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With the coming of spring, volunteers from Occupy Philly and other community groups are descending on the vacant lots on Mercy Street in South Philly to begin growing free food on vacant city land. Established as Philly Food Forests two years ago by Robyn Mello, the group is now affiliated with Occupy Philly and calls itself Occupy Vacant Lots.
Occupy Vacant Lots is creating a new culture of health by assisting & educating residents to take control of their neighborhoods by cleaning blighted spaces & starting free food-producing gardens.
Philadelphia has 40,000 vacant lots, 20,000 of which are owned by the city and are available for residents who are willing to improve them to enhance the image of the neighborhoods. Robyn’s group has identified several lots in different parts of Philly and is turning them into edible gardens. This past Sunday was the second scheduled workparty of this spring, this time at Mercy Edible Park in South Philly.
Robyn and friend in front of Mercy Edible Park, South Philly
About 40 volunteers showed up and pitched in spreading compost and wood chips, weeding, trimming grape vines, planting a pair of fruit trees, turning the ground, and preparing beds for the planting of vegetables and herbs. The Occupy Supplymobile was on hand for the delivery of nutrient-rich mushroom soil from nearby Kennett Square, the “Mushroom Capital of the World.”
Occupy Supplymobile delivering what the horse left
OVL workparties are celebrations of nature for everyone in the neighborhood. Music is provided by the neighbor’s boom box. Furry animals are provided for entertainment for the kids.
Puppy love
What does it take to turn a pocket of urban blight into a vibrant source of color and healthy food for the ground tillers and the nearby neighbors? Robyn Mello offers the magic formula.
In terms of a complete list of what it takes, the only real givens are trash bags for trash collection, a spade (shovel), a rake, a pair of gloves, water (watering can, spigot, hose, or rainwater catchment system), & some seeds. Supplies are good, but manual labor, interest, & commitment are all that are really necessary.
Every lot is different. Some are as easy as pulling up weeds/grass, loosening up the soil a little bit, putting seeds in, & watering when needed.
We encourage all our partners to take soil samples (they can be sent to UMass) so they can know what kind of nutrients are available & whether or not there are heavy metals present. If the soil is high in metal (lead, cadmium, etc.) levels, raised beds are best. That requires untreated lumber (2x8s preferred), cinder blocks, or creative masonry work if there’s lots of usable bricks around. Some people build beds with reclaimed wood such as railroad ties, but many frown upon that because it may be chemically treated or have lead-based paint.
We also could use pickaxes, wheelbarrows, small hand tools, hoes, pitchforks, 5-gallon buckets, 55-gallon food grade barrels, reel push mowers (non-electric old school), scythes, hammers, nails, rebar, pallets, chicken wire, PVC pipe, clay, strawbales, woodchips, compost, manure, coffee grounds, fruit & nut trees, berry bushes, seedlings, etc.
The edible park on Mercy street also sports an international component. One section of the garden is cultivated by gardening aficionados from Bhutan. Everyone will have to wait till harvest time to see what the Bhutanese can conjure from the soil.
Bhutan guys
17 Comments
This is just too cool. I grew up outside Philadelphia and always wondered why the city didn’t do more to put those lots to good use.
A while back there was a diary about a town in England that planted all of their common green spaces with food and herbs. So sensible and utilitarian.
If you wait for the city to do something sensible, you’ll have a long wait. It takes visionary, motivated people like those in Occupy Vacant Lots to make things happen.
Pittsburgh and its neighboring towns are actually a lot farther along than Philly in this aspect:
http://www.growpittsburgh.org/growpittsburgh/Projects/EdibleSchoolyard
I’m glad that they’re paying attention to possible soil-contamination issues. For certain lots, a few years’ worth of bioremediation crops of cotton and castor beans — crops grown not for food, but specificially to leach toxins from the soil — would likely be a good bet. (And if you’re worried about what to do with the harvested bioremediation crops, you could check with the Biosolar people, who use cotton and castor beans to make their BioBacksheets for their solar panels.)
Thanks for the link, I’ll pass it along. City gardens are not new in Philly. They’ve been around at least for decades, worked by neighbors who don’t have space to grow their own food. Occupy Vacant Lots is converting abandoned and neglected properties in areas of the city where there is no community garden and establishing them.
A volunteer from the city said that it was observed that lots that are improved near high crime areas then to reduce the shady activity in the area. That’s a welcome side benefit besides the availability of fresh, free food.
Guess what our good old PennDOT is doing? It is spraying untreated brine from the fracking wells to de-ice the Pennsylvania roads, so the fracking outfits don’t have to pay to have it treated. We’ll be bioremediating until doomsday.
Governor Corbett has to take care of his pals in the fracking industry, of course.
Brine’s easily dealt with — heavy spring rains and calcium amendments can take care of the worst cases. It’s the heavy metals and other toxins — most of which come from bygone industrial processes and bygone leaded gasoline — that call for serious plant bioremediation.
But the brine is not so benign.
It’s the toxins in the brine that are a concern. Among other counties, the brine spraying by PennDOT is occurring in Lancaster County where Amish farmers are famous for planting up to the edge of the road.
Let’s dump it on the roads!
Good diary ghostof911.
Have the folks in Philly hooked up with Will Allen’s GrowingPower.org . He has the technical information about urban agriculture. What he does is layer 2 feet of compost and doesn’t till and stir up the heavy metals from lead residential paint or from industrial processes. GrowingPower has even planted over abandoned parking lots using this method. And they have developed an agriculture-aquaculture closed cycle that produces both veggies and fish. Lots of research and innovation already done that can just be built in other urban neighborhoods.
thanks and I look forward to the updates on this great project, ghost
jesus!
What a fracking mess.
Which ironically enough means that urban raised beds may well be more wholesome than Amish farms.
Ghostof911,
So cool what you are doing! Excellent job!
This is transition, resilience, and local production, swadeshi in Gandhian economic terms. Here in Cambridge, MA, a small group has begun to think about making our city 100% self-reliant for food, based upon the example of Todmorden, UK (more at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/29/1069619/-Integrated-Urban-Agricultural-Systems). It’s an interesting thought experiment but we have nearly 40 years now of the community gardening and local food movements which has resulted in an alternative economic system that can serve as a foundation for many more businesses.
Recently, Will Allen of Growing Power was in Boston to help kick-off the city’s discussion of changing zoning laws to provide for urban agriculture. Boston is not alone in looking toward urban agriculture for economic development. There are a number of cities now doing so.
That is funny as hell! Farmers will be fleeing the countryside to grow their crops in the city slums!
I’m familiar with GrowinpPower.org. This, and permacultire, are areas of growing interest. We need these techniques to be taught at the universities so this becomes part of the future.