ark Republic honor New Year’s culinary tradition, preserves urban agriculture legacy started by Black migrants in The Great Exodus.

There are a few public green spaces in Los Angeles County designated for growing fresh, healthy produce. Charlie Southward of IGH Gardens, works on a parcel of the last remaining large green patch, about six acres, in Long Beach. On his urban estate, the military-veteran-turned-farmer harvests thousands of pounds of vegetables and fruits using organic growing methods. 

Southward donates most of his produce to nonprofits and a local senior housing complex, but this coming Saturday, on December 28, he plans to open his carefully tended microfarm to the public for a collard green giveaway. The event is the second part of a two-Saturday effort.

The day, which starts at 11 a.m., ends at 2 p.m. or when all is passed out, whichever happens first. The urban agricultural event will also have Popz and Smooth of the Wylde Bunch band, playing blues, and complimentary vegan pizza and drinks for guests. As well, attendees can tour the garden.

For the free produce dispensary, Southward is distributing fresh-from-the-soil collards, curly kale, broccoli, radishes, and citrus fruits. “When you have healthy food growing in your community that community members can access, it brings pride and healing,” said Southward to Ark Republic. 

“When you walk into a garden it calms you and opens you up. Now when you can eat from it, that takes it to another level.”

The collard green giveaway is an ode to a Black American culinary cultural practice to cook greens⸺from collards to mustards⸺and black-eyed peas for the New Year’s meal. Symbolically, greens bring prosperity and money, while black-eyed peas are for good luck and protection. Along with the savory renditions of the dish, it is usually served with cornbread, and some type of meat such as cornish hen, pork and beef roast, or chicken. 

Added to the delicious meal, the traditional New Year cuisine carries a historical significance. Specifically, collards are a familiar leafy green originating from Africa. It is known to thrive and offer the sweetest taste and the most tender leaves during colder months. Also, collards, which are a form of cabbage, was an essential food staple transported across the Atlantic during the slave trade. 

Today, collard greens are a mainstay in southern gastronomy, and have grown new followers. Recently, the health food industry cited the collards for overflowing in rich nutrients.

Included in the rare opportunity to cop some local, organic free produce, the giveaway introduces the L.A. Metro to one of the few Black inner city farmers preserving a growing legacy that migrated with Blacks who left the agrarian South during the Great Migration.

How an Exodus spawned U.S. urban agriculture

The urban grower is etched into Black farming legacy decades before President Woodrow Wilson’s victory gardens in World War I and World War II. 

During slavery, in major cities like Washington, D.C., Charleston, Richmond, Houston and New York, enslaved and Indigenous laborers maintained produce, flower and herb gardens. They subsisted on crops that yielded seasonal produce and offered medicinal plant-based remedies. Later on, those who migrated from the south after Emancipation, packed their growing traditions into suitcases and replanted them in inner cities from Chicago and Detroit to Oakland and South Central Los Angeles.

Southward’s family moved to Riverside, California in the 1950s from Texas. For Black southerners west of the Mississippi river, California became a popular migratory route rather than traveling to northern states. Like many southern settlers, they erected homesteads, backyard gardens and other grow spaces.

“Everybody had a garden when I grew up. They might not have been prolific, but they had to grow something,” reminisced Southward. “I remember fish fries on Friday night. We would go catch fish and then someone would prepare the fish, while others who had gardens would walk to their neighbors and share what they just harvested. There was so much love then, and nobody had to worry about food.”

“We really didn’t know what we had,” Southward said soberly.

In places like California, where segregation was almost as palpable as the south, harvesting food was critical to survival, and it created social currency. “Because we had to be connected we were connected,” Southward explained. “We couldn’t really socialize with white people, so we had to socialize with ourselves, so we brought our cultures and shared with each other.” 

Southward’s recollection earmarks a cultural retention journalist-scholar Isabel Wilkerson uncovered when researching Black migration for her award-winning book, “Warmth of Other Suns.” When Black folk resettled in other parts of the U.S., the neighborhoods they lived in turned into southern cultural conglomerates. Beforehand, their small towns insulated their traditions, but the cityscapes where they migrated to became fertile sites to reassemble, remix and cluster various black identities and cultural activities.

