[BUSTLING CITY STREET]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
RON FINLEY(VOICEOVER): I was raised in South Central Los
Angeles.
People call it a food desert.
For the last 10 years, I've worked to turn this food desert
into a food forest.
When you're in the garden, it seduces you.
There's magic in creating something with your own hands.
Gardening has taught me more about myself and this planet
than I could ever learn from any book.
Growing your own food gives you power.
Once you have it, it's something that could never
be taken away from you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I call myself the gangster gardener.
People ask me, why?
Because to me, gardening is gangster.
It came from basically in his urban communities,
people were using this whole gangster mentality,
the violence, the misogynistic behavior, the
be high, be drunk, be high, be drunk, to me,
that was counter to what we should be,
because if you're intoxicated, if you're high, that means
you're not you're not woke.
You're not you're not current.
You're not clear.
I wanted to change that.
So I'm like, no.
This is gangster.
Having knowledge is gangster.
Soil is gangster.
Air is gangster as fuck.
You can't get no more gangster than air.
Mother nature serves us all, so we have to have this respect
and help mother nature do what she do,
rather than thinking it's just air,
rather than taking air for granted.
Everything on this planet is alive.
We're not trained to do that, and that's
where I think if you get a child at a very early age,
and you show him the magic, the alchemy,
the the amazing wondrous things that mother nature does
with a tiny seed, all of a sudden, you take a seed,
and you put it in the ground, and you have a 40-foot tree
that gives you fruit forever.
You want to talk about your rate of return?
That's what we need to invest in.
And that's the whole reason I started my Parkway garden,
because I wanted to show people, the possibilities of what could
happen with this particular land that was just being used
for people's dogs shit and their dressers and toilets
and whatever.
They just discard all their trash on your Parkway.
So I wanted to beautify this, but I put it
outside because I wanted to show people
that they could do the same thing,
and this was a way that I wanted to change these so-called food
deserts, where we could build community with each other
by sharing in the works and sharing in the food.
And doing this, this has happened all over the world.
I say that gardens represents freedom to me,
and that's part of it.
So with my garden, I'm taking some of my power
back, where I have control over a major part of my life.
I think everybody should have the knowledge of how
to feed themselves, and what food they're eating.
I want people to know that you do have power,
you do have a say so and that your life does matter.
But first of all, it's got to matter to you,
and that's what this is about.
It's to show people that there's a big part of your life
that you can design yourself and not live the life that's
been designed for you.
In my class, I'm going to walk you
through all of the tools any gardener needs to have on hand.
I'm going to show you how to turn common household
items into beautiful containers for your plants.
I'm going to teach you how to grow an herb garden that
will save you a ton of time and money,
and for all you out there that can't
seem to keep anything alive, I'm going to show you
how not to kill your plants.
But most importantly, what I'm going
to teach you is how to grow your own damn food.
I'm Ron Finley, and this is my MasterClass.
[MUSIC PLAYING]