Lifestyles

When we think about gardening, we tend to think first about the big properties at the edges of the city, and the vast swaths of green beyond.

But those who live inside city limits -- or any urbanized area -- grow gardens too. In cities all over the world, urbanites are rediscovering the earthy pleasures of digging in the dirt and growing your own food.

In some ways, Pittsburgh is an ideal place for urban gardens. Simply describing everything going on at the moment is like keeping up with the dandelions in your yard. Everywhere you look, from the North Side to Braddock, more gardens -- and even small urban farms -- are sprouting up all the time.

Locally, it's driven by a few idealistic people and simple economics.

"If you're in downtown Manhattan, you can't afford to have a garden," says Miriam Manion, executive director of Grow Pittsburgh. "In Pittsburgh, you have 14,000 vacant lots."

Grow Pittsburgh, an initiative of Penn State Extension, has evolved to support all kinds of sustainable urban-agriculture efforts in the region. Its most visible efforts are at the Frick Art & Historical Center, which uses several green spaces and a historic greenhouse to demonstrate intensive, backyard-sized urban gardening and provide flower bouquets, produce and herb transplants for sale.

A lot of what's grown goes to the Cafe at the Frick.

Mindy Schwartz, owner of Garden Dreams' urban garden in Wilkinsburg, began by growing vegetables on two vacant lots adjacent to her house. Before she knew it, had a full-fledged farm on her hands.

"I grew so much food, I couldn't eat it or give it away," Schwartz says. "So I started to sell it, particularly to the Cafe at the Frick. I just walked in there with a basket of produce one day."

"Then I started growing it more on a production basis. My farm and Mildred's Daughters Urban Farm (in Stanton Heights and Lawrenceville) served as a launching pad for Grow Pittsburgh."

Urban farming has grown alongside the public's appetite for organic foods. Most urban farmers avoid synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, which would likely be unwieldy on such a small scale anyway.

"I think people really want to know where their food comes from," notes Manion. "Young people today are keenly aware of the concept of sustainability. So, if you're living in Pittsburgh, the sustainable thing to do is to grow food in Pittsburgh, rather than shipping it in from far away."

Reclaiming urban space

Stroll around the densely packed Victorian houses on the Mexican War Streets in the North Side, and you'll see what a difference a little green makes. Two gardens there have been lovingly tended since the '80s. In the Olde Allegheny Community Garden, each participant gets their own plot to grow whatever they want.

"Some people, you can tell -- they're just in it for the salsa," says Jana Carstensen, "Garden Captain" for the two community gardens. "They've got the tomatillos, tomatoes and hot peppers."

"Other people, it's a combo of vegetables and flowers. I go all summer with bouquets all throughout the house. It's really inexpensive, and you get to keep your plot as long as you maintain it. We've had people in the same plot for 10-12 years."

But bringing green to the concrete reality of the inner city isn't without its challenges.

"We don't have deer or groundhogs," Carstensen says. "Our problem is the homeless guys."

Before you plant anything, you've got to know your soil.

"When you do a soil test, ours is almost completely backwards from what a normal lawn would be," Carstensen says. "Our calcium is sky-high because we have so much concrete and building debris in our soil. All the things you'd normally do, all the stuff for sale at Home Depot, isn't really appropriate for us. Our pH is really high. Most people are trying to bring theirs up.

"You have to see if you have any heavy metals or contaminants in the soil," says Barb Kline, of Mildred's Daughters Urban Farm. "If so, you can do a number of things -- put barriers down and grow on top of the soil, you can do container gardening."

The 1.7 acres of Healcrest Urban Community Farm started as a series of unconnected, trash-strewn lots at the top of a steep hill in struggling Garfield.

"We've spent the last three years cleaning it up and starting to build the garden," says Maria Graziani, of the Healcrest Farm. "We knocked two houses down. Public Works helped -- we're talking bulldozers, three Dumpsters full of trash removed."

"The second year was developing the land, bio-remediation, soil testing. We really had to remediate the soil, using microorganisms, cover cropping, composting, bringing in new soil."

Planting cover crops is helpful, if time-consuming.

"You can plant sunflower or mustard greens," Graziani says. "Once it grows to a certain level, research has shown that it will pull certain toxins into its roots. Then it's pretty easy to uproot it and get rid of it. Cover cropping can also add nutrients in."

The benefits of dirty

"For Garfield, and many neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, food is insecure," says Graziani. "There isn't a local grocery store. Organic produce is mostly out of the reach of low-income families. Garfield is a hill. It's a little hard for people who live in Garfield Heights to go back and forth with groceries, especially if they don't have a car. All of our produce goes to feed the youth who work at the farm, and is donated to local neighbors, shut-ins, the elderly."

For neighborhood kids, it's a rare opportunity to watch something they've worked on, quite literally, bear fruit.

Laura Winter is "The Garden Lady" of the North Side. For 12 years, she's taught gardening to dozens of kids, culminating in the Green Millenium Children's Garden -- a tiny plot packed with raspberries, tomatoes, eggplants, greens and edible flowers.

"Most of these kids don't have the opportunity to dig in the dirt," Winter says. "Now, with video games, TV -- there's just not that connection to nature that a lot of us had."

It began as a vacant lot full of trash, metal and tires.

"I had to do a general cleanup with some friends, before I could bring the kids in. Then the city gave us a big old pile of dirt and a big pile of mulch. I had the kids work with me on getting that leveled out. People were like, 'Why don't you just bring in a backhoe?' But then it wouldn't have been the kids who did it from the beginning."

"I think that's a large part of the reason why we haven't had experienced any vandalism. People seem to respect it. People will leave gifts for me -- I'll come into the garden and see these seeds someone has left."

The educational possibilities of gardening are vast -- hard work, plant biology, weather, the environment and healthy eating are only the beginning. Grow Pittsburgh is concentrating on the "Edible Schoolyard" project, begun at the Helen S. Faison Arts Academy in Homewood and the Dilworth Traditional Academy in Highland Park.

"We started the program last September, says Manion. "Throughout the winter we were recruiting parents and ideas. They were out planting in the spring. We've been in the classroom two months talking about the garden and what they're growing. At Helen Faison, each grade picked a different continent and their plot in the garden represents that continent."

The goal is to someday get other Pittsburgh public schools involved. The hope is to eventually get the fresh food they grow into school lunches.

"Our long-range goal is to have a portable kitchen we can take from garden to garden and allow the kids to take their things and cook them," Manion says.

Flexibility is a necessity in urban agriculture. Imagination helps, too.

"I'm moving towards an 'urban-homestead' model," says Schwartz, of her farm in Wilkinsburg. "Instead of 45 feet of basil -- I could never eat that much basil -- now it's 10 feet of basil, 20 feet for chickens, 10 feet of honey hives for bees. It's more of a self-reliance model, where I grow what I need personally, rather than what I can consume and sell to make money."

Grow Pittsburgh's latest project involves farming a 3/4-acre plot in the daunting urban wastelands of Braddock. The goal is economic development -- they want to put a farmstand on the property, and sell to restaurants.

The workload for an urban garden or farm can be substantial, and the small size of plots available in a city all but guarantee that you won't make a living from it.

"We grow on about an acre and a half," says Kline. "I'm not paying my mortgage with this. But to supplement it, yes. To be a community service, to supplement a child's education or a food kitchen, sure. I'd like to be sustainable enough -- and I think someone with a decent backyard could do this -- to grow a significant portion of our food."

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