“There really is this exciting revitalization going on in Buffalo.”
Community garden projects take root in Buffalo
Urban gardens are no longer a rare breed
Planting has just started on a tree farm in a vacant lot on Buffalo’s West Side.
A community garden where neighbors can grow their own vegetables and children can learn about the origins of their food broke ground this weekend at a long-empty school in the Seneca- Babcock area.
Back on the West Side, one organization begins its seventh season of growing vegetables on several vacant city lots, providing fresh food for neighbors and jobs for local teenagers. A second group is getting ready to start planting on another urban farm.
Mark and Janice Stevens, the East Side couple who want to start a farm on vacant city-owned land on Wilson Street, aren’t the only ones in Buffalo interested in urban agriculture.
Across the city, garden projects are sprouting up as Buffalonians embrace a national movement toward creating green spaces, eating local food and connecting with nature.
“There really is this exciting revitalization going on in Buffalo,” said Cheryl Bird, one of the organizers of the Seneca- Babcock garden. “There seems to be a movement toward empowerment in neighborhoods. . . . I definitely see it happening. The excitement builds on itself.”
While community gardens have been popular for years, new excitement is mounting here and nationwide for all types of urban farming as people have become more concerned about eating locally and more healthy, saving money in the face of a slumping economy and caring for the environment.
From thriving cities where real estate is at a premium to struggling Rust Belt towns where vacant lots are sadly plentiful, communities are transforming gray concrete cityscapes into gardens, farms and other green spaces, said Samina Raja, an assistant professor in the University at Buffalo’s urban and regional planning department. She is nationally recognized for her research on the relationship between communities and health.
“Nationally,” she said, “community gardens and urban agriculture have had a tremendous resurgence in the last five to six years.”
Last month, first lady Michelle Obama helped break ground on the South Lawn of the White House for a kitchen garden — a move hailed by urban agriculture and local food advocates.
In California, Berkeley chef Alice Waters, who introduced diners to organic, locally grown fare nearly 40 years ago, helped establish a one-acre garden in a vacant lot next to a school. There, the children learn to grow food and then eat the food they grow. Her foundation also worked with the Berkeley Unified School District to eliminate processed foods from cafeteria menus and introduce fresh and organic foods instead.
In Milwaukee, Will Allen won a $100,000 MacArthur Fellowship for his urban farm, which not only provided a poor neighborhood with jobs and fresh produce, but also managed to turn a profit. His farm, Growing Power, includes six greenhouses, fish runs, poultry hoop houses, outdoor pens for livestock and an apiary with five beehives.
In Madison, Wis., Troy Gardens, a 31-acre development, combines 30 units of mixed-income housing, a five-acre farm and community gardens.
In Detroit, a nonprofit is battling city officials for the right to buy 2.5 acres from the city to turn into an urban farm. A massive 70 acre urban farm also has been proposed for vacant lots. On a smaller scale, a coalition of local urban agriculture and gardening groups, working with Michigan State University, helps residents build their own urban farms.
In New York City, which has had a rich, and at times raucous, history of community gardening, minifarms on vacant lots are growing produce sold in farmers’ markets, and some city residents are raising chickens for eggs.
A decade ago, community gardeners fought then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who wanted to hand over gardens built in vacant lots to housing developers. They reached a deal putting some land into a trust for public land and transferring other lots to the Parks Department. A review process was set up requiring developers to notify the gardeners about plans to take over the land. New land would have to be found for gardens that were displaced.
Contaminated soil
Planners recently have begun focusing on growing food in urban settings as a way to combat diet-related medical conditions such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease in the nation’s poorest inner-city neighborhoods, where fresh produce is often hard to find, UB’s Raja said.
“Urban planners want to understand how to build communities so people have access to food and the food system,” she said.
Recent interest in urban agriculture here in Buffalo, highlighted by coverage of the Stevens family’s bid to buy vacant land from the city for their farm, shows city residents are open to the idea, even though some in city government are wary, Raja said.
“It’s a cultural issue: Does farming really belong in the city?” she said.
An advocate of growing and eating local food, Raja believes Buffalo is in a good position to give it a try.
