Urban Gardens

July 28, 2008, 6:33 PM

Grow Your Own

“Edible landscape” seems to be going head to head with “staycation” as the most popular catch phrase of Summer 2008. Lawns may not be disappearing before our very eyes, but citizens are definitely swapping out blades of grass for bushels of beans in increasing numbers.

Take me for instance, a bona fide city dweller: As a follow up to my column in March on the reclamation of urban and suburban land for agricultural use, I’ve spent the last several weeks putting theory into practice, literally getting my hands dirty (and whatever other cliché I can unearth) in the interest of urban agriculture.

My backyard, before and after. (Allison Arieff)

Two months ago, I learned about My Farm, run by mortgage-broker-turned-farmer Trevor Paque. My Farm is essentially an urban take on community-sponsored agriculture (CSAs). With CSAs, individuals essentially invest in rural farms to help support their operations and are given a weekly box of fresh produce in return. With My Farm (and similar operations found in cities including New York and Portland, Ore.), you can grow food in your own backyard with the assistance of urban farmers like Paque. In one day, he created our 120-square-foot backyard farm — landscaping with found materials from the yard, installing a drip-irrigation system and planting heirloom seeds. Now he comes once a week to harvest a box of organic and ridiculously local produce for us — plus an additional box, which he sells to another family in our neighborhood.

This costs us about $100 a month, and has allowed us to replace our water-dependent grass patch with an edible landscape. After just three months in business, Paque has a waiting list of over 200 people and is scrambling to keep up with demand.

Urban agriculture has been around since at least the 18th century, but it’s an idea whose time has truly come — now — in the United States. The reasons range from the fact that our hands are always found glued to computer keys and not even occasionally in the dirt, to the scary existence of industrially grown tomatoes that may (or may not) cause salmonella, to the fact that a drive to the market can now cost more than the food you purchase there.

Though some may see this as a “lazy locavore” trend — wherein couch potato clients, glass of biodynamic Syrah in hand, observe the hard labor of city farmers while lounging with their laptops — the urban agriculture movement seems to me to be slowly transcending its elitist associations. It is truly growing into something that is wholly about collaboration, community and connection to food, to neighbors, to land.

That’s certainly been my experience both in my yard, as neighbors and friends come by to help harvest (and to eat), and in my city. Earlier this month, my family spent a Saturday at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza, helping to plant a 10,000-square-foot Victory Garden sponsored by Slow Food Nation, a nonprofit organization that will be celebrating American food through art, music, lectures, tastings, school programs and the like over Labor Day Weekend. More than 250 volunteers and nearly a dozen Bay Area gardening organizations dedicated their time to plant the first edible garden in front of San Francisco’s City Hall since 1943. Designed by John Bela of the arts collective REBAR and curated by the artist/gardener/activist Amy Francheschini of Victory Gardens 2008+, this public installation aims to demonstrate the potential of a truly local agriculture practice while producing high-quality food for those in need.

Slow Food Nation’s victory garden in front of San Francisco City Hall. (Courtesy of Scott Chernis/Scott Chernis Photography)

This day was social networking of the best sort. Participants got some dirt under their fingernails, ran into old friends, ate an organic lunch and left weary but happy. It was as much about community creation as food cultivation. I hope to see this sort of urban (and suburban) intervention replicated across the country. (It will be a shame if the city of San Francisco can’t find a way to either keep the garden here or find a suitable space to relocate it.)

This isn’t just a California thing, nor does it require vast amounts of open space. At PS1 in Long Island City, N.Y., the architecture firm WORK ACeschewed that art institution’s traditionalUrban Beach concept for an Urban Farm.

Planters at PS1, part of WORK AC’s Urban Farm”/>Planters are part of WORK AC’s Urban Farm project. (Elizabeth Felicella)

“This came out a desire to combine urbanism with ecology,” explains Work Architecture Company principal Dan Wood, who with his partner, Amale Andraos, and their architecture students at Princeton have concluded that the urban farm is really the holy grail of making things sustainable. WORK AC’s take is particularly urban, featuring things like a mobile phone charging station, speakers that emit farm-animal sounds and “Gaia” soil made from recycled Styrofoam and pectin gel. Food harvested from the project is used at PS1’s café, thus reducing food miles to a whopping 300 feet.

When I spoke with Wood and Andraos recently, it was evident that this project is the result of an intricate network of people and places. They spoke excitedly of the great advice they’d received, for example, from Michael Grady Robertson of the 50-acre Queens County Farm Museum (which I bet you didn’t know existed) in New York and from their solar panel installer, who’d honed his craft in Alaska. Andraos stressed that they really wanted this typically rural thing to offer to city dwellers all the things that attract them about city living: social interaction, play, excitement, fun.

