volved more than just weeds and brush.
“We quickly realized the hillside had
been used as a trash heap,” Bassi ex-
plained. “There were motorcycle parts.
Bike parts. Bottles from the 1920s. My
auger broke immediately on shag car-
peting that had been buried in the hill-
side.”
Inspired by the Mayan approach to
terracing steep hillsides, Bassi and her
father cut into the severely sloped bluff
using hand tools. They started at the
top, because it was easier to transport
bags of concrete and 4-by-4 posts for the
planting beds.
“It was very satisfying,” Bassi said.
During the day, the family worked on
terracing the rows, building retaining
walls and installing drip irrigation. At
night, Bassi educated herself about ur-
ban farming by reading blogs like the
Urban Farmer, Monty Don and Ne-
versink Farm. She researched sustain-
able gardening practices by watching
YouTube videos and consulting Reddit.
When a friend recommended “zoo doo”
— free compost made from yard clip-
pings and L.A. Zoo animal manure —
Bassi became a regular at the Griffith
Park Composting Facility. Prompted by
Conor Crickmore’s no-till farming prac-
tices, she created her own inexpensive
soil by amending hillside dirt with com-
post, peat moss and “zoo doo.”
After they cleared the hillside, Bassi
and her father built one large raised bed
out of untreated redwood fencing pan-
els. Then another. Ultimately they builtTwo years ago, when she was work-
ing as a production assistant on a TV
drama, Joanna Bassi had an epiphany.
“I realized that I had to find some-
thing else to do,” Bassi said. “The indus-
try wasn’t for me. I wasn’t using my cre-
ativity. I wanted to make money, but ev-
eryone on the set was unhappy. That
wasn’t how I wanted my life to go.”
She quit her job and made a list of all
the things she wanted to do.
As a child growing up in Sherman
Oaks, she would often switch bedrooms
with the hope that the change of scenery
would elevate her outlook on life.
It was a form of wanderlust that
would continue into her 20s.
“I transferred colleges three times,”
Bassi said. “I moved to Oakland, Rhode
Island and Kansas City.”
But it wasn’t until she transformed
her trash-strewn hillside into a thriving
microfarm that Bassi discovered her
true self. “I never found what I was look-
ing for when I changed cities,” she said.
“But I found it here on this hillside. I now
have a deep understanding of the envi-
ronment. It’s a good thing to be still.”
On a hot, bright afternoon recently,
Bassi walked down one of the five
switchbacks she dug, past raised beds
filled with tomatoes, beets and Swiss
chard, and stopped to inspect an abun-
dant crop of zucchini. “I’m not planting
squash again,” she said while harvesting
the overgrown vegetables. “They grow
too fast. I don’t enjoy them enough, so I
neglect them.”
While many millennials are obsessed
with indoor plants, Bassi, 30, is following
in the path of other, agrarian-minded
peers by embracing urban farming just
steps from her home and minutes from
downtown Los Angeles.
She purchased the 660-square-foot
bungalow in Montecito Heights in 2017
with help from her family, credit cards
and the income from a rental unit on the
property. The house was billed as a “hip
Craftsman home with sweeping views,”
but Bassi, an artist, was drawn to its fan-
ciful “Wes Anderson vibe.”
Ultimately, it was the empty lot be-
hind her house that would offer her an
opportunity to create her own sense of
magic.
“I looked at the weeds and thought, ‘I
want to create an ecosystem,’ ” Bassi
said of her eureka moment.
The scale of the backyard garden
may have been outrageous, but it
matched her determination. “I’d never
done something so massive,” she said.
“So I told myself, ‘I can do this.’ ”
Still, she had never grown anything
with success. But as an artist, Bassi was
able to envision the finished landscape.
“The artist part of me is exactly why I
did this,” she said. “I don’t think people
would jump into something like this if
they didn’t have creativity. They would
look at the hillside and think it’s a disas-
ter. An artist would think, ‘This is going
to be fun.’ ”
Her father, Frank, a semi-retired en-
gineer at JPL, agrees. “Her degree in fine
art helped her,” he said. “She applies her
creative thinking to making things bet-
ter.”
Working alongside her father and
brother Eric, Bassi spent more than a
year clearing the 75-by-75-foot hillside.
It was an intense process that in-seven beds measuring 3 feet wide by 3
feet tall. They lined each bed with metal
mesh to deter critters and sunk the
posts into the ground as if they were
building a retaining wall. They then at-
tached the wood fencing panels to the
posts.
For her first crop, Bassi planted 150
tomato plants in nine varieties. The
tomatoes thrived on the south-facing
slope, resulting in roughly 800 pounds of
food.
This year’s crop was equally produc-
tive, yielding 300 pounds of tomatoes
(down from last year due to spring
frost), 100 pounds of butter lettuce, 60
pounds of spinach, 100 pounds of Swiss
chard and 20 pounds of carrots and
beets. Bassi also grows about 20 pounds
of microgreens a week along with laven-
der, thyme, sage, oregano, rosemary and
chamomile.
Today, Bassi spends about eight
hours a day on her hillside, which she
calls Rose Hill Farm, and sells her orga-
nic produce at the Alhambra farmers
market on Sundays. After cold-calling a
few restaurants, she now provides her
microgreens to chefs at Hippo in High-
land Park and Pez Cantina in downtown
Los Angeles.
