On a small parcel of land tucked into a Los Angeles canyon, surrounded by $20 million to $30 million Beverly Hills mansions, a piece of Southern California history lives on behind a chain-link fence. The Franklin Canyon Orange Grove is one of the last orange groves in Los Angeles, a remnant of the time when citrus sprawled out across Southern California. Last year, city officials approved plans to uproot Bothwell Ranch , the last commercial grove in the San Fernando Valley, for 21 homes, making Franklin Canyon all the more rare — especially given its high-end location.
The handful of groves that remain in Los Angeles and its surrounding suburbs are mostly too small to be used for commercial agriculture, and instead each community has been left to decide the best use for the groves that are still around.
In the Franklin Canyon Orange Grove, that’s meant carefully restoring the once-abandoned parcel of fruit trees so that the grove could be harvested again. But instead of getting shipped off to grocery stores across the nation, as Southern California’s oranges once were, the fruit picked from Franklin Canyon’s trees are distributed for free to families facing food insecurity.
For more than a decade, the Los Angeles Parks Foundation has maintained the orange grove. It partners with nonprofit Food Forward to harvest the fruit a couple times each year: first the navel variety around March, then the Valencia oranges in May or June…