If all of this has helped plant a seed of inspiration, why not enter Readymade’s Second Annual Garden Challenge. The DIY bible Readymade, which inspires its readership toward the execution (or at least vicarious realization) of creative ideas on small budgets, invites readers to submit ideas for transforming their own outdoor spaces in innovative ways. (E-mail ideas to shana@readymademag.com by Aug. 1.) I’ve no doubt they’ll be hearing from hordes of less-than-lazy locavores.

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Urban Garden

Healthy Spaces, for People and the Earth

Rob Bennett for The New York Times

NEW GROUND Josephine Burrell, left, and Gertrude Duncan take in the view beneath martini-glass-shaped rainwater collectors in the Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson Community Garden in Jamaica, Queens.

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By ANNE RAVER

Published: November 5, 2008

TWO gardens completed in the last month by the New York Restoration Project — one in Queens, by Walter Hood, a California landscape architect; the other in Harlem, by Sean Conway, a Rhode Island garden designer — demonstrate how sustainable technologies like rainwater collection and solar and wind power can be incorporated into landscapes that are varied enough to fill many needs.

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Times Topics: Sustainable Living

Times Topics: Gardens and Gardening

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Rob Bennett for The New York Times

Designed by Walter Hood, it is one of two gardens recently completed by the New York Restoration Project.

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Rob Bennett for The New York Times

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Rob Bennett for The New York Times

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Rob Bennett for The New York Times

RED IS GREEN At the Target East Harlem Community Garden in Harlem, designed by Sean Conway, the red solar collection disks are reminders of the sponsor.

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Rob Bennett for The New York Times

Target East Harlem Community Garden.

The actress and singer Bette Midler, who founded the Restoration Project, a private nonprofit organization, in 1995, said that she has been courting imaginative designers to enlarge the scope of community gardens so that “everyone who has a stake in the garden is able to use it the way they want to: some want to grow fruits and vegetables, others want a quiet place, some want to play ball. So all these things have to be taken into consideration.”

Mr. Hood’s design, for the Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson Community Garden in Jamaica, Queens, has six 10-foot-tall blue rainwater collectors shaped like martini glasses that funnel water into two 1,500-gallon below-ground cisterns. It was named after the rapper, a Queens native whose foundation, G-Unity, provided $150,000, which paid not only for the water collection system, but also for a complete redesign of the old community garden.

Gone are the random assortment of raised beds and the scattered fruit trees. Mr. Hood, who is known for sculptural landscapes like the grounds of the de Young Museum in San Francisco and the Center for the Arts in Jackson, Wyo., created a powerful, linear space.

The new raised beds are arranged in parallel lines to emphasize the rail line that runs along the northeast side of the trapezoidal 10,000-square-foot garden. A shipping container — a nod to the train that still roars by — serves as a toolshed. Compost bins are tucked behind a fence on the northeast wall, with planting boxes on one side and fruit trees and ornamental beds on the other. Linden trees, underplanted with vinca and carpet roses, line the entrance on 165th Street, where a tall arbor that runs the length of the garden is planted with trumpet vine.

Some of the old-timers have mixed feelings about the makeover.

“It’s nice, but it looks more like a park than a garden,” said Josephine Burrell, 80, one of the community gardeners who helped clean up what was a dumping ground in the early 1990s. “It’s missing a lot of personal touches. We had marigolds around that tree.” Now, raked gravel circles the tree, flowing beneath the water collectors.

“The thing I like most is that water,” she said, staring up at the blue towers. “We don’t have to hook a hose up to the fire hydrant across the street.”

And though she was disconcerted to see her fruit trees in a different part of the garden, she loved the new raised beds. “These are better,” she said. “You don’t have to get down on your knees.”

This garden on the corner of Foch Avenue and 165th Street, once called the Baisley Park Community League Garden, was one of more than 100 community gardens the city intended to sell at auction in 1999. Instead, the Trust for Public Land bought about 60, which are largely managed by Greenthumb, part of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and the New York Restoration Project bought about 50, creating a subsidiary, the New York Garden Trust, to oversee them. The Restoration Project has redesigned about 30 of those gardens, and plans to revamp about a dozen more, said Drew Becher, the group’s executive director.

“We held focus groups with a lot of the gardeners, and none of them liked the way the gardens looked,” he said. In some cases, all they wanted was something simple, like a more attractive fence, but in others, they wanted a new design that would make the space feel more open and welcoming.

Four years ago, for instance, Jason Sheets, who directs the gardens in Queens and Brooklyn, invited children from the Myrtle P. Jarmon Early Childhood Educational Center, a nearby city-financed preschool, to plant vegetable seedlings in the Baisley Park garden, which was being maintained largely by Ms. Burrell and two other local residents, Gertrude Duncan, 70, and Charles Jenkins, 73.

