Huntington Beach will look at creating a community garden on a nearly 12-acre piece of land on the north end of the city.
The City Council unanimously voted Tuesday night to direct staff to explore the feasibility of creating a community garden with multi-trophic aquaculture.
Councilman Andrew Gruel, who brought the item forward with Mayor Pat Burns, called it a really good pilot program.
“The idea is that we’ll subdivide it so that you’ll get a little garden plot,” Gruel said in an interview with the Daily Pilot following the meeting. “People that don’t have gardens because you live downtown, you live in any of the apartments, you want to garden and you can’t just use your window sill. So, we’ll give people the opportunity to do it in that arena.”
On June 3, the council approved acceptance of a quitclaim deed from Spreckels Sugar Company, Inc. for the city-maintained property near the Boeing Company, formerly used by the U.S. Navy as a railroad corridor.
According to a report, city staff had reached out to the owner and successfully negotiated a voluntary quitclaim at no cost to the city. The Public Works Department was already maintaining the property.
Gruel said that he wanted to establish something similar to a former project he was involved in with Huntington Beach High School and teacher Greg Goran, the HBHS Green Team.
Huntington Beach City Councilman Andrew Gruel, shown after being sworn in at City Hall in March.
(James Carbone)
The students grew vegetables and delivered them to Gruel, a celebrity chef who was the founder of Slapfish. He sold his share of that restaurant company in 2022 and now owns a fish house in Sunset Beach.
“Every Friday, they would harvest it, clean it, drop it off at the restaurant, give us terms, we would pay them,” Gruel said. “We never harvested fish, because you can’t commercially. You need a receiver’s license, you need the Orange County Department of Health to oversee it.”
The role of the multi-trophic aquaculture in this case would not be to sell fish to his business, he said, but to create a closed-loop ecosystem. Some in the community had critiqued him when the agenda item came out, citing a possible conflict of interest.
“The nitrogen from the fish effluent is the perfect organic fertilizer for the veggies, and the veggie scraps feed the fish,” Gruel said in a statement posted to social media on July 10. “In addition, a year’s harvest would probably provide enough fish for [two] restaurant services. This is a benefit to the community. Not everything has to be political.”
Gruel said during the interview that the issue is of particular interest to him, adding that he ran a sustainable seafood program at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach prior to opening restaurants.
Huntington Beach currently has a community garden across town, on Atlanta Avenue.
City staff was asked to report back within six months on the appropriate next steps for the proposed new community garden.
“I love gardening,” Burns said during Tuesday’s meeting. “As soon as Andrew said he wanted to find some place for a community garden … I had been eye-balling that land for years. We acquired it with the help of the city attorney, city manager, staff and everybody, and it just worked out perfect. Now, it’s going to come to fruition, and I’m looking forward to it, I’m stoked.”