Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

>From Vacant City Lots to Food On the Table
How to grow food where we need it.
by Madeline Ostrander  posted Sep 17, 2010
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/a-resilient-community/from-vacant-city-lots-to-food-on-the-table

The first time I went to Richmond, Calif., nine years ago, my friend, who ran 
a punk music recording studio out of a converted warehouse, told us not to 
park our car on the street. The day before, vandals had walked the block and 
smashed several car windows.

At least a few things have started to change in Richmond since then: A berry 
garden sits beside a bike trail in the Iron Triangle, a neighborhood at the 
center of the city bordered on three sides by old rail lines. Once a month, 
Latino and African American families–often people who live just a few blocks 
from each other but rarely had a chance to meet in the past–gather at the 
garden and have a barbecue. Tomatoes, chard, and corn grow in raised beds 
across the street. Muslim families from the local mosque just a few blocks 
away pluck fresh mint from the garden for making traditional Arabic tea. The 
garden is the work of Urban Tilth, one of the dozen or so groups at the 
center of Richmond’s urban garden movement. It was built by community 
members, often young people, and is tended in part by students and teachers 
from the elementary school next door. And it has become a community gathering 
space.
People rarely get a say in what happens to land when their city falls apart, 
but in the last five years, some Richmonders have taken matters into their 
own hands.

Richmond boomed in the mid-20th century and now is like hundreds of other 
places around the country where industry walked away. The city is isolated 
from much of the cultural and economic life of the rest of the East Bay 
region. Young people can’t find jobs, and they move away, or their 
restlessness is channeled into all the wrong activities—vandalism, gangs, 
crime.

People rarely get a say in what happens to land when their city falls apart. 
But in the last five years, some Richmonders have taken matters into their 
own hands. Often with official permission but sometimes without, they have 
planted more than two dozen gardens in public lots and school grounds all 
over the roughest parts of town. Urban Tilth calls them “farms,” and last 
year grew 6,000 pounds of food, which went  to dozens of local families.

Many Richmonders have gardening traditions that go back several generations, 
brought by families from the rural South who came for shipbuilding jobs 
during World War II and by more recent immigrants from agricultural regions 
of Central and South America. But many of Richmond’s young people haven’t 
been exposed to these traditions.

Now Richmond’s urban gardening movement is yielding a small but radical 
cultural change. Urban agriculture has become a regular part of the 
curriculum in two local high schools. Areas in and near the gardens that 
seemed off-limits or unsafe in years past are becoming gathering places where 
Richmonders throw picnics, play outside, pick berries, and ride bicycles.