“Gertrude and the Myrtle P. Jarmon group clashed a little bit,” he said. “Gertrude felt a sense of ownership.”

But the children were able to plant the bean vines that had been languishing in cups on their classroom windowsill. And, after growing potatoes, they learned where French fries come from. “They called it the French fry tree,” said Margarine Hopkins, the head teacher.

That connection is what appeals to Mr. Jackson. “If you ask kids where tomatoes come from, they say the refrigerator,” he said. “Now they have a little farm going.” And while the old garden was “nothing worth going to look at, now it’s exciting.”

For his part, Mr. Hood said he leapt at the chance to work with the New York Restoration Project. Community gardens have always been temporary spaces, “social actions by advocacy groups during times of need,” he said. “But when Bette Midler created this nonprofit and gave ownership to these spaces, they become this real thing.”

When he met with local gardeners more than a year ago, he said, they talked mostly about the need for a convenient water source. “I was trying to find something that might capture the imagination,” he said of the towers he designed. He also borrowed elements from the famous French kitchen garden at Villandry, including the shapely ornamental beds bordered with boxwood.

Maybe corn and pumpkins will be planted in the French-style parterre, he said. Just because you are growing vegetables “doesn’t mean you have to be in this hard agricultural space.”

The Restoration Project has teams that do the work local gardeners may not want to do. “We’ll mow the lawn and trim the hedges,” said Mr. Sheets.

The group also encourages more diverse plantings. In this garden, he said, he envisions drought-tolerant perennials and heirlooms blooming in the parterres. “If folks want to help with the perennials, that’s fine,” he added.

Mrs. Duncan’s not complaining. “To me, it’s the most beautiful site,” she said. “All I want is to just sit and absorb it.”

In any case, she added, she was tired of the squabbling among gardeners. “We have people grumbling, ‘Oh, we can’t plant this or that,’ ” she said. “I don’t miss it. I didn’t want to spend the next 20 years trying to make it work.”

IT would be hard to miss the Target East Harlem Community Garden on East 117th Street, just east of First Avenue. The garden, designed by Mr. Conway and completed in early October, greets the visitor with a forest of steel poles sporting bright red disks. All that’s missing from those circles is a bull’s-eye.

“That would have been too over the top,” he said in a recent conversation from his home in Tiverton, R.I. Mr. Conway, who stars in a PBS show, “The Cultivated Life,” and designs outdoor furniture for Target, noted that “those circles were a little bit of a nod” to the company, which provided $300,000 to build the garden in a vacant lot.

A third of that went into an endowment for upkeep; a good part of the rest was used to pay for the alternative energy systems. “A water system costs $20,000,” Ms. Midler said. And the two vertical-axis wind turbines, which spin without blades, she said, “so birds are not likely to fly into” them, were $4,500 each.

Mr. Conway, who met with about a dozen local residents before designing the garden, discovered that there were several gardens nearby already growing vegetables and herbs, so he created a park that could be used for other activities.

“People wanted an open space, with grass, so children could play,” said James Garcia, 35, a community advocate who moved into the neighborhood from Battery Park City three years ago. “They wanted a stage and a wall for watching movies.”

Power from the solar collectors and wind turbines is stored in batteries in a shed in the back of the garden. Rain is collected from the roof of the apartment house next door, stored in a tank in the adjacent backyard, and pumped through a drip irrigation system.

The plantings are simple, yet unusual enough to spark a gardener’s interest. Cherry trees (Prunus autumnalis), which bloom along the west wall, “put on a nice display in spring and fall,” Mr. Conway said. They are underplanted with plum yews, which will form a dark green ground cover in the spring.

Clematis and other vines are trained up a trellis on the opposite wall, but most of it is left beautifully blank as a movie screen. A low concrete wall borders a wide swath of grass, providing ample space for sitting, and a platform offers a stage or a place to read.

But how many red circles are too many? The solar collectors’ red disks already spell Target, with humor and grace.

Mr. Becher put it this way: “If somebody gives the amount of money Target has, it’s like naming Rockefeller Center. We need to honor them.”

And there’s a lot to be said for star power.

“Bette Midler was marvelous, and 50 Cent — we love him!” Mrs. Duncan said on Monday evening, after the grand opening of the garden in Queens.

“Change is good,” she said. She isn’t too worried about who will plant what. “It’s so beautiful — I’d like it to stay just the way it is.”

More Articles in Home & Garden »A version of this article appeared in print on November 6, 2008, on page D6 of the New York edition.

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