The Philadelphia Inquirer Gardening column

Jul 30, 2010 — The Philadelphia Inquirer

Virginia A. Smith

Jul. 30, 2010 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) -- Cindy Bly gardens in the tiny yard behind her rowhouse in Lawncrest. You wouldn't imagine she's, literally, in the produce business, but she is.

This summer, Bly, a dispatcher in SEPTA's track department, is selling her kale, collard greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, and eggplants to Weavers Way in Mount Airy. Every two weeks, the food co-op's refrigerated truck comes by to pick up the vegetables and drop off a check for $20 or so.

"It's not the money. I just love to do this," says Bly, 51, who also donates vegetables to her uncle's senior citizen complex.

Bly's yard, all planted except for a small deck and gazebo with a table in the middle, is about 13 feet wide and 24 feet deep. That makes it the smallest of the first 15 gardens enrolled in the City Harvest Growers Alliance, an urban food-growing program funded over the next three years with a $300,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The program is run by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society's Philadelphia Green, an old hand at urban gardening. It requires participants to sell their fresh produce to restaurants and markets, and donate a portion to food cupboards and other nonprofits.

Either way, these gardeners are running small -- in Bly's case, very small -- food enterprises. And, at least for the bigger growers, says Joan Reilly, Philadelphia Green senior director, "it's an interesting, safe way to learn how to be an urban farmer. It can test their desire to do that."

Alliance grower Amanda Staples has the desire, for sure.

In 2005, she and her husband, Matt McFarland, started a community garden on six vacant lots in Kensington. In 2007, they interned on a Lancaster County farm. Today, they live in a huge cooperative house in Germantown owned by a friend and garden on the half-acre lot next door, which they own.

The lot had been abandoned for 30 years when Staples and McFarland bought it in 2008, and it's still not completely cleared. But the 15-foot-high tangles of multiflora rose are gone, as are the two trashed ice-cream trucks that were buried under runaway vines and weeds.

"We had a scrapper come and take them away on a flatbed truck," says Staples, 30. "It was really crazy."

On the cleared part of the lot, the couple have 10 raised beds, each 25 feet long and a few feet wide, filled with chard, tomatoes, collards, kale, squash, beets, turnips, peppers, scallions, cucumbers, eggplants, potatoes, and beans.

They sell to Weavers Way. They also run a little Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) operation, offering a box of six to 10 different vegetables a week, for $15 to $25, to eight neighborhood families. Others buy directly at the garden.

Help from Philadelphia Green "gave us a jump start. It's a big boost that will really help after the program is over," says Staples, who hopes someday to build a greenhouse on the lot and be a full-time, self-supporting farmer. (McFarland, 32, plans to work as a computer programmer, starting this fall.)

The money to be made is not huge; some alliance growers may make $1,000 or $2,000 a year. "But if 60 farmers are doing $2,000 each, that's $120,000. That's something," says Glenn Bergman, general manager of Weavers Way.

Still, Debbie Rudman is keeping her day job as programming director at Philadelphia Community Access Media. She'll farm on the side.

With about a dozen neighbors, Rudman grows on a vacant lot at Front Street and Fairmount Avenue in Northern Liberties -- with the owner's permission, another program requirement.

By gardening as a group in a large space, rather than individuals on small plots, they've vastly increased their growing potential. Planting in 10 raised beds measuring 20 by 4 feet each, they were able to donate 359 pounds of cabbages and broccoli to a soup kitchen by Memorial Day.

Last Friday, the group rounded up 25 pounds of tomatoes, yellow squash, and basil for a weekly farmers market run by Teens 4 Good at the Village of the Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia. They've already started butternut squash and sweet potato seedlings for fall.

"In between donations, we pick what we want for dinner," says Rudman, who previously had a plot at Liberty Lands community garden in Northern Liberties and also did a documentary on City Harvest, another PHS program.

In this one, Philadelphia prison inmates grow seedlings for community gardens around the city. The harvested produce is then donated to food cupboards, community and senior centers, and low-income apartment complexes.

Growers Alliance, which uses the City Harvest seedlings, is yet another way "to be really attentive to the needs of Philadelphia residents," Reilly says, especially given the downturn in the economy.

With that in mind, she hopes the program can continue after the USDA grant runs out, supporting itself with plant sales and seedling production. But it may still need financial help.

"Even the federal government subsidizes agriculture," Reilly says.

One way the alliance supports itself now is by charging members a $100 membership fee per year. They agree to grow organically in spring, summer, and fall for the duration of the program. In return, Philadelphia Green supplies materials, including lumber for raised beds, soil, compost, mulch, and netting, along with education and other support.

Three neighborhood "green centers" are in the works to offer food-production workshops and training for local residents. The first is up and running at Weavers Way farm at Awbury Arboretum in Germantown. Here, alliance growers pick up supplies and learn how to wash, prep, and pack their vegetables for pickup.

"It's a simple thing unless you don't know how to do it," Bergman says.

The other centers will be in West and lower North Philadelphia.

For Bly, the workshops are making a difference. She now knows to spread strong-smelling mint leaves around her six raised beds to deter mice, and to cover the kale and collards with white landscaping fabric to keep flea beetles out.

"I didn't know anything about organic pest control before," says Bly, who grew up in a West Philadelphia rowhouse and learned to grow corn, tomatoes, watermelon, and other crops from her grandmother.

"Momma" raised chickens and had a garden the size of a small farm in Norfolk, Va., where Bly and her two sisters spent childhood summers. "My sisters were citified and couldn't stand it, but I never wanted to come home," Bly recalls.

As part of the first "class" of Growers Alliance, she'll be in the program for all three years. The deadline for applying for one of 23 spots in the second "class" is Aug. 6; this group will commit to two years.

The third and final group of 28 will be in the program for the last year of the grant, bringing the total number of participants to 66 by 2012.

The numbers aren't large. But, says Domenic Vitiello, assistant professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania, "these people are rebuilding, to an extent, the community capacity to support their own, healthier food system.

"It's about changing how people engage in eating, buying, and growing food in their neighborhoods," says Vitiello, who studies urban agriculture.

Though involved with the alliance for only a few months, Rudman says that "growing food keeps me connected with nature and it keeps our block connected." She describes how people walk by the garden, then stop to smell the flowers or marvel at the vegetables.

"Every once in a while we give somebody a cabbage. This has really brought to life kind of a dead area," she says.

Rudman and her husband, who live across from this bountiful lot, have discovered it has entertainment value, too. But it's a show only a gardener could love.

"We call it our front yard," she says. "We can watch it grow from our window."

City Harvest Growers Alliance

Gardeners interested in applying to the City Harvest Growers Alliance for 2011 and 2012 must have access to growing space -- a home or community garden or vacant lot -- in Philadelphia. They must agree to follow organic practices; commit to growing and selling in the spring, summer, and fall seasons for the full two years; and pay a yearly membership fee of $100.

Priority will be given to experienced growers.

The program will provide plants; supplies, such as seedlings, compost, and wood to build raised beds; and support, including workshops on growing, harvesting, and organic pest control.

Applications must be received by 5 p.m. Aug. 6. They can be mailed, e-mailed, faxed, or hand-delivered to the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society.

For information, or to fill out an application, go to www.pennsylvaniahorticulturalsociety.org/phlgreen/city-harvest.html or e-mail chga@pennhort.org.

Address: Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, 100 N. 20th St., 5th Floor, Philadelphia 19103

Attention: CHGA

E-mail: chga@pennhort.org

Fax: 215-988-8810

Contact garden writer Virginia A. Smith at 215-854-5720 or vsmith@phillynews.com.

Newstex ID: KRTB-0160-47463810