Many Black southerners faced discrimination and segregation when they arrived in their new home cities. Ultimately, this forced Black émigrès into creating self-sustained communities that included food systems. In the formulation, this meant at least one person in a family unit had to grow something. For Southward, it was his Aunt Angie who grew a range of seasonable vegetables to sustain their family union. “Her garden was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.” 

Southward recalled his aunt growing cascading collard green trees, nectarines, plums and every type of produce she could fit at her home’s landscape. “She had the best garden on the block,” he said.

Inspired to plant something, at the age of five, Southward planted his first crop of potatoes. Watching how his aunt tended to every fruit and vegetable is stuck in his mind to this day. Although he says he was a natural green thumb, Southward enlisted in the military.

Southward’s stories of agrarian Black communities in the cities are the beginnings of urban agriculture that have just been recognized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Since 2022, the agency has increased funding to urban growers and growing operations; plus, has shifted conservation support to cities. Southward has been seeking funding to use every section of the six acre plot in Long Beach.

God’s plan

Following his tenure in the U.S. Army, Southward moved to San Pedro, a city in L.A. County that borders Long Beach, and is also a seaside enclave. Once he settled into his apartment, he asked the property manager if he could start a garden on the terrace. “It turned the whole place beautiful,” told Charlie, who cultivated produce and flowers in containers. 

Soon after, he began giving his neighbors what he grew because his modest-sized plot propagated abundantly. While the garden became a food hub in the complex, the manager who initially approved the grow space shut it down then evicted Southward.

Overnight, Southward became one of thousands of veterans in Los Angeles who are unhoused. Luckily, there was a silver lining at the shelter where he sought refuge. There was a garden on site. The displaced veteran brokered a deal with the program director: if they allowed him to tend a section that was vacant, he would donate his yields to the shelter’s kitchen. 

Within six months, Southward’s garden was popping. His annual harvests produced thousands of pounds. Along with supplying the shelter, the once frustrated former soldier began giving his largesse to shelters housing women and children. For years, Southward maintained his operation, which he mainly funded from his army pension. In turn, his greenery became an oasis for him and community members.

When food shortages rolled through the County during the 2020 global shutdown, he took on another mission. The L.A. Metro’s hustle-and-bustle grinded down to a sluggish, sleeping city. Businesses closed as well as markets. Almost daily, Southward packed his small, used car and made deliveries from Bellflower to Gardena with boxes of food. In some cases, his food deliveries were some locals’ only access to fresh, organic food.

When his garden’s growing pains kicked in again, he relocated to his current operation in Long Beach about three years ago. A shared space with multiple growing organizations, the acreage is owned by Los Angeles County. His agreement with the Los Angeles Housing Authority is that he can remain a steward of the land as long as he provides free produce to the Carmelitos senior complex that sits across the street.

Southward just became the caretaker of the whole estate. He plans to expand his operations and formalize growing classes. “Growing is in my soul,” said Southward. “It comes from a part of me that I cannot explain, but to grow, you’ve got to abide by God’s law.”

Throughout the year, Southward offers classes and hosts farm visits for school-aged children to college students. As well, he opens his space to corporate executives and nonprofits to tour. In between, he holds distribution to the largest senior community in the area. “It feels good to give seniors food at a time like this. The garden also has become a place where they can just sit in all this greenery and find peace.” 

The urban agricultural event on December 28 is sponsored by Black Farmers Index (The Index), a national organization that supports traditional and non-traditional growers in maximizing their business through marketing, trainers, events and providing resources. The collard green giveaway is part of their commitment to address food security and ensure that Black farmers thrive.

A co-sponsor for the event is Ark Republic, who started The Index as a media project during the global shutdown that linked consumers directly to Black growers.

IGH Gardens, which means, In God’s Hands, is an edict that Southward lives by ferociously. Farming is his ministry, and giving fresh produce is his tithe to soil, which comes from the creator. Ultimately, he wants to pass on his gift.

We really don’t have to import produce during the winter. Los Angeles is considered a Mediterranean climate so we have the capability of growing year round.

Because Los Angeles is a major city where cars are the standard and life can “as generations went by, more and more of the younger generations got away from using the stove,” he explained. “I want to help us return to growing our food, and the only way I can do that is teach those younger to me. I have to pass it on.”

Southward hopes this event strikes a fire in participants.