Bassi still freelances in the entertain-
ment industry but views the garden as a
continuation of her work as a visual art-
ist. “My artwork has to do with natural
materials and degrading,” she said. “For
me, it’s a natural progression into sus-
tainable art.”Growing an urban farm
Joanna Bassi was wasting her
creativity as a TV production
assistant. She found a new
outlet in her own backyard.
By Lisa BooneJOANNA BASSIturned a weed- and trash-filled hillside in northeast
Los Angeles into the flourishing vegetable garden Rose Hill Farm.Photographs by Mariah TaugerLos Angeles TimesLATIMES.COM WSCE F7
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHOME & DESIGN
In October 1846, before the wall or detention centers or
the Border Patrol, Los Angeles was known as El Pueblo de
Los Ángeles in the vast and remote Mexican territory of
Alta California. And its former mayor, Manuel Dominguez,
was intent on keeping invaders at bay.
It was the time of the Mexican-American War, and theinvaders were U.S. Marines marching 380 strong toward
the pueblo from their port in San Pedro, right through
Dominguez’s ranch — 75,000 acres of dusty grazing land
that covered a region now populated by communities from
the Palos Verdes Peninsula to Compton.
The ensuing battle will be re-enacted Oct. 5 and 6, dur-ing the Dominguez Rancho Adobe Museum’s 12th com-
memoration of the event. Dominguez was a prominent
and wealthy Californio, a Californian of Spanish ancestry,
who sometimes chafed at the dictates from Mexico City, a
centralized government too far removed to understand
the realities of a rancher’s life in the rugged north. None-
theless, said historian Luis Fernandez, executive director
of the Dominguez Rancho Adobe Museum, Dominguez
and his fellow Californios
did not want to be overtak-
en by the U.S. either, so
they hatched a plan to re-
pel the invaders 19 miles
south of the pueblo near
Dominguez’s adobe.
Those advancing were
well-armed Marines. The
Californios numbered
only 50 landowners and lo-
cal recruits who had some
crucial advantages: They
all had horses and inti-
mate knowledge of the dry,
hilly terrain. They also had
a secret weapon — a small
cannon hidden away by a
Californio named Clara
Cota de Reyes.
Using their horses,
the Californios swiftly
dragged the cannon fromone hillside to another, firing from different locations to
make the Marines believe they were outgunned.
The ruse worked. After two days of fighting — on Oct. 8and 9, 1846 — the Marines retreated with five dead. The vic-
torious Californiossuffered no casualties, Fernandez said.
Of course, two months later, the Marines returned withnearly triple their number to take control of the pueblo, but
they came in via San Diego, keeping their distance from
the Dominguez rancho.
Ultimately, U.S. troops took over Mexico City as well,and on Feb. 2, 1848, won the war, paying Mexico $1.5 million
in reparations and taking roughly twice that amount of
Mexican debt in exchange for Alta California, a region that
became the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Col-
orado and Nevada.
Dominguez went on to help craft California’s Constitu-tion in 1849. His six daughters inherited most of his land,
which he had inherited from an uncle, Juan Jose Domin-
guez, a soldier in the Portola expedition; it was the first
Spanish land grant in California, today encompassing
Carson, Compton, Gardena, Harbor City, Lomita, the Pa-
los Verdes Peninsula, Redondo Beach, San Pedro, Tor-
rance and Wilmington, as well as unincorporated Rancho
Dominguez, where the 14-room home Dominguez built for
his new wife, Maria Engracia de Cota, houses the Domin-
guez Rancho Adobe Museum, a private organization de-
voted to preserving the family’s legacy and the region’s
early history.
The museum’s family-friendly re-enactment of the Bat-tle of Dominguez Hills involves about 50 volunteers, who
will be in character to answer questions about whom they
portray and why they were fighting. The event also fea-
tures activities from the era. Visitors can tour Dominguez’s
14-room adobe, built in 1827, and try their hand at making
adobe bricks, the most viable building material of the time,
as well as cattle roping (on dummy cows) and tortilla mak-
ing.
Children can make corn husk dolls and pan for gold, al-though most of the gold mining in California happened far-
ther north. The connection to Dominguez? He sent his cat-
tle north to sell to prospectors, Fernandez said, part of the
savvy business crowd that mined the miners to make their
money.
The re-enactment tries to be authentic, but it can’t in-clude Clara Cota de Reyes’ cannon, Fernandez said. The
original got carted across the country, where it’s on display
— ironically enough — at the U.S. Naval Academy Museum
in Annapolis, Md.
MANUEL DOMINGUEZwas intent on keeping
invaders out. A battle ensued on his rancho in 1846.
Dominguez Rancho Adobe MuseumRe-enactment
of the 1846
Battle of
Dominguez
Hills
Where:Dominguez
Rancho Adobe Museum,
18127 S. Alameda St.,
Rancho Dominguez
When:10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Oct. 5-6. Re-enactments
at noon and 3 p.m. Oct. 5,
11:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m.
Oct. 6.
Info:Free admission and
parking. Food available for
purchase. dominguez
rancho.orgCalifornios’ win
over U.S. troops
to be re-enacted
By Jeanette Marantos