“The best, thriving cities have urban agriculture,” she said. “This is a relatively new area. Some are reluctant. At the same time, this is a great opportunity to think big. I don’t sense that people are unwilling to do that.”
Growing food in a city obviously poses challenges. The soil in vacant lots often is contaminated. Urban farmers have found a way around that by building raised beds using new soil. They also have found ways to collect rain water on site to irrigate their crops.
Youth employment
You can’t talk about urban farming in Buffalo without talking about the Massachusetts Avenue Project. The West Side nonprofit organization started farming on seven vacant city lots about six years ago as a way to provide fresh produce and constructive jobs for local teenagers.
Diana Picard, the executive director, is thrilled with the recent interest in urban farming, even though some think it is novel idea.
“It’s funny to me that in some ways people think this is such a new thing,” she said. “In reality, up until 1945, we grew a lot of food in cities. But it’s really exciting for us to see what’s going on.”
The Massachusetts Avenue Project farm employs 50 youths every year who are taught how to farm, develop recipes with fresh produce and market their goods, including a chili starter and a salsa. The group is also preparing to start a mobile farmers’ market using a recreational vehicle painted purple like an eggplant, which they will drive to low-income neighborhoods around the city where fresh produce is hard to find.
Picard supports the Stevenses’ bid to farm on vacant land on Wilson Street in the Fillmore Council District.
The East Side couple is likely to agree to leasing the land from the city, rather than buying the land as they had originally hoped because the city wants to keep it available for housing. Picard said she hopes the city eventually will become more amenable to selling or even giving land to urban agriculture projects.
“They think housing is development,” Picard said. “But housing alone is not going to develop the city. Food has implications for so much: for the health of our people and the health of the community.”
Picard says that Buffalo’s bounty of empty lots makes it a perfect place for urban agriculture. “I’m not saying we need every vacant lot in the city. It should be part of the lots.”
A second urban farm is getting started on the West Side. A group calling itself CurbSide Croft — croft means small farm —is getting ready to start planting on vacant land at Vermont Street and West Avenue, some of which they purchased and the rest leased from neighbors. The farmers here are particularly interested in providing pesticide- free produce in a neighbor-hood where many people rely on food stamps, which generally don’t cover costly organic foods in supermarkets.
The CurbSide growers are applying for permits to be able to accept food stamps for the produce, which will include heirloom vegetables and ethnic crops that they hope will be ready for harvest around late June.
West Side tree farm
This weekend, two new urban agricultural projects are breaking ground.
Re-Tree New York, formed to help reforest Buffalo and the suburbs following the 2006 October snowstorm that destroyed thousands of trees, is opening a tree farm on vacant land on 14th Street on the West Side. The land, three vacant lots, was acquired by PUSH-Buffalo, a West Side community group, and developed for Re- Tree.
“It’s in an area that once had homes that have been taken down,” said Paul Maurer, Re- Tree chairman. “It looks bad. There’s junk laying there and stuff like that. It’ll be much better looking when we get done with it.”
Trees of varying maturity will be planted in buried pots and grown until they are ready to be planted around the region. By raising the trees itself, Re-Tree will save a dramatic amount of money. The young trees will cost about $10 each while buying them more mature costs “about 10 times that,” Maurer said.
To visitors, the farm won’t look like a commercial nursery, he said. The trees won’t be arranged in neat rows.
“We don’t want it to look antiseptic,” Maurer said. “We want it to seem like they’re in a forest in the city.”
In the Seneca-Babcock area, community residents, with the help of Daemen College, LUSH — a Canadian organic cosmetics company — and local foundations celebrated a “sod busting” Saturday at former School 26 on Harrison Street.
Gardening enthusiasts are putting in 20 raised beds on the lawn of the old school. Half of the beds will be available to neighborhood residents, and the rest will be divvied up among community agencies, said Bird, executive director of the Daemen Center for Sustainable Communities and Civic Engagement.
Like the Massachusetts Avenue Project, the Seneca- Babcock garden began with community residents concerned about the lack of activities for local teens and access to fresh produce.
Bird said she hopes that the garden will just be the beginning for the old school.
“Our hope is that we can take this vacant school and make it into a huge resource center,” she said.
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