Words Rachel Wharton Photos Michael Weschler
tilling our
city soil
What’s driving urban dwellers to
dig up their yards and hoe their
own? They’re finding more control
over what and how they eat. All
across the country, it’s back to the
farm in the middle of the city.
The neighbors must have known
something was up when Jeanne Kelley
and her husband, Martin, bought their lot
near downtown Los Angeles. Before they
even started on the house, the couple built
a chicken coop, raising the chicks in the
apartment they were then renting.
The flock is now fully grown. (“I love
keeping the chickens,” says Jeanne,
a cookbook author. “They’re really
beautiful and the eggs are delicious.”)
And her hilly backyard also supports
three turkeys, tomatoes, greens, herbs,
and citrus and apricot trees. “I never buy
lettuce anymore,” Jeanne says. “Instead,
it’s ‘Let’s grab this—this is what I have on
hand. It’s fresh, and I am not going to go
to the market.’”
The Kelleys took 20 years to
evolve their “urban farm,” which has
hopscotched down the street to the
community garden they helped create.
It’s part of a growing trend, as urbanites
around the country are skipping big-box
grocers and even farm stands to harvest
from a few feet of what was once lawn.
“I’ve been doing this work for 16 to
17 years,” says Andy Fisher, executive
director of the Community Food Security
Coalition, a Portland, Oregon-based
national nonprofit focused on food issues.
“The past three or four years there’s just
been enormous interest in what we’ve
been doing. It’s exploding.”
in Portland. But the movement extends
beyond green cities like Portland. The
Atlanta Urban Garden Program helped
launch 26 gardens last spring, says Bobby
Wilson, coordinator of the University of
Georgia program. In Cleveland, the city
council is working to zone abandoned
land for growing. It also passed a law
allowing chicken coops and beehives
within the city limits, following the lead
of cities such as Madison, Wisconsin, and
Raleigh, North Carolina, where chicken-coop walking tours are de rigueur.
Some gardeners have even stepped
up production to operate true farms, or
“market gardens,” says John Ameroso,
an urban farming extension educator
with Cornell Cooperative Extension in
New York City. They’re selling fruits,
vegetables, flowers, and herbs to small
restaurants, at farmer’s markets, or to
individuals through weekly prepaid
delivery programs called Community
Supported Agriculture, or CSAs. In the
low-income Brooklyn neighborhood of
East New York, community gardeners just
bumped up their weekly warm-weather
farmer’s market to two days a week.
In Minneapolis-St.Paul, businesses and
homes have ripped out grass for terraced
vegetable growing, says Cindy Naas, an
ardent front-yard gardener who blogs for
UrbanGardenCasual.com. “I don’t think
you would have seen that 10 years ago,”
she says.
Naas epitomizes the new urban farmer:
Before she moved to Minnesota, she
turned her Detroit area side yard into a
small vegetable farm for her four sons.
“I grew up on a farm,” she says, “I really
wanted them to have the same connection
to growing things that I did.” Although
some neighbors (Naas calls them “lawn
Nazis”) didn’t take to her lettuces, squash
and corn, many were enchanted. Naas
Jeanne Kelley
tends the
community
garden that she,
her husband, and
their neighbors
created in Eagle
Rock, California.
Fisher says there’s a two- to three-
year wait for community garden plots
